Sadly, I'd have to agree with the parent post. Corporate research in the U.S. is in serious decline with way too much focus on the next quarter's bottom line. Most companies are really only focused on short-term development and doing little if any mid- to long- term research. Ten years ago, when I started my current job (with a top US semiconductor company), there were many projects with a five-to-ten year time horizon and significant links to Universities, government labs, and industry-funded research consortia (eg. Sematech, IMEC, etc...). Today, if a project can't be implemented into a product within two years, it will not be pursued. This trend is even worse at other semi companies (eg. TI and NXP have abandoned process development and will just use whatever TSMC comes up with, others have hopped on the IBM bandwagon, other companies are abandoning sematech, and pulling out of SRC, etc...).
Other industries may be better, especially in the health-sciences field, where the vast majority of government funding has gone for the last decade or two. However, even these fields are in danger as evidenced by the huge losses incurred recently by multiple pharmaceutical companies.
Agreed! An encyclopedia is not a "primary source" of information, especially in scientific disciplines. While an encyclopedia may be fine for a high school paper, half the point of a University is to learn to use the Library to do serious research and delve deeper than what could be found in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are useful to give a basic introduction to a topic and point someone towards useful references, but at the College, students should be digging deeper than an encyclopedia.
No! All of those are completely real... Just don't ask me how Margaret Thatcher makes it to all of those Wax Museums every day (and doesn't seem to get older).
... Of course now I'm a little creeped out about the Ronald Reagan exhibit.
While I don't know how MRAM's radiation hardness would compare to core memory, Honeywell has in fact licensed Freescales MRAM technology for use in radiation-sensitive applications.
While you are correct that manufacturing the metal multilayer structures is a significant challenge, the use of such structures is also an advantage. Since the MRAM structures are all in the metal layers and use lower-temperature processes, they are actually easier to integrate with existing semiconductor fabrication technologies for embedded applications.
Thus, it is actually easier to integrate MRAM into a microcontroller or power device than it would be to integrate FLASH or even SRAM.
Not to rain too heavily on your parade, but your edit is a "parody" and IS legal under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law, despite this recent court ruling, so long as it is labeled as being modified.
I don't think you can blame the NEA or even Teachers for the decline in U.S. education. I trace the decline in S&E to the decline in corporal punishment in the public schools. Let's face it, any other form of punishment requires more time and energy. Classrooms are much less disciplined today than they were in the 50's and 60's, so there is less time for learning, hence a decline in education.
I'm not saying that corporal punishment should be abused, but sometimes it is the only effective form of punishment and lack of it as an option greatly undermines the overall effectiveness of discipline in schools. Spare the rod and spoil the child, I say...
... if you want land, China has a lot more than we do!
???
China has only slightly more land than the US (9,326,410 sq.km. compared to 9,161,923 sq.km.), but more than 4 times the population (1.3 B vs. 0.3 B). Thus on a per capita basis, China has considerably less land than the U.S. (approximately 1/4). Furthermore, if you include maritime territory, the U.S. has more territory than China....Maybe you were thinking of Russia?
Re:Seems a bit pricey compared to other small WISP
on
Wheat Field Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
A lot of the farms in this area use Center-Pivot Irrigation systems. The nice part about these systems is that they are completely automated. However, they do break down fairly frequently (Flat tires are one of the more common failure modes). Thus, they require frequent monitoring. By connecting them to the internet, you could monitor them remotely, saving a lot of labor. Note that monitoring a single system isn't a big deal, but if you are a large operation with thousands of acres and hundreds of pivots or if your farm includes disparate parcels of land many miles apart, it's a different story.
Furthermore, remember that in irrigated farming, water is money. It's feasible that in the not too distant future, the irrigation equipment could actually download the weather forecast and adjust the watering schedule accordingly, so as to maximize the water usage efficiency.
I'm not sure whether Ta2O5 would be thermodynamically stable in contact with GaAs. However, it probably wouldn't be an issue due to the much lower process temperatures used for GaAs. However, even if thermal stability is not a problem, there is no guarantee that the Ta2O5/GaAs interface would be of sufficiently high quality. Defects at this interface cause fermi-level pinning, degrading device performance. There is some promising work for Ga2O/GaAS reported here that might be of interest to you.
