This is true: economic efficiency (including all externalities) is the number that matters most. But at 0.55% energy efficiency in the conversion from solar to H2O2, dropped to 0.28% after H2O2 to electricity, it will need to be ridiculously cheap per for its economic efficiency to make up the huge gap in energy efficiency compared to traditional PV solar with battery storage.
I don't follow your logic. Most new companies end up failing, this is not news. Do you think that green energy companies are failing at a higher percentage than other types of companies? Maybe they are, or maybe green energy companies failing just gets more press, causing you to become biased.
Of course none of this is suggestive of insurance fraud.
Guaranteeing a $1.6 Billion loan actually costs the taxpayer somewhere between zero and $1.6 Billion, since the govt will assume the debt if the original debtor defaults.
I'm generally in favor of the Federal Government stimulating new and exploratory commercial energy developments with loan guarantees, but it is NOT FREE. This is absolutely a risky and expensive project which would make it more difficult to obtain private investment. But it could be quite valuable to find out if solar thermal plants are really commercially viable, so the govt stepped in to assume a large part of the financial risk.
If the IRS didn't tax high dollar gifts then savvy people would legally avoid taxes by structuring income as gifts. In lieu of $40k income or bonus, an employer gives employee a $40k car and reduces their taxable income by $40k. Instead of $200/mo going to groceries, here's a $200 grocery store gift card. Etc, etc.
And this airline miles gift is effectively income in the same way a cash prize from a bug bounty program is income.
Now it may well be inconvenient to receive high-dollar gifts that are also taxable so you have to pay money to accept the gift... but going the other way and not taxing gifts has worse problems.
I think that Lithium is not, strictly speaking, toxic, so it's not really a pollution concern. But it is a pretty dangerous material that is highly reactive and can catch fire, and it is corrosive so you can't handle it directly or breath in its dust.
Why does every parking lot need every space equipped with a charger? I think that the market will provide ample incentive for build-out of charging infrastructure in proportion to demand. Smart grid technology for load balancing and to set charging speed or start time based on how quickly you need your car charged (not fast at all if we're talking overnight) will add value by saving EV owners on their electricity bill, so consumers, building owners, or utility companies will pay money for such technology.
A restaurant next to a highway might fill their parking lot with subsidized chargers to bring in more business. Businesses offering valet parking might add in a battery top-off (granted the average consumer doesn't use valet parking that often).
Chargers won't all be subsidized by a business though, so in many cases if you park in a charging spot you'll have to pay, either through a transponder in your car (like a highway toll transponder), NFC from your phone, or a credit card. The latter two payment options for charging stations already exist. This will naturally lead people to park in charging spots when they want to top off, and park in noncharging spots when they don't need it, thus obviating the need for every space to have a charger.
Apartment building owners will be have a monetary incentive to provide some kind of charging capability to renters, even if they bill the tenants for it... yes they'll have to run wiring but wiring isn't hard to run and it lasts for a really long time. They may do something like fuse the charging outlets to a lower current (and require renters to set the charge rate to match) so that the feed from the utility isn't excessive. There will be a strong value added by smart grid technology here to provide load balancing (you might pay a small premium for an immediate charge) so the electrical feed from the power line wouldn't be excessive because most people will select the slow charge option when they get home.
What we can say for sure right now is that no uniform standard is being applied to these new consumer gasoline filling services. Some companies have no certification for driver and for all we know is a fly by night operation that will evaporate in bankruptcy court if they ever cause significant damage. Some have a Hazmat certification of some kind:
Purple customers can open the company’s app and get gas within an hour, and their drivers are regular people with no special certification. Filld operates around the clock but asks customers to schedule a delivery through their app at least a few hours in advance. They employ commercial drivers who receive Hazmat certification.
Operating in a regulatory vacuum, or possibly in violation of regulation, can lead to problems. It's all fun and games until somebody starts a fire that causes property damage and/or loss of life, or contaminates water or damages property with a gas spill.
In what way is it more than an accusation? Yes, there is some evidence against him. And at some point he may be charged and convicted of a crime. But unless and until this person is charged and convicted, they have merely been accused of committing a crime.
That's the way our legal system works, and although the distinction is very fine, it is also critical. Otherwise you would have the situation where police can say that they have evidence against anybody and people then think that this person is automatically guilty and its okay to deprive them of rights or due process. But police make mistakes, either willfully or by accident, and the accused needs their day in court so that they have the ability to defend themselves.
