Carpe Nano

Another Reprieve for Moore's Law

2012-01-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

Current semiconductor line widths are pushing 20nm, or less than a dozen copper atoms wide. But just as pinching a hose reduces its flow, the narrowing of current traces on microchips has suggested the impending end of the exponential increase in integrated-circuit densities known as Moore's Law.

Not so fast. As reported in "Ohm’s Law Survives to the Atomic Scale" in Science v. 335 n. 6064, interconnects with the current-carrying capacity of today's copper traces can be formed by dotting four-atom-wide silicon pathways with phosphorus atoms:

We report on the fabrication of wires in silicon—only one atom tall and four atoms wide—with exceptionally low resistivity (~0.3 milliohm-centimeters) and the current-carrying capabilities of copper. By embedding phosphorus atoms within a silicon crystal with an average spacing of less than 1 nanometer, we achieved a diameter-independent resistivity, which demonstrates ohmic scaling to the atomic limit.

Illuminating reporting is also available at Scientific American and Gizmodo.

Fascinating-- not only does the new technique offer a fresh order-of-magnitude for the progress of Moore's Law, it's nonmetallic!

Atheists will have to do better than this

2011-12-25T19:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas Day musings...

A nice little e-flurry has built around several bloggers' trading of a provocative comment from a book by Penn Jillette:

"There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again."

Sigh. Where to begin.

Well, for starters, an exactly parallel construct would be: If every trace of chalk written on a blackboard were to be erased, it could never be written-on that way again. Which presupposes that whoever wrote on the blackboard wouldn't come and do it over. Since Jillette's faith holds that there is not and never was a Creator, that makes sense to him. The chalk, per his faith, was written by men. And my use of the term "faith" is grounded by Jillette's reliance on such words as "never" and "simple truth." On inspection, his logic is manifestly circular and self-referential. (Or is it self-reverential? [Chuckle] see what I did there).

Meanwhile, science--Jillette's unerring anti-theist lodestone--is hardly canonical across time or place. For example, dial the calendar back a few years, and a conjecture that gastric ulcers might be caused by microbes would be met by hoots and derision. How silly! Bacteria that could survive the acid environment of the upper gut! There was a day, not long ago, when a researcher proposing such foolish heresy would be laughed out of town, and out of his career. That's close to what happened to Barry Marshall, who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine with J. Robin Warren for that specific apostasy. There are others: Prusiner and his infectious proteins is another good example. In the physical sciences, the creative moment documented by the 3K microwave background radiation, so evocative of Genesis, was hugely uncomfortable for scientists to accept. Years before, Einstein himself had striven to adjust his cosmology specifically to avoid such an event, believing (there's that pesky faith again) that the universe must be unchanging forever (and there's that word, an expression of accepting belief if there ever was one). As another example, may I mention cold fusion? The avalanche of mockery that met Pons & Fleischmann's premature publicity crushed what just might have been a spectacular technology in its infancy. Though the phrase "cold fusion" remains a punchline, much about it remains unexplained, and sober minds are daring to propose a second look.

Here in the nanotech field, the miraculous is observed every day. As the field advances, each layer of the onion peels away to reveal more onion: more unknowns about nature, and perhaps more unknowables. Jillette's declaration against the divine is regrettable, as it relegates science to monotonic crank-turning. On this special day, may we reflect on the scientific value of wonder and awe, and continue proposing foolish heresies.

No, thank you MAM... did open-source kill Sun?

2011-12-03T17:16:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I was given a Sun Ultra 2 3D Creator Sparcstation, vintage 1999, with a then-whopping 1.5GB of RAM, two hard disks and two Sparc processors.

Whoo! Serious iron. Weighs a metric ton. Real hairy-chested UNIX. Hisses and spits when it runs.

But, it lacked a monitor, and playing with it over RS-232 wasn't too much fun, and I lacked a user account so there wasn't much to do with it. It sat on a shelf as part of my collection.

Recently I was offered a huge Sun CRT monitor, and it turned out to be compatible. (And easily 125 pounds.)

So I set it up.

It still left the issue of lacking a user account. Without system disks, it was impenetrable. But what I saw was purty...

So I decided to burn a bunch of Solaris 10 update 7 CDs one evening, and start from scratch. I think the thing had been running Solaris 7 or 8.

Well. Turns out, with Solaris 10, Sun was deprecating its previous GUI, the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), in favor of Gnome, with which I'm familiar from my Linux usage. Not a fan of Gnome... so I tried CDE.

And CDE is awful. It's not what the machine was running before, which seemed airier and more responsive and a whole lot less clunky.

Meanwhile, Gnome is... Gnome. It's hard to imagine someone spending what this machine originally cost and feeling satisfied with that environment. It's just nasty.

And despite its great honking 10,000 rpm SCSI disks, two 300MHz 64-bit Sparc processors, and a clock-doubled S-Bus architecture, the thing's a damn slug.

Just abysmal. I could not be less impressed.

I call it my Mac Appreciation Machine. Howdy, MAM.

I wonder how the move to Gnome factored into the demise of Sun. Premium machines, hard-core. Costly. Not for home use. Not for Aunt Min. Heck, its noises alone would give her the flapping vapors. No, it's a top-drawer tool for serious professionals. Yet there it is, glaring at me with the same unpolished face as some crappy netbook running Ubuntu. Complete with Star Office, seemingly identical to the open-source OpenOffice.