Al isn't really practical as a gate material, since the melting point is too low and it wouldn't survive the high-temperature anneals necessary to activate the dopants in the underlying silicon. Instead the gate material will be some kind of refractory metal, like Ti or TiN or something similar.
Also, another reason for using polysilicon is that you can shift its workfunction by changing the doping from p-type to n-type. Thus, polysilicon can be used for both nmos and pmos transistors.
Replacing poly with a metal will require either using two metals with different workfunctions, one for nmos and the other for pmos, or using a "mid-gap" metal with an intermediate workfunction and doing some other tricks to compensate for the differences in threshold voltages of nmos and pmos devices. One of the key challenges of replacing poly with metals is finding metals with the correct workfunctions.
and the reason it has to be in contact with Si is.... ?
remember they're talking about replacing silicon altogether. a Ta2O5/Ni (or whatever) transistor with copper over Al interconnects and no silicon whatsoever would work fine.
They are not replacing all of the silicon with metal only the polysilicon gate. The underlying material must still be a semiconductor and in this case Si. The High-K dielectric layer sits between the gate and the underlying Si. Thus, replacing polysilicon in the gate with metal solves the problem of reaction at the top interface, but the high-k material is still in contact with silicon at the bottom interface.
I dont see any mention of the type of metal that would be most suitable. I'm sure all metals are n't created equal.
Actually, two types of metal are probably needed. One for nmos transistors and another for pmos transistors. Nmos and pmos transistors have different threshold voltages (the voltage at which the device turns on), but ideally you would like both types of transistors to switch at the same voltage. The threshold voltage of a device can be shifted by modifying the "workfunction" of the gate metal. The workfunction is the energy required to remove an electron from the metal surface.
One reason polysilicon gates are used in conventional CMOS is that the workfunction of polysilicon can be modified by changing the level of doping and the type of dopant material (usually B, P or As). Thus, polysilicon gates can be used for both nmos and pmos transistors and by varying the doping, both types of devices can have the same threshold voltage.
Shifting the workfunctions of metals, using dopants is not so straightforward. As a result it will probably be necessary to use two different metals having different workfunctions for nmos and pmos transistors. Further complicating matters is the fact that the gate metal can interact with the dielectric material, modifying the effective workfunction and thus the threshold voltage. So, while the isolated metal may have the necessary workfunction, the workfunction may shift when the metal is part of a device. Thus, a lot of testing and experimentation is needed to find a metal that has the proper workfunction after it has been put into a device.
Tantalum oxide is a good high-k dielectric, but it is not thermodynamically stable in contact with Si. As a result, Ta2O5 reacts with Si during the high temperature (>900 C) anneals necessary to activate the Si dopants. These unfavorable reactions ruin the devices and as a result Ta2O5 has largely been abandoned as a potential dielectric in Si transistors. Ta2O5 is used for capacitors in DRAM memory devices.
The dielectric layer mentioned in some studies is Hafnium dioxide (HfO2). This is an insulator, not a conductor. HfO2, is good because it is a high-k material and it is thermodynamically stable in contact with Si.
One reason for replacing polysilicon with a metal is that the HfO2 layer is not compatible with the polysilicon deposition process. Defects form in the HfO2 layer during the polysilicon deposition step. Another reason for replacing poly with a metal is to avoid poly depletion effects. Essentially, poly still behaves as a semiconductor, so a charge depletion layer forms near the poly/dielectric interface. This depletion layer acts as an insulator and has the same effect as increasing the thickness of the dielectric layer (which is what we're trying to reduce). The increased thickness reduces the capacitance, which needs to be large for the transistor to function properly. Unlike semiconductors, metals do not form a depletion layer.
The INEEL nuclear labs in Idaho - Home of the world's first nuclear power generation facility.
Tour of the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington. Home of the worlds first large-scale nuclear reactor for production of weapons grade plutonium. Nuclear reactors, Plutonium Generation plants, lots of nuclear waste,... a must see!
Grand Coulee Dam, The largest hydroelectric dam in North America and one of the largest in the world.