I don't know about the particulars of this case - but I see a lot of people who think its okay to give police worrying amounts of power over the lives of people who have only been accused of a crime, as though suspicion of a crime is the same as conviction of a crime. Innocent until proven guilty.
Sure, just as soon as Texas charges all companies special one-off taxes to cover use of public infrastructure. (/sarcasm). If you think that the Texas tax code is broken then it's better to fix that then come up with complicated system of one-off special taxes based on armchair analyses.
It's kind of new, since this is an active circulator instead of the old passive ones.
Passive ones work great except they cannot be effectively miniaturized at the low frequencies used for current cell phone communication because size is proportional to the wavelength. Active circulators, based on non-reciprocal amplifiers and appropriate phase shifted combiner/divider networks, have existed for a long time. But there's been a lot of recent attention and work to bring them to a point where they're actually useful and efficient in communication applications.
The researcher acknowledges this, as quoted in the article:
Roßnagel openly admits that you won't find his four-stroke motor in any nano-sized robots anytime soon. While the engine itself is tiny, the machinery required to create the electromagnetic cone and suspend the two heating and cooling lasers takes up most of a room. But Roßnagel says that's no surprise. The engine was never meant to be a functioning part of a future machine, but to reveal new insights into the fundamental science of heat engines. Until now it wasn't clear that such a tiny engine would even work.
"I don't see a direct application for this engine. We do fundamental research and try to get a better understanding of thermodynamics of single particles," he says. Still, "this improved understanding can (and will, I'm convinced) lead to a next generation of experiments and to future devices which will be interesting for various applications," Roßnagel says. Maybe future robotic parts or single-atom refrigerators?
"[We now know] it is possible to realize a heat engine with a single atom," he says, "while maintaining the same working principles as for macroscopic engines."
2. The nakey microwave: The goddamn "millimeter wave" (high frequency microwave) xray machines are STILL NOT TESTED OR CERTIFIED as medically safe for xray exposure, only that they're safe from a heat damage perspective. It would be a federal crime to use one in a hospital, because there have been "no human tests or studies to prove scanner safety." And yet the TSA video playing at top volume above the line makes baseless claims that it's perfectly safe...
It is most certainly not a "millimeter wave xray machine", it is a millimeter wave imaging system. mm-wave and Xray technologies are totally different. If these devices could emit any xrays whatsoever (beyond black body radiation that all objects including you emit in infinitesimal amounts) then it would be a marvel of physics.
I'm not sure if detailed or long term studies of mm-wave radiation exposure have been completed but as it is completely non-ionizing there is little reason for concern. To put it into perspective, millimeter wave radiation has wavelengths of (you guessed it) about a millimeter, which is longer wavelengths than infrared, visible, UV and Xray light. Xray light has wavelengths 100,000 to 100,000,000x shorter wavelength than mm-wave. So you can see that the newer scanners are totally nonionizing.
The power levels involved in the new scanners are also quite miniscule, some of them are passive scanners that do not even emit mm-wave light and just measure the black body radiation that the body gives off (similar to a passive infrared camera), I'm not sure if passive scanners are the typical ones in airports or not. The active ones have very low power levels, simply because generating mm-wave radiation is rather difficult, the total power emitted would be less than a cell phone's worth.
True, they'll make a bit of money, especially with automation, but Apple's bread and butter is their huge profit margin on the iPhone. They make hundreds of dollars in profit per phone sold. Optimistically they'll get what - a few dollars worth of materials per recycled iPhone? This program will make them money mainly by driving new sales from positive publicity and giving people an environmentally friendly way to get rid of old phones (giving them incentive to make new purchases).
They've had decades to think about their responsibility towards the environment, and they haven't done jack squat about it up to now...
Better late than never. If they're better than their competition then they deserve some kudos. I doubt they'll make a great deal of money on recycling, the aluminum content will be a few cans worth... they will also recover some of the previous metals in the phone but there's precious little of those.
This is probably about a combination of good marketing to a public which is increasingly concerned about environmental impact as well as a portion or corporate environmental responsibility.
This was the guy's second offense jamming cell phones so I have no sympathy for him.
Penalties for operating illegal jammers should be high because of the impact to public safety and productivity, and because catching people operating jammers can be difficult so there needs to be a significant legal deterrent. It sounds like they took it easy on him for his first offense, but he didn't learn his lesson.