Both Sun and Apple, with OS X's NeXTSTEP-based innards, leveraged the open-source BSD UNIX as their foundations. In Apple's case, the generic/open-source-y inner UNIX giblets are cloaked with a sublime and solid proprietary user interface with lots of unique and thoughtful goodies built in. Nothing of the sort with the Sun, at least with Solaris 10u7. Interface- and usability-wise, I see nothing here I couldn't get from Mandriva or Mint for free, today and maybe even back in 2001 when Sun first started edging towards Gnome, and certainly by 2007-2008 from whence this version of Solaris sprang.

Though it remained (and remains) well regarded in the server space, Sun summarily disappeared from desktop usage, and I wonder if Gnome was a symptom or a cause.

My thought: as in every business endeavor, differentiation is everything. Whatever other problems Sun was battling in the market, it also lined up a chunk of its differentiation carefully in the cross-hairs and blew it away by adopting an open-source persona for its machines.

It seems my thoughts both parallel and oppose those of Scott McNealy from exactly a year ago. On the one hand, the interviewer refers to the "open core" of Sun's products, which could have excluded the user interface. And McNealy notes, "We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share... You gotta strike a proper balance between sharing and building the community and then monetizing the work that you do... I think we got the donate part right, I don't think we got the monetize part right."

But he doesn't mention differentiation. And if McNealy & Co. were prescient in stating that The Network Is The Computer, maybe they missed appreciating that The Interface Is The User Experience. And on MAM, with Gnome, that's nothing special.

What he left behind

2011-10-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

This blog is supposed to be about nanotechnology, capitalism and innovation. Almost all of my posts have related to the first or the last topics-- precious few have related to the one in the middle: capitalism. And that's a shame, as capitalism bridges the two and has given us so much.

The past few days saw the passing of the most successful capitalist in generations. His was a classic story: Steve Jobs started with nothing: a castoff child, a dropout. His career took some wrong turns, but evidently he learned from them, and he built (and re-built) what is currently the most valuable company on Earth.

Somehow his passing seems to have affected people more than most executive deaths. It's quite the phenomenon. After all, Apple recently nudged Exxon into the #2 position, and who remembers the founders of Exxon?

I think it has to do with a sense of generational loss: In Jobs we saw the leader we wish our leaders were more like. We saw the visionary who made dreams happen, who defined the fresh and graceful. We saw the guiding big brother who showed us how it's done.

That's what's gone now, and folks are feeling it, though maybe without the words. But it's there. It's there in the shrines of flowers, the candles, the yellow-stickied goodbyes, and the apples-with-a-bite-missing arrayed in front of Apple's retail stores. It's there in the paeans of pundits around the world, the front-page photos, the presidential condolences and the online appreciations. It's there.

Remarkable.

Jobs had a lot to say about death in his Stanford commencement speech, which I urge you to watch. He was one of the few captains of industry fearless enough to philosophize and talented enough not to make a laughingstock of himself doing it.

There's something that lives on, then, and it's much more valuable than all the AAPL shares in the world: like a good big brother, sadly departed, he left behind inspiration. And inspiration is where advancement starts under our system. It underlies the willingness to risk, the drive to succeed, to make something of nothing. It underlies entrepreneurship. Defines it. Defines ambition, animates hope.

We need more of that. Its loss is what makes us weep.

One thing that was unique about Jobs was the breadth of his accomplishments. Most historic entrepreneurs are content to build one business or one industry. To have built and revolutionized so much across so many fields takes a special kind of gift, and not just as an inventor: as a team-builder, a network-spanner, a persuader and communicator and negotiator and all those other things. Consider:

The personal computer (Apple II)
The personal computer, again (Macintosh)
The laptop (PowerBook)
The personal computer, a third time (NeXT)
Animated feature films (Pixar)
Personal media players (iPod)
Music distribution (iTunes is now the world's largest media store)
Software distribution (the App Store)
Computer retailing (Apple Stores)
Personal computers, iteration 3.5 (Mac OS X, the commercial second coming of NeXT)
Cell phones (iPhone)
Personal computers, round 4 (iPad)...

...And that's just off the top of my head and excludes the monumental turn-around of Apple, Inc as it twitched and gasped in extremis after his twelve years wandering in the desert, its worth less than its cash in the bank.

In none of these was Jobs the first-mover, but he brought a unique business approach to bear. For example, Apple did not invent the mouse-- that original implement for driving a computer's graphical user interface. He licensed what he needed from Xerox, paying with Apple stock. Xerox's mouse cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Apple's retailed for $29.

It's too pat to sniff, "Well, he didn't invent it, he just commercialized it." Exactly! That's the very essence of meaningful innovation. Edison didn't invent the first light bulb, either, as Joseph Swan demonstrated in court. But until Edison came along, the light bulb didn't happen. Edison made it happen by nailing the details and building the teams and establishing the networks that made it affordable, made it reliable, made it marketable, made it supportable by the necessary infrastructure and ecosystem, made it comprehensible and accessible to the common man...

See the difference? It's the difference between the inventor and the entrepreneur.

Then look at the great entrepreneurs, the Fords and the Perots and the Hewletts and Packards and Varian brothers and the Larry Ellisons and Michael Dells and Bill Gates and... well, the list goes on and on, and they all did basically one or perhaps two startups, or shepherded one or perhaps two revolutions, or built or flipped maybe one or two technologies, bless 'em all. The likes of Steve Jobs, on the other hand, come once a generation. Besides Edison, only Howard Hughes comes to mind as a serial entrepreneur of such diverse accomplishments in the past century. They're exceedingly rare.