If you're in the area you might also want to visit one of the various lower Dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, which feature huge locks for transporting boats and barges above the dams.
If your into Natural Disasters and biological recovery, visit Mount St. Helens, the volcano that erupted in 1980.
I was thinking this too, but as I thought more about it, I realized it might not free up as much spectra as I at first thought. The problem is that TV stations in neighboring broadcast zones must be kept on separate channels to avoid interference in the interlying regions. Thus, even with consolidation about half of the channels in any area must be left vacant.
I live near Phoenix, AZ and am able to receive about 20 channels. This would imply that in my area another ~20 channels would need to remain open for adjacent communities for a total of 40 channels. I could be wrong, but I don't believe the UHF OTA spectrum goes above 70, so this would only free ~30 channels. Still significant, but nowhere near what I at first thought.
this is THE most poorly written article i've actually tried to read on the web in years.
I take it you don't read many articles on the web...:D
Anyway I agree the article is not really well written and the English is horrible, but it does give a nice, though very simplified, overview of some of the key problems of semiconductor processing and what various companies are doing to overcome them.
Being completely technically accurate for such an article is quite difficult. For example, when discussing high-k dielectrics, the article states that, "This material should be 10,000 more effective in preventing electron leakage from the channel to the gate than SiO2. If you have been reading attentively, you should realize the importance of this: the thickness of the nonconductive layer may now be reduced to tenths of nanometer keeping an acceptable gate leakage value."
The above contains many errors. For example the quantum mechanical tunneling through a layer (any material) a few tenths of a nanometer thick is enormous, so it can't be true that the high-k layer is thinner than SiO2. The reality is that high-k means the material has a higher dielectric constant than SiO2. This means that electric fields are transmitted more readily through the high-k material and so a thick high-k film exhibits the same electrical behavior as a much thinner SiO2 film.
Thus, the reality is that replacing SiO2 with a high-k material allows the use of a much thicker film, which behaves electrically as if it were thinner than the corresponding SiO2 film. Quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons through the gate dielectric drops exponentially with increasing thickness, so the leakage current is reduced dramatically through the use of the thicker film.
Carbon nanotubes can be mass produced. The problem is that modern production techniques are not selective, so the result is a jumble of nanotubes, some of which possess the desired electrical properties and many of which do not. The challenge then becomes removing the undesirable nanotubes and then organizing the remaining nanotubes into electrical circuits. Researchers are making great strides in removing the undesired nanotubes, but organizing those that remain is much more difficult.
On a small scale this can be done using AFM tips and I believe this is how IBM and others have demonstrated working nanotube-based devices. However, such a technique is impractical for large-scale production, where you need to interconnect millions of devices and significant work still remains to reach this goal.
Sure breathing nano-particles is bad. This has been known for a long time. What the article seems to ignore is that the greatest anthropogenic producer of nano-particles in most industrialized societies is the automobile. In its current state nanotech health effects are insignificant compared to the degradation in public health due to the particulate polution from automobiles and this is not likely to change any time soon. If we are to abondon nanotech, we should certainly abandon the internal combustion engine first of all!
It may be true that some nano-tech workers are exposed to extraordinarily high levels of nano-particles and this is a valid concern, but not a general public health concern. Development of adequate breathing aparatus (or particulate abatement systems) for such workers is certainly within the reach of current technology, so providing safety to a small group of nanotech workers should be a relatively trivial task and certainly not something requiring an extensive delay of nanotech development.
Actually, it was a conservative estimate based on a review from Tom's Hardware indicating power consumption levels around 42 W for a DELL laptop. I will admit that 50W is probably on the high side. With appropriate power management, power requirements in the 30W range are probably achievable, perhaps even lower for PPC architectures like the powerbooks. However, even a 10W battery would still likely weigh over 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs), which is too much.
Unfortunately, such a battery would be too big for a laptop (unless you can significantly reduce the power requirements). Based on Cornell's press release, they plan to use Nickel-63 with a half-life of about a 100 years. So how much Nickel-63 will they need?