Unfortunately for him it sounds like he was being pretty obvious about it, so people took his picture with the jammer and reported it to the police who set up a sting operation (at the taxpayer's expense I might add) to arrest him and stop him.
Advancing the manufacturability of photonic technology is one of the goals of the the federally funded AIM Photonics program: http://www.aimphotonics.com/
RF GaN parts are certainly expensive - the GaN is grown on silicon carbide substrates which is incredibly expensive by itself, and high-speed RF stuff has much more demanding fabrication needs like very small T-shaped gates, better contact resistances, and so on.
GaN for power electronics is much cheaper, grown on 6 inch silicon substrates, and produced in much higher volumes. You can buy GaN parts from EPC on Digikey for a couple of dollars each, the other GaN power device manufacturers aren't selling publicly that I know of (just to partners, or nobody) but the cost per unit is not tremendous - a bit more than the same voltage and current rating silicon device but the GaN part can switch faster.
In fact from the paper (subscription probably required) the efficiency of this cell is about 2.3%, about 1/10 that of conventional silicon solar cells - so per unit area you're much better off with silicon. The watts per gram metric is more about them showing that very little material is needed for this cell which is a component towards achieving low cost.
The idea of this work is that organic cells in principle might be able to become cheaper per unit area than silicon solar cells (they will need to be much cheaper to account for the lower efficiency), and can be laminated onto curved surface and thus integrated more easily into products and more locations. Remains to be seen if that will happen and I'm not familiar enough with organic solar cells to say. And the reliability over time and environmental factors will need to be proven out.
Captain pedantic here. Electron holes [wikipedia.org] are not positive charges. This "hole" can be treated for convenience and practicality like a positively charged particle but that isn't technically the same thing.
True, but basically all semiconductor device engineers don't worry about this distinction. It's true but it doesn't matter.
This is similar to deciding whether to talk about the air or the water in two cases: A drop of water falling down in a container otherwise filled with air, or a bubble floating up in a container otherwise filled with water. In both cases you could look at either the movement of the air or the water. But in a container filled with air except for one drop of water it makes most sense to consider the drop of water rather than the air being displaced by the water. And for a bubble in a container otherwise filled with water it's much easier to keep track of the bubble rather than the water that is moving around the bubble.
Similarly in a semiconductor, in a valence band which is typically mostly filled with electrons we pay attention to the hole. And in a conduction band which is typically mostly empty of electrons we track the electrons . There is a real positive charge associated with a hole, coming from the uncompensated positive charge of an atomic nucleus. So is it a real particle? No. But when you actually look at it from a quantum perspective it is indistinguishable from one.
It's great work, very fascinating. The speed can probably improved up to a point but it could be a valuable technology based only on the energy per bit switching event, since this sets the energy limit for a given piece of computation.
A more important challenge is integrating this into a circuit and figuring out how to get electrical signals into optical switches based on the output of an optical switch. Transistors are great since they are electrical input and output, and with complementary logic they only draw a leakage current except while they are switching. But a voltage controlled optical/plasmonic switch is strictly speaking a transducer and so you need it paired with the inverse transducer element to create cascadable elements. And you need something supplying the light. And while there is a small switching element there is a (comparatively) huge waveguide feeding structure. So solving these issues and making sure that you don't get huge energy losses when you add the pieces surrounding the switch element, and figuring out how to combine large numbers of elements onto a small chip is the bigger challenge for bringing this into a computing application. Or maybe it can make a very energy efficient optical modulator, not used for computation.
I think that this trend partly a shift towards more mobile-oriented webpages and being targeted towards the large mobile devices like tablets and touch-screen laptops. I don't like the trend, but I think that's what is behind it.
Making a power amplifier to produce even one Watt of signal at 75 GHz is a million-dollar project. In short, it's not likely to be mainstream for at least ten years.
I work in mm-wave semiconductors and you might be pleased to find out that you're high by a factor of over 100 on price:)
Power amplifier chips have no need to be cryogenically cooled like the ultra-low noise temperature amplifiers used in radioastronomy receivers. A few years ago you could pay about $10k per watt of packaged, power combined Gallium Arsenide amplifiers up to ~30 watts of power, and I understand that today the price is less than half of that. GaAs is not exotic, fully fabricated 6" wafers for the cell phone market apparently cost under $1,000 each (and each chip just a few square mm of that wafer). If you need really high powers vacuum tubes are available at ~100 watt output power levels at a similar price per watt.