Of course, there are detractors. Haters, even. Jobs was a tyrant, some will tell you, a prick, brutal and dehumanizing to his targets. Sure. That's almost a given among historic entrepreneurs. Edison was a prickly, mercurial, arrogant, claim-jumping son of a bitch. Henry Ford wasn't Mr. Nice Guy either, and a raging anti-Semite on top of it. Hughes was a psychological basket case who trusted no one. Historic-class entrepreneurs are odd, even damaged, and pretty much uniformly not-nice, at least in their business arena. There, niceness is not what it's about. Gladiators tend not to be nice in the ring.

But that's not their entirety. In Jobs' case, I never met him but have some mutual friends, and they're pretty ripped up. He was, after all, rather young, with kids still at home and a lovely, kind wife he adored. By all accounts (and see this charming Quora thread for some of them) he had a sort of quiet, out-of-the-spotlight charity and was a devoted family man. Personally, I'll miss him for his his exemplification of so much that is uniquely American, for his unabashed philosophizing, and of course for his cool products. But there are his family members and many friends who really mourn him, because Business Steve and Personal Steve were different people. My heart goes out to them in their loss.

Personally, I believe our Creator gave each of us unique gifts. And just as we are disappointed when things we give to others sit on a shelf unappreciated, I believe we disappoint God when we fail to use our gifts to their utmost. Jobs and I are of different faiths, but I think we'd agree on that. Certainly we disappoint ourselves, down deep, when we play it safe, notch it down, avoid risk and otherwise keep those gifts in their wrappers. But rarely, we encounter a person who uses his gifts to the hilt, each and every day. Such a person leaves this world with fewer regrets than most of us, I suspect. And though their passing pains us most, it should grieve us least, because their example--their inspiration--will feed the next generation of their kind.

Like a guiding big brother, Steve Jobs showed us how it's done. And the world--and the future--is a better place for it.

Fabricating transistors without those pesky junctions and dopants

2010-02-22T13:31:00.000-08:00

Now this looks interesting. EETimes relates some fascinating research at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland: The current flow in nanowires can be pinched off by a simple, conductive nanoscale surrounding structure. According to the EETimes article:

The breakthrough is based on the deployment of a control gate around a silicon wire that measures just a few dozen atoms in diameter. The gate can be used the squeeze the electron channel to nothing without the use of junctions or doping. The development, which could simplify manufacturing of transistors at around the 10-nanometer stage, was created a by a team led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge and a paper on the development has been published in Nature Nanotechnology.
It simplifies the production of transistors which also have a near-ideal sub-threshold slope, extremely low leakage currents and less degradation of mobility with gate voltage and temperature than classical transistors, the researchers have claimed. Nonetheless such device can be made to have CMOS compatibility...
"We have designed and fabricated the world s first junctionless transistor that significantly reduces power consumption and greatly simplifies the fabrication process of silicon chips," declared Tyndall's Professor Colinge...

Between these devices, graphene technology and memristors, it would seem that a whole new chapter in integrated-circuit fabrication is in store for the next few years. Somewhere, Gordon Moore smiles.

Billiard photonics

2010-02-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

In another fascinating post to Ars Technica, Chris Lee discusses the leveraging of scattering to improve resolution in a microscope. A more counterintuitive thing is hard to imagine, but he explains...

Scattered photons can make for an improved focus
...a few years ago I reported on a very cool experiment, one that allowed researchers to get a nice focusable beam of light through a scattering medium, such as a sugar cube. This work has been continuing, and there are some technical differences in how the experiment works, but the concepts are still fundamentally the same.
Laser light is shone on a scattering sample, and a tiny fraction of this leaks through, but goes in every direction. To improve the transmission, the researchers place a liquid crystal matrix between the laser and the sample. They modulate the settings on each pixel of the liquid crystal, varying the amount of light transmitted and the effective thickness of each pixel.
Before the liquid crystal, the light beam is a nice smooth thing: the crests, called phase-fronts, of the electromagnetic waves form smooth curves across the profile of the laser beam, as does the intensity of the light. After the liquid crystal, the beam is a complete mess, with the phase-fronts forming some jagged pattern.

It just so happens that the phase-fronts can be chosen so that they exactly compensate for the presence of the scattering sample. This allows some small fraction of the light to pass unhindered through the sample, as if neither the liquid crystal or the sample were there.
Unfortunately, you never really know in advance what the phase-fronts need to look like in order to compensate for the scattering. So you place a CCD camera just after the sample, and then adjust the LCD pixels until you get as bright a dot as possible on the camera sensor. It turns out that this is easy—you just need to take each liquid crystal pixel and adjust it until maximum brightness is achieved. No iteration is needed.

(...Seems to me that if the characteristics of the scattering medium could be more predictable and consistent than the sugar-cube example, the diffraction pattern could be pre-determined. If so, instead of an LCD array, a calculated or even printed pattern could be used. Perhaps the whole optical train could be diffractive, basically a modified zone-plate configuration. --S.J.)

This approach is quite flexible, because it turns out that you can turn the scattering sample into a lens. Just adjust the liquid crystal pixels until the smallest, brightest dot possible turns up, and you have a lens with a focal distance equal to that of the distance between the sample and the camera.

You can also use this technique to improve the resolution of an imaging system, a technique called structured illumination microscopy. Basically, you distort the phase-fronts so that you get multiple sharp points or lines of focus. Each point of focus is, at best, a factor of two better than achievable with ordinary light. But, a factor of two is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, so we'll take it.
What the researchers in the Nature Photonics paper report is an example of structured illumination microscopy, but they claim a factor of ten improvement over the diffraction limit....

