HP unveils tiny wireless chip

Boffins at Hewlett-Packard (HP) have unveiled a tiny wireless data chip that could bring a wealth of new features to mobile phones and other portable devices.

According to HP the new chip, which is about the size of a grain of rice, can provide broadband internet access to most digital devices and can store up to 100 pages of text. The ‘Memory Spot’ can be embedded into most surfaces and provide broadband speeds of up to 10Mbps, or about ten times faster than Bluetooth.

The Memory Spot was developed by HP researchers at the company’s Bristol campus in England. Howard Taub, the vice president of HP Labs said: “We have built a device that allows us to bridge the physical and digital world,” Taub said. “We have made hundreds of these chips. The question now is the business question: ‘How much will they cost? Where will they be used?'”

It is conceivable that people could store music, pictures, databases and short videos on the chip while attached to say, a printed digital photograph. The devices could also be adapted to read and write data and find their way into in mobile phones and other portable devices, lending themselves to a wide range of applications.

After revealing the chip late on Sunday night, HP said it intends to take the technology to various industry standards bodies to win support across the sector.

The Memory Spot needs no battery or external devices and derives energy via inductive coupling from the read-write device. Inductive coupling is an energy transfer from one circuit component to another through a shared electromagnetic field.