Slashdot Mirror
Transparent Transistors Are Coming
Roland Piquepaille writes "Transparent electronics is an emerging technology which aims to produce invisible electronic circuits. Now, researchers from Oregon report they made a major advance in transparent electronics. Their zinc-tin-oxide 'thin-film' materials are amorphous, physically robust, chemically stable and cheap to produce at just above room temperature. These new materials and transistors offer many new possibilities for consumer electronics, transportation, business and the military."
#2: This Roland Piquepaille stuff is getting on my nerves. There is obviously some kind of either backdoor deal, or favoritism for this guy getting stories.
Where is your journalistic integrity?
Hey Slashdot! I feel like having the option to block this guy out on my Edit Home Page Page. I mean, he has more submissions than "samzenpus," whoever the hell that is.
Don't force me to write a RSS filter that blocks phrasewords out. I'm feeling too lazy atm.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money.
Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index) . Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistors
Wearable computers, please.
"Yes sir, I know it doesn't look like there's an Athlon in there, but there is, trust me. It's the new transparent model."
"Really?"
"Sure."
The coolest voice ever.
Zinc Tin Oxide sounds alot like indium tin oxide (ITO) which is pretty commonly used, but has commonly known downsides. I don't think this is all that impressive.
This is just what I need for that transparent Lucite(tm) computer case. A transparent MOBO!!!
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So being "transparent" really doesn't mean much for sales point? It sounds like the key points are (1) the element can be made small (thin) and (2) cheap. I could be way off the mark, as I just skimmed the article out of curiousity on application.
Perfect for a throw-away phone and such?
Transparent aluminum?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I hope the tech gets better than this. Still I'm Impressed.
I don't think we'll see much of this implemented.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I could imagine that all other implications of this technology are clear too, transparent in fact.
It appears that every single article submitted to Slashdot by Roland Piquepaille is accepted, and he submits multiple articles each month. As of today, it is clear that ten articles were accepted in October, six in November, and four in December (so far). See http://slashdot.org/~rpiquepa for yourself. Some generate lots of discussion; others very little. What is clear is that, on a whole, this generates a lot of traffic for Roland Piquepaille.
You must be new here. Since when do Slashdotters read the articles???
Currently, the quality and definition of LCD screens and LCD chips used in projectors is due to the fact that the driver circuitry for each cell is in the area around the cell. And the yeild for both is limited by not having redundant driver circuitry for each cell. If these transistors truely are transparent, does this mean that the driver circuitry could be in the middle of each cell, and the area between each cell could be reduced to a bare minimum? And does this mean that they could have additional circuirty so the cells could be self-healing and could eliminate both "burned on" and "burned off" pixels?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
From the abstract :
:-) which is not the purpose of the research anyway.
Transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) with an amorphous zinc tin oxide channel layer formed via rf magnetron sputter deposition are demonstrated. Field-effect mobilities of 5-15 and 20-50 cm^2 V^-1 s^-1 are obtained for devices post-deposition annealed at 300 and 600 C, respectively. TTFTs processed at 300 and 600 C yield devices with turn-on voltage of 0-15 and -5-5 V, respectively. Under both processing conditions, a drain current on-to-off ratio greater than 10^7 is obtained. Zinc tin oxide is one example of a new class of high performance TTFT channel materials involving amorphous oxides composed of heavy-metal cations with (n-1)^d10 ns^0 (n>=4) electronic configurations. ©2005 American Institute of Physics
For comparison pusposes positive carrier mobility in silicon is about 500 cm^2 V^-1 s^-1 and for negative charges (aka electrons) it is about 800. This means that this transparent dvice technology is on the order of 10 - 50 times slower than silicon. Not good for new CPU's
What's of much more interest and is not mentioned in the abstract is what the gain of these devices are and what kind of current density they can handle.
The "drain current on-to-off ratio" is sort of an odd thing to put in the paper. I mean if the off current is 1pA then the on current is 10uA (woo-hoo). If they made an actual transistor they should be able to present very standard benchmark values like gain, cut-off frequency and breakdown voltages.
So I'm not actually convinced they created a bonafide device, but maybe just characterized the films for use as a potential semiconductor, in which case they have a long way to go. They need to dope the material, attach a gate, etc... all things which could cause all sorts of complications.
Absolute statements are never true
It means more comments in the thread, which means more ad hits for Slashdot, which means more demand for the dude's work. Frankly, I resent my flamebait moderation on my previous post. It's a good point. The best way to keep this guy around is to keep the topic controversial. How do you think Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh stay on the air?
You guys want Slashdot to take him down? Don't comment in his threads. The editors will get the point when they can no longer guarantee that certain topics will get x many pages served with client y's ads..
"Derp de derp."
I think that Roland Piquepaille's biz is entirely legitimate.
His job is to research the web for people who do not have the time to do it, and he is getting $600 for his job.
What's wrong with that?
Ok, he didn't give credits before, but now he do.
So, don't bother him.
It's a differente story the issue about slashdot posting.
--
You realize this is just a canned response that's in a lot (1 2 3) of his threads, right? If you look at the post, you'll notice that the AC didn't even bother to change As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate to the current date.
Nice conspiracy theory. I don't buy it, but it's very cute.
Some specific problems with your theory:
First, Slashdot itself runs basically the same type of service Roland does; they link to other articles. Hell, Slashdot doesn't even have to go looking for the articles, they expect readers to submit them. Slashdot is sure as hell making more money each month than Roland. Should we hate Slashdot as well?
Second, is Roland (and Slashdot) providing a service? Well, you're here, aren't you? Roland serves the same purpose many blogs do, he collects information. Maybe that's not worth anything to you, but it's hardly an evil scheme. Is he pimping his own site via Slashdot? Perhaps. So what? Apparently the Slashdot editors find his submissions to be worthy of posting. On that note...
Fourth, you're seriously suggesting that Slashdot is involved some sort of evil plan to scam $647 a month? That's chump change t to Slashdot.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, you suggest that the $647 is something that we should give the slightest crap about. If you were paying him that money you might have a right to complain that he wasn't justifying that money, but you're not. You're getting a free service, the only cost to you is potentially being exposed to some ads. If you don't like it, don't take advantage of that free service.
The worst non-crazy charges you can levy are that Roland pimps himself on Slashdot for hits and that Slashdot editors are lazy and let Roland pimp himself. Wow, life's tough.
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