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Silicon LED
Ian writes "Scientists at the University of Surrey have developed an LED made entirely from silicon. This is a different approach to optoelectonics which had previously concentrated on nanocrystals. Full report from Nature, also coverage from the BBC, stand back and watch the patents fly (although in this case they are much more deserved)."
NAPIER UNI has some info on a pretty funky technology I first came across at an Investor Conference in Edinburgh last Autumn.
Essentially, this stuff gathers all the available light and throws it back out within a narrower range of wavelengths - making it apparently brighter. Especially when you consider it takes UV and (_I think_)some IR and throws it back in the visible. You can make signs out of it, so goodby neon, and the brighter the sun gets the brighter the sign gets. You can make ANYTHING out of it, and it will glow in daylight, artificial light, moonlight... v.cool.
Photons - officially the new SEX
The Nature 'article' linked appears to just be a summary of the actual paper.
Either get it in paper form, or wait for NewScientist to cover the story.
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Ah yes. I remember going to the National Cryptological Museum a few years ago. It's right next to the NSA, of course - they run it, and probably swipe your DNA while you're there...
Anyway, in their hall of obselete computers was a CM5. Impressive, yes. A little humbling though. I can't imagine what they've got in there, these days.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
So they can generate the light signal on chip now, which is a big step. But for light to replace electrical current on/around a chip, how that signal is transmitted? As far as I know, there is not any way to create a fiber optic 'wire' on chip.
And what if I like my oversized, very heavy, power sucking 19" relic? I really have no desire for the flat pannels I've seen so far, I like my oversized box that sits on my desk.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
wow, I am suprozed how many here have no clue on LED's or their history. Check out
http://www.marktechopto.com/HistoryofLEDTech.htm
for some good history.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hear, Hear!
I like the fact that I can work on my suntan in a windowless office. If I need some exercise, there's heavy lifting right in front of me.
Just think if flat panel displays become the norm, there are gonna be a lot of disappointed cats (except for maybe the really skinny ones).
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You wouldn't believe it, but there is life outside the US, too! ;-)
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The 56K modems push up against the limits of the telephone voice network which has a maximum bandwidth designed to carry voice transmissions. There is no way to push more information through the voice telephone system than this bandwidth limitation of the system itself. (ok, there are ways of using multiple lines/circuits, but that is cheating...)
Well, that's not really true. Todays 56K modems push up against the limits of the old telephone network and even those are theoretical limits. Basically, the phone company could push more speed through the phone line by increasing the maximum allowed voltage. But they don't; because they don't have to.Later...
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This limitation is not a theoretical one, it is a designed one. As I understand things, the system was designed to take the voice noises, encoded them digitally at less than 60K, transmit them through those fancy new digital thingies that the phone companies installed in the 1970's (or earlier? or later? I don't know) and route them to the other phone location. Transfer the data back into analogue and pump it out the recipient's phone.
Thus, since the sound is encoded at about 60K, there ain't no way possible to take your data and encoded it into a sound to send through your phone such that you can push more than 60K through the equipment the phone company has. Unless, as is done with the DSL stuff, you do not use that equipment with those limitations.
At least that's the model working in my mind - I could be totally wrong.
I guess what QwkHyenA had in mind, but i guess we could detect light 'leaking' from the circuitry, thus running the board in the dark we'd be able to see where the light is leaking...
#DEFINE QUESTION (2b)||(!2b) -- William Shakespeare
Why does this article and a lot of the others on the front page today have a huge block of italic text?
It's not needed, ugly, and hard to read.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
The article states that integrated circuits are all made from silicon. This is not true. A majority of integrated circuits are silicon, but a lot of high speed CPUs are gallium-arsenide.
And I believe a lot of LEDs are made from gallium arsenide. Maybe a mix of germanium and gallium too.
Why are they "much more deserved"? Is it because those researchers work in a field that you don't understand? Why does working on computers mean that our experts don't deserve patents? It seems that computer geeks have a fundamental misunderstanding of their place in the world of science...
