In the 1983 film The Right Stuff, the phrase "No bucks, no Buck Rogers" is used to describe what makes rockets go up, namely funding. In an Aug. 21, 2008, Intel Developer Forum Keynote "Crossing the Chasm between Humans and Machines" in San Francisco, Intel CTO Justin Rattner talked about how Intel Research and Development funding is helping bring some decidedly futuristic gadgets out of Intel labs and into peoples' lives.

Although the chip giant celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008, Rattner was more interested in looking forward 40 years rather than backward. "Look forward 40 years and we can see the point described by futurist Ray Kurzweil as 'the Singularity,'" which Ratner describes as a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence to create something bigger than itself.

To get to that technological level in 40 years will take some doing, including innovations that go far beyond Intel chips built using 32 nanometer (nm) technology, which are on track to begin production in 2009. Mike Garner, the manager of Intel's Emerging Materials group, described new chip materials and new structures such as the tri-gate transistor. "Tri-gate gives you higher speed, lower leakage, potentially higher density and lower variability in devices," he said. Garner also described other materials such as gallium arsenide and carbon nanotubes that could allow electrons to move much faster. "This yields higher speed, lower energy." Another possibility is moving beyond binary logic by using materials that allow multiple states.

Silicon photonics is another project Intel R&D is working on. Brian Koch from UC Santa Barbara said "Photons move almost losslessly and require very little energy." Koch described a second-generation hybrid silicon laser he's been working on that has integrated mirrors on the edge of the device. The laser mechanism Koch demonstrated was about 1-mm long and transferred data at rate of 3.2 gigabits per second, although he said it was capable of running at 40 Gbps. The laser sends out about 8mW of power, which could go hundreds of miles over fiber, or used at much lower power to transfer data chip-to-chip.

Wireless technology is an important Intel R&D focus. "In 10 years, there will be about 1,000 radios per person. Everything will have connectivity in it," Jan Rabaey from UC Santa Barbara said. According to Rabaey, there are wavelength, energy, and reliability problems with current wireless technology. Designing a new wireless network today will require connectivity brokerage, where it's possible to trade and allocate spectrum dynamically. Also needed are cognitive and collaborative radios that could sense spectrum and choose wavelength available in the area. To do this requires a change in the current approach to wireless spectrum by the Federal Communications Committee, however.

The next Intel R&D project would have made inventor Nikola Tesla proud. Alanson Sample, an Intel intern and graduate student at the University of Washington, showed a project he's been working on to transmit power wirelessly. Sample's demonstration had two large coils with a transmitter on one side of a desk, and a receiver on the other with a light bulb attached. He then moved the receiver around and the light bulb stayed lit. Sample estimated that the equipment could transfer roughly 60W of power at 75% efficiency for distance of 2 to 3 feet. A possible real-world application would be to put this technology into a laptop or wireless USB device, which would allow them to be wirelessly charged.

Robotics was next on the agenda, with demonstrations of robots able to interact in physical environments, including Herb, the robot arm, who was able to pick up a mug since he had the model of a mug in memory and was able to locate it on a table. Joshua Smith from Intel Seattle also displayed a robot arm that uses an electric field to do "pretouch," which is a sense that fish are capable of using in their environment. Smith's robot arm with sensors was able to track an apple and grasp it without crushing it.

Tan Le of Emotiv Systems next explained how to use brain waves to control machines. Using an array of sensors on a headset, a computer gamer was able to navigate through a computer game and do things like move a virtual rock across a virtual bridge and change the sky color in the game to reflect his mood.

The last display was a very Buck Roger-ish demo of programmable matter, or material that can be moved in three dimensions by semiconductor technology and can reshape itself dynamically. Jason Campbell from Intel Research in Pittsburgh showed a collection of glass hemispheres the size of grains of sand that have the potential to resize. One possible real-world use would be in 3-D models to train medical surgeons. Another might be to replace your cell phone with a tablet that changes shapes, so it could add a keyboard and screen for typing, then be folded into something much smaller and carried in your pocket.

Saying "The singularity is near!," Rattner closed his session with a video from Intel's Technology Clubhouse that asked 500 children worldwide to predict what technologies the next 40 years will bring. In addition to predictions of instantaneous communication and other Buck Roger-ish technologies like teleportation was a request by one young girl to "go behind the rainbow," a project that Intel may very well fund sometime in the next 40 years.