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. "

Comments

this is an argument for opensource science

[unAnonymous unCoward]

> 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.

Re:this is an argument for opensource science

[Signal 11]

This is doubtless true. Even Einstein didn't create the atomic theory behind nuclear energy without help (manhattan project).

As a side note.. if it's true that electrons on the surface of the metal is what cause this.. wouldn't that mean that electromagnetic fields would have a major effect on it - especially high frequency transmissions?



--

Re:this is an argument for opensource science

[gavinhall]

Posted by 2B||!2B:

Agreed. This was indicative of three main factors in why we had to put up with mediocre technology for ten years:

1) The researcher might be greedy (possible; he's been collaborating in a managerial position with NEC since the 80's) or a show-off (common in researchers, especially when, like him, they're looking for a full professorship (which he has since obtained in France)).

2) NEC has way too restrictive nondisclosure requirements. This is almost guaranteed. He's been working with them for over ten years, and has a managerial position. My boss did a internship once with them a few years ago, and they all but prohibited from ever touching a computer again in his NDA. Like the rest, they're _very_ greedy (hiding desperately needed technology for _10_ years!?), immoral in achieving their goals.

3) Research universities set unrealistic requirements on their professors for both jaw-dropping publications and for high-income research projects. I have seen this far too many times. All they ever think in the administration of any research university is "show me the money!". One of the greatest enemies of invention and application of new technology has long been college administrators. If they don't see serious corporate sponsorship coming out of a project, the project can get canned. Wonderful professors are frequently denied tenure because they're too busy actually teaching students (which, I had mistakenly assumed, is part of their job) or advancing science in things that matter (instead of worthless projects which are sexy to corporations who want a tax write-off for their large donations). I saw it happen to a friend of mine. He was a great teacher, plus his research was in real-life applications involving medical imaging. But, no, it wasn't a quick buck, it was _usefull_ research. And, no, he didn't have a ton of publications (though he, at a young age, was already one of the main references in graphics textbooks), because he was busier inventing and applying than writing. Now that they didn't let him do useful research, he's off at a government lab figuring out better ways to blow up the planet instead of curing its inhabitants.

Once something is done, schools are sometimes overly restrictive on its use in commercial products (or clueless on how to get it there), and many wonderful new technologies rot away on paper. Linux would surely be far better than it is now if universities would give us the technologies they have already invented and will probably never get another dime out of. For that matter, I bet AIDS and cancer would have been cured by now if research universities weren't so overly protective of their results.

And in this particular instance, we've been putting up with some pretty pathetic LCD screens for a decade because of the petty concerns of some a**holes in universities and corporations.

Re:this is an argument for opensource science

[Repton]

When I read the article, I had similar thoughts -- and also one other: Extend the GPL to science?

Eg, "you may use this discovery, and you may make money out of it, but any discoveries you make as a consequence of working on it must be made available under the same terms".

Would that work / could it be made legally binding/etc?

--
Repton.

Keeping up with Moore's Law.... is this the road?

[Chris Worth]

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.

This could extend current CPU making processes.

[Sun Tzu]

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.