The Kynix Blog

For people with celiac disease or gluten intolerances, dining out can be stressful. Even trace amounts of the protein—found in wheat, barley, and rye—in a whole plate of food can cause adverse reactions.Now MIT spinout Nima—co-founded by CEO Shireen Yates MBA '13 and Chief Product Officer Scott Sundvor '12—has developed a portable, highly sensitive gluten sensor that lets diners know if their food is, indeed, safe to eat.According to the National Institutes of Health, celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that leads to intestinal damage when gluten is eaten, affects around 1 percent of the U.S. population, or roughly 3 million people. According to the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, millions more may suffer from nonceliac gluten intolerances.Nima's sensor, also called Nima, is a 3-inch-tall triangular device with disposable capsules. Diners put a sample of food—about the size of a pea—or liquid into the capsule, screw on the top, and insert the capsule into the device, which mixes the food into a solution that detects gluten. In two to three minutes, a digital display appears on the sensor, indicating if the food sample does or doesn't contain gluten.Every time someone runs a test, the result is automatically sent to an app Nima has developed. The diner can enter information about where and what they ate, and whether the food contained gluten. Any Nima user can log in to see the results.The aim is to create "a peace of mind at mealtime," Sundvor says. By amassing data on food, he adds, the startup hopes to provide people with better information about what they eat. "Right now, we don't know what's in our food, whether it is allergens, pesticides, or other harmful chemicals," he says. "There's not a good way to get that data. We want to give people the ability to understand their food better and how it affects their health."Sensitive sensorNima can sense gluten at 20 parts per million (ppm) or more, the maximum concentration for "gluten-free" foods as determined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.Nima's high sensitivity comes from the immunoassay inside the sensor, developed primarily by MIT chemical engineering alumnus Jingqing Zhang SM '12, PhD '13, who is now the lead scientist at Nima. The immunoassay contains custom antibodies that are highly sensitive to gluten molecules. When gluten is present, the antibody bonds to the gluten molecules, causing a color change in the immunoassay, which is captured by an optical reader. If any gluten is detected, the sensor will display an icon with a "gluten found" message. If the sample has less than 20 ppm of gluten, the sensor will display a smiley face.Nima can detect gluten in foods that are labeled as "gluten-free" but may have picked up microscopic amounts of the protein during the production or cooking process. A steak may have been fried on the same grill as gluten-based foods, for example, or a salad dressing may contain trace amounts of wheat flour. The device can even detect if someone touched a piece of bread that contained gluten, before handling the food in question. "It's the equivalent to finding a breadcrumb in an entire plate of food," Sundvor says.Moreover, Sundvor says, the device seamlessly integrates that chemistry with electronics and mechanics. "We've created this grinding, mixing, and extracting system, and together it works really well," he says.Filling the consumer gapNima was founded in 2013 as GlutenTech, when Yates, then an MIT Sloan School of Management student, dreamt up an idea for a portable gluten sensor. Seeking an engineer to bring the device to life, she met Sundvor, a recent MIT graduate who had studied mechanical engineering and product design.Together, they set up shop at the now-defunct MIT Beehive, a startup incubator on MIT's campus, with aims of filling "a huge consumer gap" in food-allergen testing, Sundvor says. Conventional at-home tests, he says, require equipment such as test tubes, pipettes, a mortar and pestle, and microscale. "You can't bring test tubes to a restaurant," he says.Sundvor began working long hours in an MIT machine shop building a prototype, while Yates brought the idea around to her MIT Sloan classes. Of note was a particular pricing class, where students sketched out pricing and demand models for the product. "The result of that was that I found there's a real opportunity here: There's a need and a willingness to pay," Yates says.In spring 2013, GlutenTech entered the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition with a proof-of-concept model, and they earned the Audience Choice Award in the Accelerate contest. That summer, the team entered the Global Founders Skills Accelerator (GFSA), a 12-week startup program held at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.Participating in the $100K forced the team develop a business plan they could pitch to investors, Yates says. "It was a testing period to see, if