Skylanders from the first game, reposed with light-up components.
As the internal components came to light, the markets automatically picked winners and losers in the chip world.
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Nasa suggested it could be used in detectors and instrument components where stray-light causes problems.
Researchers have steadily overcome such challenges to build a series of building blocks from silicon, including components that modulate pulses of light from lasers to encode data and detect such signals.
Germany's Robert Bosch, a major supplier of critical diesel components, forecasts diesel penetration in light-duty pickups and SUVs will reach 20% by 2015.
In 2002 MIT professors started a not-for-profit called BioBricks that has collected 2, 000 biological components, including gene sequences that sense light, produce light, send messages between cells and switch cell functions on and off.
As one managing director of a car components firm told me, it offers some light at a time when there's not much of it around.
That said, the 2% by volume that goes by air accounts for around 35% of the value: light, expensive goods such as high-end electronic components tend to be flown.
As it is made entirely out of circuit board, users can solder components directly to it -- such as a light dependent resistor or a microphone to make it respond to sound.
Optical correlators, meanwhile, work by encoding images on to a beam of light and, using a special lens, transforming them into their Fourier components building-blocks that encode the thickness and direction of lines in the image, but not their position.
Whereas tablet PCs are full-blown PCs that contain all their components inside the casing of a notebook-sized flat-screen display, smart displays are light, portable display screens that connect wirelessly to a PC, so a user can interact with the PC away from the desk for reading documents or surfing the Web.
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