Those prices are of course really high, but that's in large part because the market is tiny and a lot of these amplifiers are basically one-offs built for a specific customer and application. With volume production prices will drop dramatically.
Gallium Nitride is capable of per-chip output powers several times larger than Gallium Arsenide, in fact Fujitsu just last month unveiled their own over 1 watt GaN amplifier operating at 86 GHz. Other companies have had 1-2 watt output chips a few years ago, and at higher efficiencies, but I think Fujitsu might be better positioned to commercialize their technology.
Similar thing happens with the construction in some public universities. Because of the complexity of bidding on projects, the documentation required before, during, and after project completion, heavy oversight from the Campus's own construction department (and a hefty overhead percentage charged to pay for said oversight), and inevitable change orders throughout the project because of committees wanting new things after already accepting a design and/or construction bid, I have heard that construction costs 2-3x as much at some universities as similar projects taken on by (competent) private companies.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true: economic efficiency (including all externalities) is the number that matters most. But at 0.55% energy efficiency in the conversion from solar to H2O2, dropped to 0.28% after H2O2 to electricity, it will need to be ridiculously cheap per for its economic efficiency to make up the huge gap in energy efficiency compared to traditional PV solar with battery storage.
I don't follow your logic. Most new companies end up failing, this is not news. Do you think that green energy companies are failing at a higher percentage than other types of companies? Maybe they are, or maybe green energy companies failing just gets more press, causing you to become biased.
Of course none of this is suggestive of insurance fraud.
Guaranteeing a $1.6 Billion loan actually costs the taxpayer somewhere between zero and $1.6 Billion, since the govt will assume the debt if the original debtor defaults.
I'm generally in favor of the Federal Government stimulating new and exploratory commercial energy developments with loan guarantees, but it is NOT FREE. This is absolutely a risky and expensive project which would make it more difficult to obtain private investment. But it could be quite valuable to find out if solar thermal plants are really commercially viable, so the govt stepped in to assume a large part of the financial risk.
The Dark Pixel Youtube channel put out a trailer for their vision of a Tetris live action movie, it's worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If the IRS didn't tax high dollar gifts then savvy people would legally avoid taxes by structuring income as gifts. In lieu of $40k income or bonus, an employer gives employee a $40k car and reduces their taxable income by $40k. Instead of $200/mo going to groceries, here's a $200 grocery store gift card. Etc, etc.
And this airline miles gift is effectively income in the same way a cash prize from a bug bounty program is income.
Now it may well be inconvenient to receive high-dollar gifts that are also taxable so you have to pay money to accept the gift... but going the other way and not taxing gifts has worse problems.
I think that Lithium is not, strictly speaking, toxic, so it's not really a pollution concern. But it is a pretty dangerous material that is highly reactive and can catch fire, and it is corrosive so you can't handle it directly or breath in its dust.
Why does every parking lot need every space equipped with a charger? I think that the market will provide ample incentive for build-out of charging infrastructure in proportion to demand. Smart grid technology for load balancing and to set charging speed or start time based on how quickly you need your car charged (not fast at all if we're talking overnight) will add value by saving EV owners on their electricity bill, so consumers, building owners, or utility companies will pay money for such technology.
A restaurant next to a highway might fill their parking lot with subsidized chargers to bring in more business. Businesses offering valet parking might add in a battery top-off (granted the average consumer doesn't use valet parking that often).
Chargers won't all be subsidized by a business though, so in many cases if you park in a charging spot you'll have to pay, either through a transponder in your car (like a highway toll transponder), NFC from your phone, or a credit card. The latter two payment options for charging stations already exist. This will naturally lead people to park in charging spots when they want to top off, and park in noncharging spots when they don't need it, thus obviating the need for every space to have a charger.
Apartment building owners will be have a monetary incentive to provide some kind of charging capability to renters, even if they bill the tenants for it... yes they'll have to run wiring but wiring isn't hard to run and it lasts for a really long time. They may do something like fuse the charging outlets to a lower current (and require renters to set the charge rate to match) so that the feed from the utility isn't excessive. There will be a strong value added by smart grid technology here to provide load balancing (you might pay a small premium for an immediate charge) so the electrical feed from the power line wouldn't be excessive because most people will select the slow charge option when they get home.
What we can say for sure right now is that no uniform standard is being applied to these new consumer gasoline filling services. Some companies have no certification for driver and for all we know is a fly by night operation that will evaporate in bankruptcy court if they ever cause significant damage. Some have a Hazmat certification of some kind:
Operating in a regulatory vacuum, or possibly in violation of regulation, can lead to problems. It's all fun and games until somebody starts a fire that causes property damage and/or loss of life, or contaminates water or damages property with a gas spill.