we position ourselves in a certain way, will it resonate with investors?" she says."The GFSA was incredible," Sundvor adds, "It gave us the opportunity to have a safe space to go full-out on this for three months, have mentors, and have just enough money to squeak by."By the time the GFSA Demo Day rolled around in September, GlutenTech had its first working prototypes—"which were so ugly," Sundvor says, laughing.The 9-inch-long aluminum tubes "looked like lightsaber handles," Sundvor says. Inside the tubes were chemicals used in conventional food tests, and the system took about 10 minutes to detect gluten. When it did, a bright light flashed and a loud alarm went off. "We got many looks at restaurants," Sundvor says. "But they worked and got us our first investors."Three years ago, GlutenTech moved headquarters from Boston to San Francisco, and changed its name to 6SensorLabs. This year, they renamed the startup as Nima. In three years, the startup has gained more than $14 million in capital venture funding.New opportunitiesConsumers are the startup's first market. But as more individuals start using Nima, restaurants will have more data on their food to better serve patrons, Sundvor says. A couple of restaurants in San Francisco, in fact, are working with Nima on validating their gluten-free menu items.Next year, Nima plans to release two new sensors, one for peanuts and one for dairy, which is "surprisingly sneaky," Sundvor says. Bread at a restaurant, for instance, could have been fried in a pan with remnants of butter. "A lot of people are getting sick from dairy allergies, so that will be a big market," Sundvor says.Reference:LM50BIM3/NOPBDS18B20-PAR+T&RAD592BNZ 

Powerbox introduces two board mounted DC/DC converters to power industrial and railway applications; the extra wide input PQB50U-72S and the ultra-high power density PFB600W-110S. With an unprecedented extra wide input of 12:1 (14V to 160V) the PQB50U-72S delivers 50W in quarter brick packaging, bringing simplicity to power designers addressing EN50155 applications (one unit covering all bus voltages).In full brick packaging, the PFB600W-110S delivers industry’s first 600W unit within a 4:1 input voltage range of 43V to 160V, accommodating 72V, 96V and 110V bus voltages. Both products can be operated from -40°C up to +100°C case temperature, matching very demanding and ruggedized requirements such as in construction vehicles, mining equipment & heavy machinery process control.Demanding Industry and Railway power designers always face challenges to optimize board power solutions when designing standardized equipment for worldwide operation on a very large variety of system bus voltages. In the railway industry, designers are permanently seeking the best power architecture to operate within the overall EN50155 input voltage range, from 24V up to 110V (including continuous operation in the 14.4V brownout condition and 154V transients). To guarantee board power designers the highest level of flexibility, the PQB50U-72S has been developed to deliver full and stable power within an extended input voltage range from 14V up to 160V.In Demanding Industry and the forthcoming Industry 4.0 applications, system designers have to guarantee full performance in a multitude of applications operating from 24V to 72V and fixed industrial battery backup systems using 110V in which the quality of line is often disturbed. In those applications, the PQB50U-72S is designed to sustain high level of line disturbance within a range as low as 14V to a 200V surge. In such environments, the PQB50U-72S guarantees full output performance, simplifying design for systems architects and by having only one power module covering all ranges of input voltage, thus reducing inventory.PQB50U-72S comes in a standardized DOSA quarter-brick package. The module is available in four output voltages (5V/6A ; 12V/4.2A ; 24V/2.1A and 48V/1.05A). The device sustains 200V/100ms surge input voltage, includes short circuit and over-voltage protection, meets UL60950-1-2nd edition basic insulation and meets the EN50155 (EN61373) shock and vibration standard. The unit can be operated from -40 up to +100°C case temperature and has an efficiency of 86%. The PQB50U-72S includes an aluminum baseplate, making it possible to fix a heatsink or mount it directly to a cold-wall or chassis.Used in demanding applications, the PQB50U-72S has an isolation voltage of 3,000VDC (min) between input/output, 1,500VDC input/case and 1,500VDC output to case.