Looking at a handy dandy table of the isotopes gives a half-life of 92 years and a decay energy of 67 keV per disintegration for Nickel-63. Also, it has an atomic mass of 63 g/mol. 1 Joule equals 6.24E+15 keV, so to produce 1 Joule of energy you would need:
One Watt is a J/s, so to produce a Watt of power you would need 9.32E+13 disintegrations per second. So, how much Nickel-63 is needed to get this many disintegrations per second?
(Note 2903299200s = 92 years). Dividing by Avogadros Number and multyplying by the atomic mass gives a mass requirement of 40.8g for each Watt. A typical laptop computer consumes ~50 Watts giving a required mass of ~2 kg.
While a bit high, this probably isn't too bad, especially since future technologies can probably lower the power requirement to 10-20 Watts. However, the above calculations assume 100% efficiency. I have no idea what the actual efficiencies are, but they are likely to be less than 50% since the proposed battery uses a mechanical process to produce the electricity. This alone would double the mass. In addition this is only the mass of the nickel. The other components and any shielding are likely to double or triple the mass, so the overall battery would likely weigh 8-12 kg (18-26 lbs). Much too heavy for a laptop.
This is not to say there aren't many very low-power applications for which such a battery would be ideal, but a laptop isn't one of them unless the power requirement can be dropped below about 10W.
Wow! You actually find loading 200mm wafers to be "awkward"?!?
If you're talking about the SVG Thermco furnace, yes it is quite awkward. The problem is that you're wearing several layers of gloves and trying to load the thing at an awkward angle. TEL furnaces really weren't so bad.
Anyhow, I'm not saying humans can't do it with 300mm wafers, but at that size the odds of someone "plonking" down a cassette becomes quite large. While this usually won't break the wafers, it can sure stirr up lot's of yield destroying particles. At this point the benefits of automated wafer movement greatly outweigh the costs.
Also, although IBM is leading in automation implementation right now slmost all of the other 300mm fabs worldwide are putting in similar systems.
Tool to tool transfer is pretty much a necessity for 300mm wafers. Remember the things are about the size of dinner plates. Having clumsy humans carting around crates of 25, when each is worth tens of thousands of dollars is just asking for trouble. I've loaded cassettes of 200mm wafers into diffusion furnaces and that is awkward enough, I can't imagine trying to do the same with 300mm wafers.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, they won't really get all of the kinks worked out of this thing until December 2012 (see http://www.december212012.com/).
Sadly, I'd have to agree with the parent post. Corporate research in the U.S. is in serious decline with way too much focus on the next quarter's bottom line. Most companies are really only focused on short-term development and doing little if any mid- to long- term research. Ten years ago, when I started my current job (with a top US semiconductor company), there were many projects with a five-to-ten year time horizon and significant links to Universities, government labs, and industry-funded research consortia (eg. Sematech, IMEC, etc...). Today, if a project can't be implemented into a product within two years, it will not be pursued. This trend is even worse at other semi companies (eg. TI and NXP have abandoned process development and will just use whatever TSMC comes up with, others have hopped on the IBM bandwagon, other companies are abandoning sematech, and pulling out of SRC, etc...).
Other industries may be better, especially in the health-sciences field, where the vast majority of government funding has gone for the last decade or two. However, even these fields are in danger as evidenced by the huge losses incurred recently by multiple pharmaceutical companies.
Agreed! An encyclopedia is not a "primary source" of information, especially in scientific disciplines. While an encyclopedia may be fine for a high school paper, half the point of a University is to learn to use the Library to do serious research and delve deeper than what could be found in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are useful to give a basic introduction to a topic and point someone towards useful references, but at the College, students should be digging deeper than an encyclopedia.
While I don't know how MRAM's radiation hardness would compare to core memory, Honeywell has in fact licensed Freescales MRAM technology for use in radiation-sensitive applications.
While you are correct that manufacturing the metal multilayer structures is a significant challenge, the use of such structures is also an advantage. Since the MRAM structures are all in the metal layers and use lower-temperature processes, they are actually easier to integrate with existing semiconductor fabrication technologies for embedded applications.
Thus, it is actually easier to integrate MRAM into a microcontroller or power device than it would be to integrate FLASH or even SRAM.