While Lee ultimately figures that a factor-of-two is a likelier improvement for resolution, it seems there may be further seductiveness to the technique. Thinking wildly, perhaps objects embedded in scattering media might be observable using some offspring of this research. That could enable applications ranging from oceanic imaging and sensing to in vivo biological imaging. And what does it say about whether scattering is as randomizing as is ordinarily assumed? Are there quantum-entanglement and cryptographic consequences? I've often wondered if we humans have the feeblest grasp of that thing called "randomness"... what we think is random usually isn't at some level, and our proudest efforts to generate randomness without recourse to natural phenomena are really pretty feeble. I wonder if this research may lead to further humbling in that way.

Gold finger: photonics galore

2010-02-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

Chris Lee of Ars Technica provides an insightful analysis of a significant new capability in photonics. What impresses me most about this is how well the stage is set for further development and then industrial implementation through recombination with rapidly emerging industrial technologies. I've clipped a summary below and indicated one such synergy, but you should read the whole thing.

Making an optical switch by drawing lines in gold
...Normally, metals make for horrible nonlinear optics—in part because metals fail at transparency—but, they do have one advantage: lots of free electrons. If you shine light on the metallic surface in just the right way, then the electrons start to respond to the light field by oscillating in sympathy. This oscillation moves along the surface of the metal as something called a surface plasmon polariton—which is jargon for electrons that set up an oscillation that maintains a spatial orientation on the surface of the metal.
These plasmons travel at a much slower speed than light, have a much shorter wavelength, and are confined to the metal's surface. As a result, the electric fields associated with the charge oscillation are quite intense—intense enough, in fact, to drive nonlinear interactions. As a result, metals provide light with quite a good medium for things like four-wave mixing, provided you can get the light into the metal. Plasmons are made for this job because they are essentially light waves traveling along the surface of a metal.
[The researchers] ruled lines on the metal that were about 100nm in width...

(...a barn-door for nanoimprint lithography --S.J.)

and separated by around 300nm (center to center). These lines act to slow down the waves, with the delay depending on how close the plasmon wavelength is to the separation of the lines. This also controls the direction of the emission. Light only exits the structure at the point where the emission from each individual line is in phase with the rest, which depends on the spacing of the lines. But, not every color can find a spacing for which this occurs. In this case, the second of the two emitted waves can't find an emission angle that works for it at all, so the device emits only a single wavelength of light.
So, the end result is that, by ruling lines on the gold surface, you can choose which of the two colors you want generated and which direction it's emitted in. As an added bonus, the lines provide sharp points on the surface, which accumulate charge, resulting in very high electric fields (think of a lightening rod on a building). As a result, the four-wave mixing process becomes more efficient.
What's next? That's hard to say. I know that there are some ideas about how these nonlinear optical processes can be made more efficient, and maybe even useful, using plasmonic surfaces. So we may see some plasmonic optical switching devices. The big selling point in plasmonics is usually sensing, though, so things may go in that direction.

One thing that intrigues about this approach is how it leverages and manages those surface plasmon waves. Note the point Lee mentions about the plasmon waves' shorter-than-light wavelengths, necessitated by their comparatively slow velocity. Their short wavelengths would seem to be a useful property for probing and sensing phenomena and physics on the nanoscale, perhaps providing a new tool to bridge the region between light-based microscopies and electron microscopies, which are limited by the electron's Compton wavelength (on the order of 10^-12 m) in the same way that optics are diffraction-limited by photons' wavelengths. In particular, materials with even slower surface plasmon velocities but still generous free electron populations (which I'd imagine equates to "conductivity," though I'm rusty) would have shorter plasmon wavelengths still. Depending on how far down the process can be driven, things could get really interesting, and really weird.

Single. Best. Customer. Experience. Ever.

2010-02-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a quick note of appreciation to Apple for their extraordinary effort to rectify a minor but recurring annoyance with my beloved, well-traveled, hard-working original-issue MacBook Pro. The details are too long and boring to post, but the elevator summary is: I went to the Los Gatos Apple Store for an appointment to visit the "Genius Bar" with a software question. This is always a treat-- imagine talking face-to-face with folks who actually know their products and can communicate effectively, rather than spending hours on hold to Bangalore waiting for an incomprehensible script-reading troll to not solve your problem. Customer service: what a concept. While there, I almost off-handedly mentioned a hardware issue with the machine, which the justly-termed Genius, Trevor, recalled addressing before when my machine was under warranty. He encouraged me to call AppleCare, although my extended warranty had expired last Summer. Within an hour, Apple had spun up an amazing effort to get to the bottom of the issue. Noel at AppleCare could not have taken better care of me and the resolution could not have been more perfect.

It got me thinking. I first used Macs early in my career to run the first versions of LabVIEW, back in my days at Newport Corporation in 1986 when the Mac was the only GUI machine in town. We accomplished some amazing work on those groundbreaking machines, including:

