Nor does it involve having to make changes to a product or its packaging to incorporate security features, such as adding watermarks, fitting holograms or implanting microchips.
To build ever cheaper sensors, graviton uses technology known as MEMS (short for microelectromechanical systems), devices built with techniques developed in semiconductor manufacturing.The tiny sensors are, in essence, microchips that convert analogue data about anything physical pressure, light, gas, genes into bits and bytes which they communicate wirelessly to a network.
Hitachi and Toshiba, which make everything from nuclear reactors to the toasters they power, have been hit by the collapse in sales of microchips.
With the help of tax incentives and (for now) far cheaper land than either Shanghai or Shenzhen, officials hope to make the zone a manufacturing powerhouse for everything from aircraft and cars to microchips and chemicals.They want Tianjin city to regain its pre-Communist era status as north China's financial capital.
An official speaks darkly of the possible threat created by countless billions of microchips in devices from cars to household dryers, increasingly networked but largely unsupervised.
Intel, a giant maker of microchips, apparently managed to export to Russia 1,000 computers containing software to protect the firm's intellectual property, without getting ensnared by Russia's stringent regulations on encryption products.
And some companies, such as ARM, a British firm that designs the blueprints for microchips used in wireless devices, do little other than create and sell intellectual property.According to a survey of business executives last year by McKinsey, a consultancy, 54% of companies saw growth in licensing of 10-50% between 2000 and 2002.
But as microchips become more powerful, devices shrink and battery life is extended, a host of companies are vying to take wireless technology deep into the human body.Some wireless devices are ingested.
During the recent tech bubble, western makers of computers, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets speculated by stockpiling microchips.
That is why he and other computer scientists are taking a new approach: designing microchips that can tolerate errors in their operation.
Others are based on microchips that amplify the DNA of suspected bioagents and then compare the results with those of known pathogens.