In what way is it more than an accusation? Yes, there is some evidence against him. And at some point he may be charged and convicted of a crime. But unless and until this person is charged and convicted, they have merely been accused of committing a crime.
That's the way our legal system works, and although the distinction is very fine, it is also critical. Otherwise you would have the situation where police can say that they have evidence against anybody and people then think that this person is automatically guilty and its okay to deprive them of rights or due process. But police make mistakes, either willfully or by accident, and the accused needs their day in court so that they have the ability to defend themselves.
I don't know about the particulars of this case - but I see a lot of people who think its okay to give police worrying amounts of power over the lives of people who have only been accused of a crime, as though suspicion of a crime is the same as conviction of a crime. Innocent until proven guilty.
Sure, just as soon as Texas charges all companies special one-off taxes to cover use of public infrastructure. (/sarcasm). If you think that the Texas tax code is broken then it's better to fix that then come up with complicated system of one-off special taxes based on armchair analyses.
It's kind of new, since this is an active circulator instead of the old passive ones.
Passive ones work great except they cannot be effectively miniaturized at the low frequencies used for current cell phone communication because size is proportional to the wavelength. Active circulators, based on non-reciprocal amplifiers and appropriate phase shifted combiner/divider networks, have existed for a long time. But there's been a lot of recent attention and work to bring them to a point where they're actually useful and efficient in communication applications.
The researcher acknowledges this, as quoted in the article:
It is most certainly not a "millimeter wave xray machine", it is a millimeter wave imaging system. mm-wave and Xray technologies are totally different. If these devices could emit any xrays whatsoever (beyond black body radiation that all objects including you emit in infinitesimal amounts) then it would be a marvel of physics.
I'm not sure if detailed or long term studies of mm-wave radiation exposure have been completed but as it is completely non-ionizing there is little reason for concern. To put it into perspective, millimeter wave radiation has wavelengths of (you guessed it) about a millimeter, which is longer wavelengths than infrared, visible, UV and Xray light. Xray light has wavelengths 100,000 to 100,000,000x shorter wavelength than mm-wave. So you can see that the newer scanners are totally nonionizing.
The power levels involved in the new scanners are also quite miniscule, some of them are passive scanners that do not even emit mm-wave light and just measure the black body radiation that the body gives off (similar to a passive infrared camera), I'm not sure if passive scanners are the typical ones in airports or not. The active ones have very low power levels, simply because generating mm-wave radiation is rather difficult, the total power emitted would be less than a cell phone's worth.
True, they'll make a bit of money, especially with automation, but Apple's bread and butter is their huge profit margin on the iPhone. They make hundreds of dollars in profit per phone sold. Optimistically they'll get what - a few dollars worth of materials per recycled iPhone? This program will make them money mainly by driving new sales from positive publicity and giving people an environmentally friendly way to get rid of old phones (giving them incentive to make new purchases).
Better late than never. If they're better than their competition then they deserve some kudos. I doubt they'll make a great deal of money on recycling, the aluminum content will be a few cans worth... they will also recover some of the previous metals in the phone but there's precious little of those.
This is probably about a combination of good marketing to a public which is increasingly concerned about environmental impact as well as a portion or corporate environmental responsibility.
This was the guy's second offense jamming cell phones so I have no sympathy for him.
Penalties for operating illegal jammers should be high because of the impact to public safety and productivity, and because catching people operating jammers can be difficult so there needs to be a significant legal deterrent. It sounds like they took it easy on him for his first offense, but he didn't learn his lesson.
Unfortunately for him it sounds like he was being pretty obvious about it, so people took his picture with the jammer and reported it to the police who set up a sting operation (at the taxpayer's expense I might add) to arrest him and stop him.
Advancing the manufacturability of photonic technology is one of the goals of the the federally funded AIM Photonics program: http://www.aimphotonics.com/
This is a great article in my opinion, definitely "News for Nerds" and definitely Slashdot-worthy.
RF GaN parts are certainly expensive - the GaN is grown on silicon carbide substrates which is incredibly expensive by itself, and high-speed RF stuff has much more demanding fabrication needs like very small T-shaped gates, better contact resistances, and so on.