Devising an easy-to-use quality-test workstation which made 100% graphical, six-degree-of-freedom interferometry a tool that any production-line assembler could use. This precipitated an avalanche of assembly tweaks and quality improvements from curious assemblers eager to apply their weekend shade-tree-mechanic skills. All these years later, I remain awed and grateful for their gumption and creativity, and at the role LabVIEW and the Mac played in enabling it.
Turning around the company's motion-control business segment and turbocharging its instrumentation product lines as the industry's first adopter of National Instruments' brilliant instrument-library initiative for LabVIEW. To show this off, we bravely built a simple virtual instrument from our company's optical hardware and put it on the trade-show floor of the next major conference. It was mobbed. I recall standing in the back of the booth with my boss, the much-missed Dean Hodges, and observing a stunning phenomenon: customers over 35 were looking at the optical hardware, while customers under 35 were looking at the Mac. In a stroke, the Mac had helped us open a highly differentiating dialog with the up-and-coming Young Turks of the laser/electro-optic industry. (An exercise for the user: what would generate a similar effect for your company today?)
Building a thriving systems business on technical innovations that LabVIEW on the Mac let us explore quickly and with little risk. The keystone was my work on the first digital gradient search algorithm for nanoscale alignments of optical fibers, waveguides, etc. From idea to first demonstration of that took only a few hours thanks to LabVIEW's dataflow programming paradigm which the Mac's GUI enabled. Eventually we received the very first patent for a LabVIEW-based virtual instrument, and a multi-million-dollar business grew from that seed.

It was an enthralling time, and I even was honored to be subject of a photo interview on "Science and the Mac" in MacWorld magazine. But eventually, Microsoft came out with Windows, and by its version 3.1 there was a version of LabVIEW for it. While my family kept using Macs at home, the world went Windows. And soon we saw how monocultures are a bad thing, both for customers (who are deprived of competition-driven advancements) and for security (having a single, badly-designed lock to pick makes the job easy for the bad guys).

Today, Apple and the Mac are surging again, propelled by superb, imaginative products that are meaningfully differentiated by great performance, compelling design, unmatched solidity and a high-end focus. And please add nonpareil support to that, thanks to a corporate culture that grows Trevors and Noels.

And here, in a ZDNet blog story by David Morgenstern, is terrific news: for scientific and engineering fields, the Mac's story is coming full circle:

Engineering: The Mac is coming back

Most attendees at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco this week — distracted by plentiful iPhone apps, whispered tales of the forthcoming Apple iPad, and the sight of dancing booth workers with their faces covered by unfortunate costumes of gigantic Microsoft Office for Mac icons — may have overlooked a trend: The Macintosh is back in the engineering segment.

Engineering, which was often lumped into the beat called “SciTech,” once was strong segment for the Macintosh. Then in the early 1990s, the platform’s position was weakened and then lost. But now the Mac appears poised for a strong return.
...

“Engineering is primed to take off now [on the Mac],” said Darrin McKinnis, vice president for sales and marketing at CEI of Apex, NC. He said there was a “growing ecosystem of applications” to support Mac engineers and while previously, many engineers purchased Mac hardware to then run Linux applications or even Windows programs in virtualization, his company had seen increasing demand for a native Mac version.
McKinnis pointed to a number of engineering teams around the country that are now almost all working on Macs. With the native Mac apps, the loser will be Linux, he said.

McKinnis has a long (and painful) history with engineering solutions on the Mac. He was once an engineer at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, where in 1995, CIO John Garman decided to eliminate “unnecessary diversity” and switch thousands of Mac workstations over to Windows 95.

The battle was joined between NASA’s directive at the time for Better, Faster, Cheaper,” and what Garman dismissively called “Mac huggers” (a techno-word-play on the “tree huggers” environmentalist sobriquet). It didn’t help that Garman was mentioned in a Microsoft advertisement that thanked customers for their “contributions” to Windows 95.

NASA Mac users tried hard to point out that this policy would cause problems. My MacWEEK colleague Henry Norr wrote a series of articles about the fight to keep the Mac at NASA, which won a Computer Press Association award. Here’s a slice of his Feb. 12, 1996 front page story:

“Making me take a Pentium is like cutting off my right hand and sewing on a left hand,” said a Mac user at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston who recently faced forced migration to Windows. “I’ll learn to use the left hand, but there’s no doubt my productivity is going to suffer, and I’m going to resent it.”

To this engineer and hundreds of other Mac users at the space center, such desktop amputations hardly seem like an effective way to comply with agency administrator Dan Goldin’s much-publicized motto, “Better, Faster, Cheaper.” To them, the space center’s new policy of standardizing on Windows is wasteful, unnecessary and infuriating, and they are not taking it lying down.

Eventually, the fight went to hearings at the Inspector General’s office. McKinnis was one of the staff who testified there. While the investigation concluded with a report that sided with the Mac users, the Mac was supplanted.

No more. The Mac's architectural advantages in performance, security, robustness and ease of use are attracting users snake-bit by the malware, misbehavior and cumbersomeness of Windows and the chaos and geek-intensiveness of the Linux world.

And then there's Trevor and Noel.

[Yet more] Researchers make faster-than-silicon graphene chips

2010-02-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

Egad. A few hours after posting the graphene news from IBM, I encounter this apparently parallel development:

Researchers make faster-than-silicon graphene chips
updated 06:35 pm EST, Wed February 3, 2010
Penn State finds method of making graphene chips

A carbon semiconductor called graphene could replace silicon in computer chips in the near future, researchers at Penn State found. They claim to have developed a way to put the graphene on 4-inch wafers. The Electro-Optics Center Materials Division scientists say their work can eventually lead to chips that are 100 to 1,000 times faster than silicon.

Graphene is a crystalline form of carbon that is made up of two-dimension hexagonal arrays which is ideal for electronic applications. Attempting to place the material onto sheets using the usual methods turns them into irregular graphite structures, however. David Snyder and Randy Cavalero at Penn State say they came up with a method called silicon sublimation that removes silicon from silicon carbide wafers and leaves pure graphene.