I thought the main reason for using other materials in optoelectronics was that Si have an indirect bandgap. From what I could se in the article, this isn't meantioned at all.
If someone gets going a transparent cube with lots of transparent chips blinking very fast in different colors...
...It's going to be Apple's intellectual property.
iCube, anybody?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Hey! Come on! They say this kind of stuff every time! Ok, they have to come up with something new to acchive that "next, impossible" result. But they always do!
I remember when 56K modems came out and we were told they would virtually rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Suddenly we've got 2mb ASDL sockets in the wall, that can do simultaneous voice & data. What da f????
In summary, I agree entirely with you. It only looks impossible now. Tonight some bright spark will have a dream about how it can be bettered.
It is mentioned in the actual research paper here. They explain the band structure can be modified by introducing an array of dislocations, which create a special kind of strain field in the crystal structure.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
My impression was that this invention would enable us to integrate fiber-optic connections into the silicon circuits, thus removing some bottlenecks.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Hey! Come on! They say this kind of stuff every time! Ok, they have to come up with something new to acchive that "next, impossible" result. But they always do! It's getting boring, like in all those TV-Show, where you know that the hero is going to survive
On the other hand I'm happy that they allways find a way to work it out ;-)
Britain's University of Surrey...
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No sig for you!!
Most probably you are referring to blue SiC LEDs. These are however not related to the article.
Maybe just cut a groove, and fill it in with something transparent?
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
At work I have one of those nice 19" aquariums to develop on... If I look around me: heck, I see 7 developers here that have such a screen. I saw dozens of flatscreens here in the company, on places where no customer should ever come. Guess they care about our health around here. ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Also, think of the implications in debugging which board/circuit went bad?? If they can do this cheap enough, we could have our electronics tell us which section went bad based on what color it's emitting!
LFS. Have you built your system today?
Now we can all finally build those kewl androids like 'Data' that have those kewl flashy head circuitry implants!
Just think, you'll be able to tell how your bot is doing based on the different colors emitting from its cranium!
Light emitting diodes are yummy!
LFS. Have you built your system today?
But the light-emitting devices needed to do this can't be built into silicon circuits.
This is talking about older style LEDs. Consider the next paragraph:
The ideal solution would be to make light emitters from silicon itself, but silicon does not glow efficiently. Various tricks have been tried to squeeze light from silicon.
And what is the article about?
A light-emitting device based on silicon promises to end what has become an uncomfortable marriage.
(perhaps silicon can help your uncomfortable marriage? ;)
Nothing that I could see in the article about how they overcame "silicon does not glow efficiently," or even if they did. Perhaps the BBC one was different, but the Nature article is a headline with some background information. Nothing really about the headline.
There's no such place as Surrey in America.
Actually, there is... At least three of them, actually. Surrey, ND; Surrey, IN; and Surrey, IL.
MapQuest
Though, I doubt any of them have Universities.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Actually, I think it has more to do with creating a pure optical based laser so fibre doesn't have to be terminated back into electronics at routers (this slows everything down precipitously).
This is very much "pure research" though, so it could be applied or adapted to anything, including CPU's.
It cannot be long before these things will be as throwaway as the daily newspaper.
There's no such place as America. All these 4-letter abbreviations (DMCA, MPAA, RIAA etc) are obviously the ravings of a deranged mind.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
It is also rather expensive to attempt to replace copper with fibre cabling
Not really an effective way to bundle strands of fibre together in order to make this work. What can end up happening is, once strands start dying out, the entire emission of the light becomes lower and less useable.
Pardon me for being the troll here, but why would their be patent suits or other on this?
360 degrees of Karma
now all we have to do is find intelligent Silicon-based light forms.
You stupid bastard, you don't have no arms left. It's just a flesh wound.
Laptops... Now they'll be even smaller! Great, I can't stand typing on one as it is..
The BBC article says that it works with current fabrication plants.
This sounds very similar to fibre optic technology.
Does anyone know if this new technology would have a reduced power consumption ? It all sounds really promising. Well done University of Surrey (15 miles from where I live).
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
Of course, the fact that the Nobel prize is Swedish to begin with must have escaped both of you...