Not to rain too heavily on your parade, but your edit is a "parody" and IS legal under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law, despite this recent court ruling, so long as it is labeled as being modified.
I don't think you can blame the NEA or even Teachers for the decline in U.S. education. I trace the decline in S&E to the decline in corporal punishment in the public schools. Let's face it, any other form of punishment requires more time and energy. Classrooms are much less disciplined today than they were in the 50's and 60's, so there is less time for learning, hence a decline in education.
I'm not saying that corporal punishment should be abused, but sometimes it is the only effective form of punishment and lack of it as an option greatly undermines the overall effectiveness of discipline in schools. Spare the rod and spoil the child, I say...
... if you want land, China has a lot more than we do!
...Maybe you were thinking of Russia?
???
China has only slightly more land than the US (9,326,410 sq.km. compared to 9,161,923 sq.km.), but more than 4 times the population (1.3 B vs. 0.3 B). Thus on a per capita basis, China has considerably less land than the U.S. (approximately 1/4). Furthermore, if you include maritime territory, the U.S. has more territory than China.
Furthermore, remember that in irrigated farming, water is money. It's feasible that in the not too distant future, the irrigation equipment could actually download the weather forecast and adjust the watering schedule accordingly, so as to maximize the water usage efficiency.
I'm not sure whether Ta2O5 would be thermodynamically stable in contact with GaAs. However, it probably wouldn't be an issue due to the much lower process temperatures used for GaAs. However, even if thermal stability is not a problem, there is no guarantee that the Ta2O5/GaAs interface would be of sufficiently high quality. Defects at this interface cause fermi-level pinning, degrading device performance. There is some promising work for Ga2O/GaAS reported here that might be of interest to you.
Al isn't really practical as a gate material, since the melting point is too low and it wouldn't survive the high-temperature anneals necessary to activate the dopants in the underlying silicon. Instead the gate material will be some kind of refractory metal, like Ti or TiN or something similar.
Also, another reason for using polysilicon is that you can shift its workfunction by changing the doping from p-type to n-type. Thus, polysilicon can be used for both nmos and pmos transistors.
Replacing poly with a metal will require either using two metals with different workfunctions, one for nmos and the other for pmos, or using a "mid-gap" metal with an intermediate workfunction and doing some other tricks to compensate for the differences in threshold voltages of nmos and pmos devices. One of the key challenges of replacing poly with metals is finding metals with the correct workfunctions.
and the reason it has to be in contact with Si is .... ?
remember they're talking about replacing silicon altogether. a Ta2O5/Ni (or whatever) transistor with copper over Al interconnects and no silicon whatsoever would work fine.
They are not replacing all of the silicon with metal only the polysilicon gate. The underlying material must still be a semiconductor and in this case Si. The High-K dielectric layer sits between the gate and the underlying Si. Thus, replacing polysilicon in the gate with metal solves the problem of reaction at the top interface, but the high-k material is still in contact with silicon at the bottom interface.
I dont see any mention of the type of metal that would be most suitable. I'm sure all metals are n't created equal.
Actually, two types of metal are probably needed. One for nmos transistors and another for pmos transistors. Nmos and pmos transistors have different threshold voltages (the voltage at which the device turns on), but ideally you would like both types of transistors to switch at the same voltage. The threshold voltage of a device can be shifted by modifying the "workfunction" of the gate metal. The workfunction is the energy required to remove an electron from the metal surface.
One reason polysilicon gates are used in conventional CMOS is that the workfunction of polysilicon can be modified by changing the level of doping and the type of dopant material (usually B, P or As). Thus, polysilicon gates can be used for both nmos and pmos transistors and by varying the doping, both types of devices can have the same threshold voltage.
Shifting the workfunctions of metals, using dopants is not so straightforward. As a result it will probably be necessary to use two different metals having different workfunctions for nmos and pmos transistors. Further complicating matters is the fact that the gate metal can interact with the dielectric material, modifying the effective workfunction and thus the threshold voltage. So, while the isolated metal may have the necessary workfunction, the workfunction may shift when the metal is part of a device. Thus, a lot of testing and experimentation is needed to find a metal that has the proper workfunction after it has been put into a device.