A similar process has been used for graphene before, but the EOC is the first group that claims it has perfected the process to a point that lets them produce 4-inch wafers. The smallest wafers using a more conventional method have resulted in 8-inch graphene wafers. Typical wafers used for processors today are roughly 11 inches across. [via EETimes]

A Quantum Leap in Battery Design?

2010-02-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

A Quantum Leap in Battery Design
Digital quantum batteries could exceed lithium-ion performance by orders of magnitude.
A "digital quantum battery" concept proposed by a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign could provide a dramatic boost in energy storage capacity--if it meets its theoretical potential once built.

The concept calls for billions of nanoscale capacitors and would rely on quantum effects--the weird phenomena that occur at atomic size scales--to boost energy storage. Conventional capacitors consist of one pair of macroscale conducting plates, or electrodes, separated by an insulating material. Applying a voltage creates an electric field in the insulating material, storing energy. But all such devices can only hold so much charge, beyond which arcing occurs between the electrodes, wasting the stored power.

If capacitors were instead built as nanoscale arrays--crucially, with electrodes spaced at about 10 nanometers (or 100 atoms) apart--quantum effects ought to suppress such arcing. For years researchers have recognized that nanoscale capacitors exhibit unusually large electric fields, suggesting that the tiny scale of the devices was responsible for preventing energy loss. But "people didn't realize that a large electric field means a large energy density, and could be used for energy storage that would far surpass anything we have today," says Alfred Hubler, the Illinois physicist and lead author of a paper outlining the concept, to be published in the journal Complexity.

That's all quite interesting, and heaven knows the world needs to finally advance beyond battery technology that Volta could understand. Going directly to Hubler's paper yields the following explanation, spanning pgs. 3 and 4:

Nano plasma tubes are generally forward-biased and if the residual gas emits visible light, they can be used for flat-panel plasma lamps and flat panel monitors... The energy density density in reverse-biased nano plasma tubes is small, because gas becomes a partically ionized, conducting plasma at comparatively small electric fields... In this paper, we investitage energy storage in arrays of reverse-biased nano vacuum tubes, which are similar in design to nano plasma tubes, but contain little or no gas... Since there are only residual gases between the electrodes in vacuum junctions, there is no Zener breakdown, no avalanche breakdown, and no material that could be ionized. Electrical breakdown is triggered by quantum mechanical tunneling of electrode material: electron field emission on the cathode and ion field emission on the anode. Because the energy barrier for electron field emission is large and the barrier for ion field emission even larger, the average energy density in reversed-biased nano vacuum tubes can exceed the energy density in solid state tunnel junctions and electrolytic capacitors. Since the inductance of the tubes is very small, the charge-discharge rates exceed batteries and conventional capacitors by orders of magnitude. Charging and discharging involves no faradaic reactions so the lifetime of nano vacuum tubes is virtually unlimited. The volumetric energy density is independent from the materials used as long as they can sustain the mechanical load, the electrodes are good conductors, and the mechanical supports are good insulators. Therefore, nano vacuum tubes can be built from environmentally friendly, non-noxious materials. Materials with a low density are preferable, since the gravimetric density is the ratio between the volumetric energy density and the average density of the electrodes and supports. Leakage currents are small, since the residual gases contain very few charged particles.

The thing is is, I think something much like this has been tried, though not for energy storage: The technology Hubler describes seems very similar to the notion of field-emission displays and surface-conduction electron-emitter displays, two closely-related technologies in which nanoscale vacuum tubes are fabricated microlithograhically and arrayed to stimulate phosphors.

One of Silicon Valley's largest failed ventures was Candescent, a company devoted to developing such displays, which burned through (IIRC) something like $600 million in funding from some stellar sources. As Daniel den Engelsen notes in his article, "The Temptation of Field Emission Displays,"

...Manufacturing of FEDs is too difficult, and thus too expensive; moreover, the recent success of LCDs and PDPs as Flat Panel Displays (FPDs) for TV is now discouraging (large) investments in FED manufacturing facilities. The two main challenges for designing and making FEDs, viz. high voltage breakdown and luminance non-uniformity, are described in this paper. Besides improvements in the field of emitter and spacer technology, a new architecture of FEDs, notably HOPFED, has been proposed recently to solve these two persistent hurdles for manufacturing FEDs.

But energy storage wouldn't care much about luminance non-uniformity, and Hubler seems to have determined that high-voltage breakdown is manageable in his configuration. Hubler and Canon, which acquired the ashes of Candescent from receivership, might want to talk. Sony, a major battery manufacturer as well as a former FED developer, might be another interested party.

Big Blue demos 100GHz chip

2010-02-14T14:51:00.000-08:00

Time to rev up this blog thingie again. Lots is going on, including some developments that seem quite practical for commercialization in the not-too-distant future.

Consider, from The Register in England:

Big Blue demos 100GHz chip

IBM reseachers have made a breakthrough in the development of ultra-high-speed transistor design, creating a 100GHz graphene-based wafer-scale device. And that's just for starters.
The transistor that the researchers have developed is a relatively large one, with a gate length of 240 nanometers - speeds should increase as the gate length shrinks.

The field-effect transistor that the IBM team developed exploits what a paper published in the journal Science understates as the "very high carrier mobilities" of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms grown on a silicon substrate.
This extraordinarily thin sheet is grown on the silicon epitaxially, meaning that it's created in an ordered crystaline structure on top of another crystaline structure - in this case, good ol' garden-variety silicon.