It might be interesting to put indicators on your chip based on these devices to show state during chip test. You could then view that with a camera to determine the state of lots of nodes at the same time. Of course I doubt it would be cheaper than boundary scan, but I suspect that there would be some useful applications. As it is, I doubt it would be useful for much more than fibercomm chips.
True, but from my understanding of the optical/electronic interface (which is far from complete) generating laser pulses (which is required for data transmission (LED's simply don't cut it) isn't the problem. It's going from photons to electrons that's the slow process.
If they can do this (p2e) with this technology then they are will on the way to using photons in the data bus, either between chips or on the chip. Unfortunately, from the paper, it appears that this can only be used to generate light, so they have only one half of the equation.
Also from the picture they published, the doped tracks glow, so it's not even a point source. There seems to be a lot more promise vertical-cavity serface emitting lasers.
I wonder if this means they'll still drop the same voltate as a normal, red, led drops. It would be nice if they dropped say, hardly anything, and were cheap. Just because I want that night-rider led thing for my kick ass Hyundai. (Please, note the sarcasm there.)
-h-
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
There's no such place as Surrey in America.
but it's a well known fact that the best engineers are imported from england.
For sure!
Why is it that the British like warm beer?
Because Lucas makes refrigerators.
Hmmm...
British Reliant. American Reliant. (Yeah, okay, it's actually a Canadian Reliant now living in Scotland.)
At least North American Reliants have 4 wheels. So there.
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IANAEE, but it seems to me that this won't really help. Reading the Nature article reveals that creating these SLEDs (new acronym? Silicon LED?) requires doping the silicon with boron, then heating it to 1000 deg C.
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The stated purpose of this invention is to ease the integration of optics and silicon-based electronics - ostensibly to allow chip designers to fabricate an LED directly on the same chip, without having to "scab" on a separate LED to talk to the optics.
Is this boron doping and superheating process really going to be compatible with general chip fabrication procedures? Maybe a real EE can answer that.
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--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
After reading both the Nature and BBC articles, I'm not sure that they are really talking about opto-electonics, although it might be used for such.
Instead I think they may be using this to emit the energy loss of silicon circuits in the visible spectrum, rather than IR.
As we all probably know, today's CPU's run extremely hot, just look at all the comments about the new Apple titanium notebook. Getting rid of this excess as light instead would be an immense benefit. And would mean small faster CPU's without the need for a cyrogenic cooling system.
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The real benefit of this is that these silicon light emitters can fairly easily be fabbed in existing chip plants wthout requiring the 'start from scratch' of other optical computing tecnologies.
This technique should (according to the invetor) provide a way of building hybrid practical electronic/optical chips very soon. He particularly mentioned the clock distribution problem that /. had a big discussion on few days back as being one of the first applications he expects to see for this technology.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
If someone gets going a transparent cube with lots of transparent chips blinking very fast in different colors... well, all I can say is they will get a lot of free coverage in the next major films.
;-)
It's already been done in Blakes 7 (spectacular BBC TV sci-fi series from the 80s).
Computer was called Orac, and had a spectacularly cheesy pseudo-computer-generated voice!
To quote:
Orac was described by its creator, Ensor, as being beyond a simple computer but rather being a brain, a genius.
Sounds just like b1ll Gates describing Win2K
Although details like the reaction time of the optical effect are missing. In a world where many things are measured in nanoseconds, if these things react in millionths, for example, then this will limit the applications.
Interesting all the same.
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I submitted this story too. More information from Yahoo(via Reuters). They mention how it works, something with dislocations, loop-flaws in the silicon. The press release from U-Surrey is here. Google also claims to have indexed their paper here but accesss is forbidden.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
I mean, they really miss the old times when they could represent computers with lots of blinking red lights!
If someone gets going a transparent cube with lots of transparent chips blinking very fast in different colors... well, all I can say is they will get a lot of free coverage in the next major films.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
"Flashing your tits" gets a whole new meaning :)
It's long been a rumour, but finally...
Silicon-based light forms!
Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardise your credit rating.