“From the early days, board mounted DC/DC converters simplified the design process, whilst shortening the time to market” says Martin Fredmark, VP Product Management. “With the increased demand from Systems Designers to meet a large variety of bus voltages and from Supply Chain Managers to reduce inventory and fewer product-codes, Powerbox has been working on Swiss-knife power solutions, of which the PQB50U-72S and PFB600W-110S are perfect example of products responding to those needs”Part of the railway and industry modernization programs introduce more digital communication, entertainment systems, local computers and radio-communication, requiring higher power board mounted converters, able to operate independently of the system bus voltage, such as the EN50155 input bus voltage (72V, 96V, 110V), industrial 48V while delivering 600W output power.Designed and optimized for railway 110V systems, the new Powerbox PFB600W-110S can be operated from 43V up to 160V input, sustaining 180V/100ms surge voltage. The 4:1 input voltage range makes it easier and simpler for the system designer when developing new equipment for international railway applications.Packaged in an industry standard full-brick, the PFB600W-110S is available in four output voltages (12V/50A ; 24V/25A ; 28V/21.4A and 48V/12.5A) with an output power up to 600W. The PFB600W-110S is fully regulated and operates at a fixed switching frequency of 250 KHz and includes a PI type input filter reducing the input and noise. PFB600W-110S includes current limiting, continuous short-circuit protection, under/over-voltage lockout and an over-temperature protection with thermal shutdown with automatic recovery. For safety, the module complies with the UL60950-1 2nd edition (Basic isolation) has an input/output and input/case isolation of 2,500VDC and 500VDC output/case.For additional power or operational redundancy, the PFB600W-110S can be used in parallel. A paralleling control circuit is included within the product, guaranteeing true load-sharing, without the need to add external components. PFB600W-110S has a typical efficiency of 89% and designed carefully to optimize the thermal dissipation through the baseplate.The product complies with EN50155 (EN61373) shock and vibration standard and environmental EN50155 (EN60068-2-1). PQB50U-72S and PFB600W-110S meet CE Mark 2004/108/EC requirements.Reference:DS1200DEZ1582CM-2.5SC2608AS  

Samsung Electronics unveiled the industry’s first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC UFS 1.0 Card Extension Standard, for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Coming in a wide range of storage capacities including 256, 128, 64 and 32 GB, Samsung’s UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.“Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics.“By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritise performance and user convenience above all.”Samsung’s new 256GB UFS removable memory card ─ simply referred to as the UFS card will provide greatly improved user experiences, especially in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback.It provides more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 MB/s which is similar to the sequential read speed of the most widely used SATA SSDs.With this UFS card, consumers have the ability to read a 5GB, Full-HD movie in approximately 10 seconds, compared to a typical UHS-1 microSD card, which would take over 50 seconds with 95MB/s of sequential reading speed.Also, at a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, the 256GB card delivers more than 20 times higher random read performance compared to a typical microSD, which offers approximately 1,800 IOPS.When it comes to writing, the new 256GB UFS card processes 35,000 random IOPS, which is 350 times higher than the 100 IOPs of a typical microSD card, and attains a 170MB/s sequential write speed, almost doubling the top-end microSD card speed.With these substantial performance improvements, the new 256GB UFS card significantly reduces multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users.To shoot 24 large/extra fine JPEG photographs (1,120 MB-equivalent) continuously with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35MB/s.To achieve the highest performance and most power-efficient data transport, the UFS card supports multiple commands with command queuing features and enables simultaneous reading and writing through the use of separately dedicated paths, doubling throughput.As the leading memory storage provider, Samsung has been aggressive in preparing UFS solutions for the marketplace, while contributing to JEDEC standardisation of the Universal Flash Storage 2.0 specification in September 2013 and the UFS 1.0 Card Extension standard in March 2016.Following its introduction of the industry-first 128GB embedded UFS chip in January 2015, the company successfully launched a 256GB embedded UFS memory for high-end mobile devices in February of this year.As of earlier this month, Samsung also completed the Universal Flash Storage Association (UFSA)’s certification program that evaluates electrical and functional specifications for compatibility of a UFS card, and Samsung’s new UFS card products were approved as UFSA-certified UFS cards with the right to use the official UFS logo for the first time in the industry.Reference:S29GL032N11FFIS42S29GL064N90FFIS30S29AS016J70BFA040  