I wrote about graphene back in the Summer of 2007, noting it seemed more tractable for utilization in manufacturing processes than its more-glamorous siblings, carbon nanotubes. And so it seems: the fact that IBM's development is based on "garden-variety silicon" is a wonderful testament to recombinant innovation and promises practical adoption before too long. It seems hackneyed and threadworn to haul out Moore's Law one more time, but here it is again, keeping pace.

A guru on innovation takes note

2008-07-16T17:16:00.000-07:00

My "Breakthrough Innovation" co-panelist, Patricia Seybold, has spotlighted my blog posts on HP's memristor and photonic interconnect developments.

Patty's attention is worthy of note, as she has a track record of pegging paradigm shifts in the technology world and guiding organizations to capitalize on them. Savvy strategists listen to her, and successful ones put her advice to work.

Most critical is her relentless focus on customers and her insistence on involving them early in the strategic and developmental process, central to the ecosystem of stakeholders in a commercial endeavor. As she states in her blog's definition of Outside Innovation--both her mantra and the title of one of her books:

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services. The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes. The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

Exactly right. Too many businesspeople are happy to say, "The customer is always right" while missing the opportunity to harness customers' insights early in the strategic or design process when it can have its most profound leverage and produce the most striking competitive advantage. As she notes:

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?
You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

...And listening to them.

A corollary to that is to seize every opportunity to advance the education--the "smartening"--of your customers. Including: facilitate their learning from each other.

The same goes for the rest of your enterprise's ecosystem. Regardless of your business, one of the most valuable take-aways from HP's purposeful ecosystem-building was illuminated in their Photonics Interconnect Forum when Jamie Beckett quoted HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee: "Not all the smart people work at HP." If so, then the ecosystem-building and customer-smartening is a way of multiplying the ones who work with them.

Call it a positive feedback mechanism for organizational IQ.

"Fast bipolar nonvolatile switching," and why it changes everything

2008-06-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

Yet more memristor news from HP Labs. An eye-blink after their stunning news of discovering the memristor's existence as the fourth fundamental passive electronic circuit element, comes Nature Nanotech's advance online publication of significant progress in the practical fabrication of these devices.

Authors Yang, Pickett, Li, Ohlberg, Stewart and Williams--all of HP Labs in Palo Alto--state:

We have built micro- and nanoscale TiO₂ junction devices with platinum electrodes that exhibit fast bipolar nonvolatile switching. We demonstrate that switching involves changes to the electronic barrier at the Pt/TiO₂ interface due to the drift of positively charged oxygen vacancies under an applied electric field. Vacancy drift towards the interface creates conducting channels that shunt, or short-circuit, the electronic barrier to switch ON. The drift of vacancies away from the interface annilihilates such channels, recovering the electronic barrier to switch OFF. Using this model we have built TiO₂ crosspoints with engineered oxygen vacancy profiles that predictively control the switching polarity and conductance.

The keywords are "engineered oxygen vacancy profiles" and "predictively control." These indicate that memristors are hurtling from their emergence as a laboratory success-story to land square in the everyday IC design toolkit, right before our eyes. Remarkable!

More remarkable is the unusual behavior of these devices. First, there's no doubt that they'll be used as replacements for flash RAM and hard disks: they're faster, they use less energy, they would appear to be denser (50x50nm, in the versions discussed in Nature Nanotech), they operate in parallel, and scalability seems to be a real strength. Given the world's exponentiating appetite for information and information storage, this is all fine news for iPhones and laptops and other good things. But memristors' capability is not limited to storing 1's and 0's. That would be so 21st century. No, memristors can store values in-between. They are analog devices, and they will facilitate parallel analog computers. Those are common enough: you have one between your ears.

HP Labs' Jamie Beckett spoke with the researchers:

"A conventional device has just 0 and 1 – two states – this can be 0.2 or 0.5 or 0.9," says Yang. That in-between quality is what gives the memristor its potential for brain-like information processing... Any learning a computer displays today is the result of software. What we're talking about is the computer itself – the hardware – being able to learn."

Beckett elaborates,

...[Such a computer] could gain pattern-matching abilities [or could] adapt its user interface based on how you use it. These same abilities make it ideal for such artificial intelligence applications as recognizing faces or understanding speech.

Another benefit would be that such an architecture could be inherently self-optimizing. Presented with a repetitive task, or one requiring parallel processing, such a computer could be designed to route subtasks internally in increasingly efficient ways or using increasingly efficient algorithms. Tired of PCs that seem slower after a few months' use than when they were new? This computer would do just the opposite.

Beckett continues:

"When John Von Neumann first proposed computing machines 60 years ago, he proposed they function the way the brain does," says Stewart. "That would have meant analog parallel computing, but it was impossible to build at that time. Instead, we got digital serial computers."

Now it may be possible to build large-scale analog parallel computing machines, he says. "The advantage of those machines is that intrinsically they can do more learning."

Not science fiction. Science fact. And soon--sooner than any of us imagined--it will be up to the engineers and entrepreneurs to leverage this in fantastical ways, using memristors as routinely as they do transistors, invented just sixty years ago.

Putting the "Lab" back in "LabVIEW" -- while spreading LabVIEW out of the lab

2008-06-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

As my panel on "Breakthrough Innovation" at NI Week last year discussed, National Instruments and its LabVIEW programming environment are both an important part of the nanotechnology ecosystem and a fine case study of the commercial benefits of ecosystem-building and customer-driven, recombinant innovation.