Tantalum oxide is a good high-k dielectric, but it is not thermodynamically stable in contact with Si. As a result, Ta2O5 reacts with Si during the high temperature (>900 C) anneals necessary to activate the Si dopants. These unfavorable reactions ruin the devices and as a result Ta2O5 has largely been abandoned as a potential dielectric in Si transistors. Ta2O5 is used for capacitors in DRAM memory devices.
The dielectric layer mentioned in some studies is Hafnium dioxide (HfO2). This is an insulator, not a conductor. HfO2, is good because it is a high-k material and it is thermodynamically stable in contact with Si.
One reason for replacing polysilicon with a metal is that the HfO2 layer is not compatible with the polysilicon deposition process. Defects form in the HfO2 layer during the polysilicon deposition step. Another reason for replacing poly with a metal is to avoid poly depletion effects. Essentially, poly still behaves as a semiconductor, so a charge depletion layer forms near the poly/dielectric interface. This depletion layer acts as an insulator and has the same effect as increasing the thickness of the dielectric layer (which is what we're trying to reduce). The increased thickness reduces the capacitance, which needs to be large for the transistor to function properly. Unlike semiconductors, metals do not form a depletion layer.
Any Geek tour of America should include the following sites:
The NSA National Cryptologic Musuem
The INEEL nuclear labs in Idaho - Home of the world's first nuclear power generation facility.
Tour of the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington. Home of the worlds first large-scale nuclear reactor for production of weapons grade plutonium. Nuclear reactors, Plutonium Generation plants, lots of nuclear waste,... a must see!
Grand Coulee Dam, The largest hydroelectric dam in North America and one of the largest in the world.
If you're in the area you might also want to visit one of the various lower Dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, which feature huge locks for transporting boats and barges above the dams.
If your into Natural Disasters and biological recovery, visit Mount St. Helens, the volcano that erupted in 1980.
I was thinking this too, but as I thought more about it, I realized it might not free up as much spectra as I at first thought. The problem is that TV stations in neighboring broadcast zones must be kept on separate channels to avoid interference in the interlying regions. Thus, even with consolidation about half of the channels in any area must be left vacant.
I live near Phoenix, AZ and am able to receive about 20 channels. This would imply that in my area another ~20 channels would need to remain open for adjacent communities for a total of 40 channels. I could be wrong, but I don't believe the UHF OTA spectrum goes above 70, so this would only free ~30 channels. Still significant, but nowhere near what I at first thought.
this is THE most poorly written article i've actually tried to read on the web in years.
:D
I take it you don't read many articles on the web...
Anyway I agree the article is not really well written and the English is horrible, but it does give a nice, though very simplified, overview of some of the key problems of semiconductor processing and what various companies are doing to overcome them.
Being completely technically accurate for such an article is quite difficult. For example, when discussing high-k dielectrics, the article states that, "This material should be 10,000 more effective in preventing electron leakage from the channel to the gate than SiO2. If you have been reading attentively, you should realize the importance of this: the thickness of the nonconductive layer may now be reduced to tenths of nanometer keeping an acceptable gate leakage value."
The above contains many errors. For example the quantum mechanical tunneling through a layer (any material) a few tenths of a nanometer thick is enormous, so it can't be true that the high-k layer is thinner than SiO2. The reality is that high-k means the material has a higher dielectric constant than SiO2. This means that electric fields are transmitted more readily through the high-k material and so a thick high-k film exhibits the same electrical behavior as a much thinner SiO2 film.
Thus, the reality is that replacing SiO2 with a high-k material allows the use of a much thicker film, which behaves electrically as if it were thinner than the corresponding SiO2 film. Quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons through the gate dielectric drops exponentially with increasing thickness, so the leakage current is reduced dramatically through the use of the thicker film.
Carbon nanotubes can be mass produced. The problem is that modern production techniques are not selective, so the result is a jumble of nanotubes, some of which possess the desired electrical properties and many of which do not. The challenge then becomes removing the undesirable nanotubes and then organizing the remaining nanotubes into electrical circuits. Researchers are making great strides in removing the undesired nanotubes, but organizing those that remain is much more difficult.
