HP Develops Chip As Small As A Grain!

As tiny as a grain of rice or smaller, with a built-in antenna, the chip doesn't need a battery. It can be embedded in a sheet of paper or stuck to any surface, and could eventually be available in a booklet as self-adhesive dots.
HP has developed a miniature wireless data chip that could provide broad access to digital content in the physical world. With no equal in terms of its combination of size, memory capacity and data access speed, the tiny chip could be stuck on or embedded in almost any object and make available information and content now found mostly on electronic devices or the Internet.
The experimental chip, developed by the 'Memory Spot' research team at HP Labs, is a memory device based on CMOS (a widely used, low-power integrated circuit design) and about the size of a grain of rice or smaller (2 mm to 4 mm square). The chip incorporates a built-in antenna and is completely self-contained, with no need for a battery or external electronics. It receives power through inductive coupling from a special read-write device, which can then extract content from the memory on the chip.The chip has a 10 megabits-per-second data transfer rate -- 10 times faster than Bluetooth wireless technology and comparable to Wi-Fi speeds -- effectively giving users instant retrieval of information in audio, video, photo or document form. With a storage capacity ranging from 256 kilobits to 4 megabits in working prototypes, it could store a very short video clip, several images or dozens of pages of text. Future versions could have larger capacities.Information can be accessed by a read-write device that could be incorporated into a cell phone, PDA, camera, printer or other implement. To access information, the read-write device is positioned closely over the chip, which is then powered so that the stored data is transferred instantly to the display of the phone, camera or PDA or printed out by the printer. Users could also add information to the chip using the various devices.