IBM’s futuristic approach to building microchips will include human DNA, a paper published in a journal revealed. Artificial DNA nanostructures or DNA Origami provides a cheaper framework to develop tiny chips than what the current technology is capable of.

Spike Narayan, researcher manager at IBM says the technology will need a lot of “experimentation and testing” to be used at full-scale. However, once it reaches that stage, manufacturers can save millions of dollars by investing in polymers, DNA solutions rather than investing hundreds of millions in complex tools.

[Via Reuters]

Looks like the tough times has made ailing Sun Microsystems to hunt out for buyers in recent months. Though HP is reported having turned down the Sun takeover, WSJ’s sources say that IBM is in talks to buy Sun for a staggering $6.5 billion. The rumored figure turns out to be 100% more than Sun’s closing price of $4.97 on Tuesday.

If the deal goes through successfully, IBM’s Internet, data storage, government and telecommunications business stand to gain with the Sun coup.

[Via Bloomberg]

With millions of telecom subscribers being added each month, the Indian telecom industry is looked as the land of opportunity. The scientists at IBM apparently think the same which has led to the development of a technology that allows users to communicate via speech with the websites.

The new protocol, Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) is under development that takes inputs from voice instead of text used by Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) websites. The HSTP in existence can give rise to a number of voice sites that could help even illiterates to surf the internet.

The technology went under some pilot testing in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and received positive results.

[ArunKumarvia Indiatimes]

IBM’s research lab at Zurich have created a simple and effective security device to ensure safe online banking for consumers. Dubbed as the Zone Trusted Information Channel (ZTIC), a simple USB drive that creates a direct and secure channel to the bank’s online server for transactions irrespective of user’s PC being affected with malware or viruses.

The ZTIC works by plugging into the user’s PC that directly takes the user to the already programmed bank’s website in a secured environment. Whenever the user transacts with the bank, the ZTIC equipped with a small display shows the transaction to be approved or disapproved. This can be done with the two buttons on the device. Transactions displayed on ZTIC are identical to what the server “sees”, no matter what malicious intervention may occur on the PC or anywhere in the Internet. There’s also an optional integration of Smartcard for added security.

How does it do?

The ZTIC runs the commonly used TLS/SSL protocol. The ZTIC hardware consists conceptually, at a minimum, of a processing unit, volatile and persistent memory, a small display and at least two control buttons (OK and Cancel) as well as an optional smartcard reader. The software is minimally configured with a complete TLS engine including all cryptographic algorithms required by today’s SSL/TLS servers, an HTTP parser for analyzing the data exchanged between client and server, plus custom system software implementing the USB mass storage device profile and a networking proxy for running on a PC. It supports TLS/SSL client authentication as well as common chip-card based challenge/response protocols.

A short explanatory video below explaining ZTIC:

ZTIC

As the world is pushing itself towards 32nm from 45nm and higher chips, IBM comes forward and claims that they can produce chips on 22nm fabrication technology. If we go by the current lithography methods, then it is impossible to fit in critical layers on 22nm’s physical size. However with the use of ‘Computational Scaling’, IBM says it can overcome lithographic limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit.

IBM will first implement these chips for cloud computing purposes as there will be a need of powerful, flexible servers in the future to suffice the demand of the increasing cloud computing users.

Press Release

[Via PCAuthority]