GaN for power electronics is much cheaper, grown on 6 inch silicon substrates, and produced in much higher volumes. You can buy GaN parts from EPC on Digikey for a couple of dollars each, the other GaN power device manufacturers aren't selling publicly that I know of (just to partners, or nobody) but the cost per unit is not tremendous - a bit more than the same voltage and current rating silicon device but the GaN part can switch faster.
In fact from the paper (subscription probably required) the efficiency of this cell is about 2.3%, about 1/10 that of conventional silicon solar cells - so per unit area you're much better off with silicon. The watts per gram metric is more about them showing that very little material is needed for this cell which is a component towards achieving low cost.
The idea of this work is that organic cells in principle might be able to become cheaper per unit area than silicon solar cells (they will need to be much cheaper to account for the lower efficiency), and can be laminated onto curved surface and thus integrated more easily into products and more locations. Remains to be seen if that will happen and I'm not familiar enough with organic solar cells to say. And the reliability over time and environmental factors will need to be proven out.
True, but basically all semiconductor device engineers don't worry about this distinction. It's true but it doesn't matter.
This is similar to deciding whether to talk about the air or the water in two cases: A drop of water falling down in a container otherwise filled with air, or a bubble floating up in a container otherwise filled with water. In both cases you could look at either the movement of the air or the water. But in a container filled with air except for one drop of water it makes most sense to consider the drop of water rather than the air being displaced by the water. And for a bubble in a container otherwise filled with water it's much easier to keep track of the bubble rather than the water that is moving around the bubble.
Similarly in a semiconductor, in a valence band which is typically mostly filled with electrons we pay attention to the hole. And in a conduction band which is typically mostly empty of electrons we track the electrons . There is a real positive charge associated with a hole, coming from the uncompensated positive charge of an atomic nucleus. So is it a real particle? No. But when you actually look at it from a quantum perspective it is indistinguishable from one.
It's great work, very fascinating. The speed can probably improved up to a point but it could be a valuable technology based only on the energy per bit switching event, since this sets the energy limit for a given piece of computation.
A more important challenge is integrating this into a circuit and figuring out how to get electrical signals into optical switches based on the output of an optical switch. Transistors are great since they are electrical input and output, and with complementary logic they only draw a leakage current except while they are switching. But a voltage controlled optical/plasmonic switch is strictly speaking a transducer and so you need it paired with the inverse transducer element to create cascadable elements. And you need something supplying the light. And while there is a small switching element there is a (comparatively) huge waveguide feeding structure. So solving these issues and making sure that you don't get huge energy losses when you add the pieces surrounding the switch element, and figuring out how to combine large numbers of elements onto a small chip is the bigger challenge for bringing this into a computing application. Or maybe it can make a very energy efficient optical modulator, not used for computation.
I think that this trend partly a shift towards more mobile-oriented webpages and being targeted towards the large mobile devices like tablets and touch-screen laptops. I don't like the trend, but I think that's what is behind it.
I work in mm-wave semiconductors and you might be pleased to find out that you're high by a factor of over 100 on price :)
Power amplifier chips have no need to be cryogenically cooled like the ultra-low noise temperature amplifiers used in radioastronomy receivers. A few years ago you could pay about $10k per watt of packaged, power combined Gallium Arsenide amplifiers up to ~30 watts of power, and I understand that today the price is less than half of that. GaAs is not exotic, fully fabricated 6" wafers for the cell phone market apparently cost under $1,000 each (and each chip just a few square mm of that wafer). If you need really high powers vacuum tubes are available at ~100 watt output power levels at a similar price per watt.
Those prices are of course really high, but that's in large part because the market is tiny and a lot of these amplifiers are basically one-offs built for a specific customer and application. With volume production prices will drop dramatically.
Gallium Nitride is capable of per-chip output powers several times larger than Gallium Arsenide, in fact Fujitsu just last month unveiled their own over 1 watt GaN amplifier operating at 86 GHz. Other companies have had 1-2 watt output chips a few years ago, and at higher efficiencies, but I think Fujitsu might be better positioned to commercialize their technology.
Similar thing happens with the construction in some public universities. Because of the complexity of bidding on projects, the documentation required before, during, and after project completion, heavy oversight from the Campus's own construction department (and a hefty overhead percentage charged to pay for said oversight), and inevitable change orders throughout the project because of committees wanting new things after already accepting a design and/or construction bid, I have heard that construction costs 2-3x as much at some universities as similar projects taken on by (competent) private companies.