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Perforated Metal Advances Computer Technology
TeknoDragon writes "In the July Scientific American there's an article on how conductive metals can be made into optical sieves. Two applications of this technology pursued by NEC are color LCD screens up to six times as bright and photolithography techniques that would help plants upgrade to a smaller fab. "
ha ha funny, if you came up with a good idea, would YOU want to share it and let someone else get the credit for the discovery. When people discover something, the news says one name. Sure you spent 70 years developing the technology to the 99% mark, but who ever gets that 1% at the end is the one who will be on the news. Open is not human nature.
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> For nearly 10 years, Ebbesen struggled with the
> problem, waiting, in the closed-mouth habit of
> corporate researchers, to make his findings
> public until he could explain and control (and
> patent) the phenomenon.
Sigh. The wonderful effects of closure in science. We could have had this 10 years ago if science was more open. As it is, if the discovering scientist can't solve the problem, then by damn no-one is going to be allowed to solve the problem.
This article is the clearest demonstration of why we need old fashioned OpenSource Science to return.
It's a good thing this came along or we risked falling off the Moore curve.. even so, even these holes aren't small enough for proper x-ray lithography, so it looks like we're still stuck with that five-atom width absolute limit of traditional litho if technology takes this route.
The question is, though: is squeezing every last breath out of trad litho the way to go? A couple of hexagons on the wall of a bucky tube can form a complete logic gate; molecular nanotech will soon build single-molecule transistors (check out J Ellenbogen's work at MITRE.org) and Ned Seeman at NYU is folding DNA into massively parallel computing devices. These bottom-up routes are to traditional scrapin' and shinin' lithography as Linux is to Windows 3.1. Maybe we don't need new ten-billion dollar fabs; maybe we just need some fresh ideas.
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It seems that for every breakthrough that would obsolete an important technology, there is an equal and opposite chain of refinements in the old technology to keep it competitive.
We've seen this many times now in the computer industry; a completely new technology that will utterly displace hard disks, for example, but in the 5 years that it takes to go from the lab to the factory, hard disks become ten times as dense and drop to a tenth the old price. In the end, the new technology is obsoleted by the new economics of the old technology even before it gets started.
With better conductors (copper) and finer etching via something like this, CPU technology is likely to continue to follow the same lines for a long time still.
Just something to consider when talk of optical processors or some new molecular switching technology hits the news again.
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Forget the applications they are currently anticipating - the fundamental physics here is the exciting thing - very wierd!
.cx domain ?
BTW, where/what's the
Is this the return of perfocards? :P
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For cheaper Fabing of IC's, but this will have to move fast to compete in the flat screen market. Theirs all ready Electronic Ink. making paper thin displays, although they may not do video but its a start. Also thier is a companie making a phophorus flat screen display where their is an electron gun for every pixel, and they have OEM demos out.
Unless this is cheaper and makes it to the market in time, it will not survive. As for Cheaper Fab's this will help the processor market a lot.
-magister-
I read it somewhere, a consumer (coud be you and me, could be heavy industrial equipment buyer) will change to new technology once the new one is proven 1000 times more cost effective.
(yeah yeah don't ask, what that number means, i forget, but the point is, old habit die hard, and novelty that is only slightly better doesn't cut it. It has to be extremely better).
All it was the power companies runing there Y2K tests. The tests showed that many power plants will go powerless when the year 2000 comes around. Maybe?
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What he's talking about is an upgrade that *breaks compatibility*, which does indeed require several orders of magnitude perceived benefit for consumers to make the switch.
I don't see that this argument applies to monitors. It does apply to monitor *interfaces* (VGA vs. digital) because a move to digital interfaces would be a step in the right direction, but it would break compatibility with the installed base of 300,000,000+ VGA adapters.
I don't really care much about it's application, it's just cool. Of course it is good for business, brighter cheaper LCD's would make me plenty happy, or an LCD that doesnt rob the life out of poor laptop batteries. I see people bitching about GPL science and all the like, but I'm sorry, everything shouldn't be open source. Some people like to share their research with lots of people, and some like to work on it privately, it's their choice. Geez, damn fanatics. All fanatics must die.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.