A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and Cubic Micro today announce that they have developed and demonstrated a 400 MHz radio frequency (RF) transceiver with the highest power efficiency and leading performance reported to deliver high quality signals over industry's widest coverage in wireless sensor network applications. The transceiver is integrated with a highly configurable baseband, which allows users to customize transceiver performance for specific applications ranging from wireless smart energy management and security control in homes and buildings to long-range remote industrial monitoring.To achieve low power consumption in RF transceiver, performance is typically sacrificed, resulting in degradations of sensitivity, channel selectivity and interference immunity during the wireless signal communication process.To address the performance and power consumption dilemma, the IME team has employed a low-power low-noise linear RF chain and a 75-dB-dynamic-range band-pass analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) so that channel filtering is conducted in the low-power digital circuits. This strategy cuts energy consumption by up to 55% while providing unprecedented wireless communication range that supports highest reported sensitivity along with excellent selectivity compared to commercially available RF transceiver integrated chips. These features translate into fewer sensor nodes to achieve similar network coverage in a wireless sensor network, further reducing costs and power consumption.The design is amenable to mass production and is compatible with both Japanese standards[1], while also meeting the emission limits of Europe and US."IME's commitment to continually demonstrate strong R&D capabilities in CMOS RF design has attracted partners who look forward to developing next-generation smart energy metering solutions," said Professor Dim-Lee Kwong, Executive Director of IME. "We look forward to strengthening customer adoption to benefit the community with a wider range of innovative applications.""We are glad to have developed the lowest power and high performance RFIC in Asia together with IME," said Mr Yutaka Kumagai, Managing Director of Cubic Micro. "This kind of joint developments will be needed for high diversity business environment, and we believe IME will be one of the best technology partners in the area of wireless solution to create new product and technologies."Reference:BC417143B-GIQN-E4CC430F5147IRGZTLMX9838SBX/NOPB 

Sending a password or secret code over airborne radio waves like WiFi or Bluetooth means anyone can eavesdrop, making those transmissions vulnerable to hackers who can attempt to break the encrypted code.Now, University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers have devised a way to send secure passwords through the human body—using benign, low-frequency transmissions generated by fingerprint sensors and touchpads on consumer devices."Fingerprint sensors have so far been used as an input device. What is cool is that we've shown for the first time that fingerprint sensors can be re-purposed to send out information that is confined to the body," said senior author Shyam Gollakota, UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering.These "on-body" transmissions offer a more secure way to transmit authenticating information between devices that touch parts of your body—such as a smart door lock or wearable medical device—and a phone or device that confirms your identity by asking you to type in a password.This new technique, which leverages the signals already generated by fingerprint sensors on smartphones and laptop touchpads to transmit data in new ways, is described in a paper presented in September at the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery's International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2016) in Germany."Let's say I want to open a door using an electronic smart lock," said co-lead author Merhdad Hessar, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. "I can touch the doorknob and touch the fingerprint sensor on my phone and transmit my secret credentials through my body to open the door, without leaking that personal information over the air."The research team tested the technique on iPhone and other fingerprint sensors, as well as Lenovo laptop trackpads and the Adafruit capacitive touchpad. In tests with 10 different subjects, they were able to generate usable on-body transmissions on people of different heights, weights and body types. The system also worked when subjects were in motion—including while they walked and moved their arms."We showed that it works in different postures like standing, sitting and sleeping," said co-lead author Vikram Iyer, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student. "We can also get a strong signal throughout your body. The receivers can be anywhere—on your leg, chest, hands—and still work."The research team from the UW's Networks and Mobile Systems