On a small scale this can be done using AFM tips and I believe this is how IBM and others have demonstrated working nanotube-based devices. However, such a technique is impractical for large-scale production, where you need to interconnect millions of devices and significant work still remains to reach this goal.
Sure breathing nano-particles is bad. This has been known for a long time. What the article seems to ignore is that the greatest anthropogenic producer of nano-particles in most industrialized societies is the automobile. In its current state nanotech health effects are insignificant compared to the degradation in public health due to the particulate polution from automobiles and this is not likely to change any time soon. If we are to abondon nanotech, we should certainly abandon the internal combustion engine first of all!
It may be true that some nano-tech workers are exposed to extraordinarily high levels of nano-particles and this is a valid concern, but not a general public health concern. Development of adequate breathing aparatus (or particulate abatement systems) for such workers is certainly within the reach of current technology, so providing safety to a small group of nanotech workers should be a relatively trivial task and certainly not something requiring an extensive delay of nanotech development.
Actually, it was a conservative estimate based on a review from Tom's Hardware indicating power consumption levels around 42 W for a DELL laptop. I will admit that 50W is probably on the high side. With appropriate power management, power requirements in the 30W range are probably achievable, perhaps even lower for PPC architectures like the powerbooks. However, even a 10W battery would still likely weigh over 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs), which is too much.
Unfortunately, such a battery would be too big for a laptop (unless you can significantly reduce the power requirements). Based on Cornell's press release, they plan to use Nickel-63 with a half-life of about a 100 years. So how much Nickel-63 will they need?
Looking at a handy dandy table of the isotopes gives a half-life of 92 years and a decay energy of 67 keV per disintegration for Nickel-63. Also, it has an atomic mass of 63 g/mol. 1 Joule equals 6.24E+15 keV, so to produce 1 Joule of energy you would need:
6.24E+15 kEV/67 keV/disintegration = 9.32E+13 disintegrations
One Watt is a J/s, so to produce a Watt of power you would need 9.32E+13 disintegrations per second. So, how much Nickel-63 is needed to get this many disintegrations per second?
9.32E+13 / (1-exp(1/2903299200*ln(2)) = 3.90E+23 atoms
(Note 2903299200s = 92 years). Dividing by Avogadros Number and multyplying by the atomic mass gives a mass requirement of 40.8g for each Watt. A typical laptop computer consumes ~50 Watts giving a required mass of ~2 kg.
While a bit high, this probably isn't too bad, especially since future technologies can probably lower the power requirement to 10-20 Watts. However, the above calculations assume 100% efficiency. I have no idea what the actual efficiencies are, but they are likely to be less than 50% since the proposed battery uses a mechanical process to produce the electricity. This alone would double the mass. In addition this is only the mass of the nickel. The other components and any shielding are likely to double or triple the mass, so the overall battery would likely weigh 8-12 kg (18-26 lbs). Much too heavy for a laptop.
This is not to say there aren't many very low-power applications for which such a battery would be ideal, but a laptop isn't one of them unless the power requirement can be dropped below about 10W.
Wow! You actually find loading 200mm wafers to be "awkward"?!?
If you're talking about the SVG Thermco furnace, yes it is quite awkward. The problem is that you're wearing several layers of gloves and trying to load the thing at an awkward angle. TEL furnaces really weren't so bad.
Anyhow, I'm not saying humans can't do it with 300mm wafers, but at that size the odds of someone "plonking" down a cassette becomes quite large. While this usually won't break the wafers, it can sure stirr up lot's of yield destroying particles. At this point the benefits of automated wafer movement greatly outweigh the costs.
Also, although IBM is leading in automation implementation right now slmost all of the other 300mm fabs worldwide are putting in similar systems.
Tool to tool transfer is pretty much a necessity for 300mm wafers. Remember the things are about the size of dinner plates. Having clumsy humans carting around crates of 25, when each is worth tens of thousands of dollars is just asking for trouble. I've loaded cassettes of 200mm wafers into diffusion furnaces and that is awkward enough, I can't imagine trying to do the same with 300mm wafers.