Lab systematically analyzed smartphone sensors to understand which of them generates low-frequency transmissions below 30 megahertz that travel well through the human body but don't propagate over the air.The researchers found that fingerprint sensors and touchpads generate signals in the 2 to 10 megahertz range and employ capacitive coupling to sense where your finger is in space, and to identify the ridges and valleys that form unique fingerprint patterns.Normally, sensors use these signals to receive input about your finger. But the UW engineers devised a way to use these signals as output that corresponds to data contained in a password or access code. When entered on a smartphone, data that authenticates your identity can travel securely through your body to a receiver embedded in a device that needs to confirm who you are.Their process employs a sequence of finger scans to encode and transmit data. Performing a finger scan correlates to a 1-bit of digital data and not performing the scan correlates to a 0-bit.The technology could also be useful for secure key transmissions to medical devices such as glucose monitors or insulin pumps, which seek to confirm someone's identity before sending or sharing data.The team achieved bit rates of 50 bits per second on laptop touchpads and 25 bits per second with fingerprint sensors—fast enough to send a simple password or numerical code through the body and to a receiver within seconds.This represents only a first step, the researchers say. Data can be transmitted through the body even faster if fingerprint sensor manufacturers provide more access to their software.Reference:HMR3400HMC6343HMR3000-D00-232HMR2300-D00-485 

A newly-developed form of transistor opens up a range of new electronic applications including wearable or implantable devices by drastically reducing the amount of power used. Devices based on this type of ultralow power transistor, developed by engineers at the University of Cambridge, could function for months or even years without a battery by 'scavenging' energy from their environment.Using a similar principle to a computer in sleep mode, the new transistor harnesses a tiny 'leakage' of electrical current, known as a near-off-state current, for its operations. This leak, like water dripping from a faulty tap, is a characteristic of all transistors, but this is the first time that it has been effectively captured and used functionally. The results, reported in the journal Science, open up new avenues for system design for the Internet of Things, in which most of the things we interact with every day are connected to the Internet.The transistors can be produced at low temperatures and can be printed on almost any material, from glass and plastic to polyester and paper. They are based on a unique geometry which uses a 'non-desirable' characteristic, namely the point of contact between the metal and semiconducting components of a transistor, a so-called 'Schottky barrier.'"We're challenging conventional perception of how a transistor should be," said Professor Arokia Nathan of Cambridge's Department of Engineering, the paper's co-author. "We've found that these Schottky barriers, which most engineers try to avoid, actually have the ideal characteristics for the type of ultralow power applications we're looking at, such as wearable or implantable electronics for health monitoring."The new design gets around one of the main issues preventing the development of ultralow power transistors, namely the ability to produce them at very small sizes. As transistors get smaller, their two electrodes start to influence the behaviour of one another, and the voltages spread, meaning that below a certain size, transistors fail to function as desired. By changing the design of the transistors, the Cambridge researchers were able to use the Schottky barriers to keep the electrodes independent from one another, so that the transistors can be scaled down to very small geometries.The design also achieves a very high level of gain, or signal amplification. The transistor's operating voltage is less than a volt, with power consumption below a billionth of a watt. This ultralow power consumption makes them most suitable for applications where function is more important than speed, which is the essence of the Internet of Things."If we were to draw energy from a typical AA battery based on this design, it would last for a billion years," said Dr Sungsik Lee, the paper's first author, also from the Department of Engineering. "Using the Schottky barrier allows us to keep the electrodes from interfering with each other in order to amplify the amplitude of the signal even at the state where the transistor is almost switched off.""This will bring about a new design model for ultralow power sensor interfaces and analogue signal processing in wearable and implantable devices, all of which are critical for the Internet of Things," said Nathan.Reference:2SA19872sb1647FJA4213RTU