So some media coverage of National Instruments caught my eye recently, such as:

National Instruments Announces Global Multi-core Programming Workshop

National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) today announced an initiative sponsored by Intel Corporation to deliver free, hands-on multi-core programming workshops based on the NI LabVIEW graphical programming language to engineers and scientists around the globe. The Multi-core Programming with NI LabVIEW Hands-On Workshop will be presented in 18 U.S. and Canadian cities beginning in May and 15 international cities this fall...

and

EETimes: LabView poised for parallel role

James Truchard thinks he may have one of the keys to the multicore era.
The chief executive of National Instruments believes the company's flagship LabView environment offers many of the tools parallel programmers need today. NI has plugged into parallel research efforts at Intel Corp. and Berkeley to make sure LabView evolves with the times...
LabView can automate the assignment of jobs to different cores and threads. It also can generate C code and offers tools to manually optimize CPU loading, debugging and the use of cache in multicore chips...
"This is going to be pretty painful for people," said Truchard. "Today's programming languages really weren't developed for parallel programming" and the new mechanisms Intel and others are developing to plug the holes "add a lot of complexity to the programming environment," he said...
Truchard notes that high school students in the annual First Robotics contest used LabView to program FPGAs. Last year NI set up a lab at Berkeley so students there could use its tools to prototype embedded system designs.

(How about that. High school and college students making their own silicon. Wow.)

The program is one of several at NI aimed at keeping LabView in the forefront of parallel programming research, currently one of the hottest topics in computer science, thanks to the move to multicore processors...

As you can deduce, there has been angst among analysts and engineers alike about the scarcity of software architectures supporting multiprocessing and parallelism.

Hardware has gotten ahead of software. But NI has had parallelism nailed in the architecture of LabVIEW for more than two decades, at least for scientific instrumentation and process automation. With the introduction of LabVIEW FPGA three years ago and LabVIEW 8.5 for multicore processors last year, support for true parallelism became not only possible but easy.

Now comes this "initiative sponsored by Intel."

The thing that raised my antennas is that the coverage underplays LabVIEW's traditional market focus on scientific instrumentation and process automation.

Is NI staging a breakout into general computing? Might LabVIEW be the new C++? Is NI taking the "Lab" out of "LabVIEW"?

Technically, there's no reason it couldn't happen. It is a fully-fledged programming environment.

If, say, The MathWorks issued a press release about Matlab, touting sponsorship by Intel, extolling multiprocessing support, commencing a worldwide tour that spotlights the ease with which parallelism can be leveraged and managed on its platform ...and avoiding mention of its foundational calculational capabilities... then we might all agree that would be news. And so is this.

So. Can they take LabVIEW out of the lab? Is that what this is about, even? Maybe I'm just running a fever, but that's how it hit me.

If I were to venture a suggestion, I'd advise that NI consider seeding the programming world with a version of LabVIEW that omits its instrumentation and heavy-duty numerical modules. Maybe even a free one, or one targeted at students. Include its current facilities for integrating traditional code, and watch what happens when folks realize how straightforward programming for multiprocessing can be.

Arguing against the notion is the dictum from page 102 of Scott's Big Book of Pithy Pronouncements: "The Great Unfunded Liability of technology is: Support." On the other hand, NI's experience with Lego Robotics might suggest an affordable upper bound for the incremental support-cost obligation.

The time is right for Dr. T to stake his claim as the Moses of Multiprocessing. He already has the stone tablets. (He got 'em from Jeff Kodosky.)

Happily, research customers can revel in another new initiative at NI, aimed at strengthening its traditional ties to the academic and research marketplaces. (After all, another dictum is, "Dance with the girl that brought ya.") I don't know all the details yet, but what I've heard is exciting for researchers at colleges and universities. It includes an NI Week Academic Forum, a focused day of presentations and discussions for research customers and industry partners, which extends NI Week one day forward. More at http://www.ni.com/niweek/academic.htm --and it appears you'll be hearing more about the broader aspects of this new outreach initiative in the coming weeks.

P.S. I learned today that my "Breakthrough Innovations" co-panelist, Dr. Andrew Hargadon, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center at the University of California, Davis, will present the closing keynote address at this summer's NI Week. Excellent!

----------

UPDATE: 2 July 2008: The Mystery of the Exploding Hit-Meter has been solved, thanks to a kindly email from NI's Vincent Carpentier. Seems this post is linked in NI News for July '08. The whole newsletter is well worth visiting-- lots of exciting developments and interesting applications, with webcasts and other resources of interest to both LabVIEW users and just-plain-folks interested in the latest in computing and instrumentation.

Best. Fortune-Cookie. Ever.

2008-05-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

Optical communications goes nano -- HP announces practical interconnect tech (and an ecosystem for it to grow in)

2008-05-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

Pretty much everyone in developed countries appreciates the escalating appetite for bandwidth of our indispensible digital companions. Phil Edholm of Nortel posted an intriguing graphic recently which shows both historic and projected per-user bandwidth consumption and compares these to other noted growth laws:

...Note the ramp-ups corresponding to adoption of new applications and media such as personal audio (MP3s) and streaming video. (And let's not forget VOIP. And I would personally add escalating adoption of desktop virtual machines to the mix, though few analysts seem to recognize that as a trend yet.) Edholm is the gentleman who exposited bandwidth's equivalent to the semiconductor industry's Moore's Law, reducing its exponentiation to sensible (and highly predictable) form:

The skyrocketing consumption of Internet bits is easy enough to appreciate. But also ponder what this means for the internal communications bandwidth of the devices themselves. Horsing all that data around requires not only better connectivity and more storage and processing power, but also higher internal communications throughput and more flexible and complex routing. But at the same time, chips are getting smaller and denser, buses grow wider, and clock-rates increase (for both performance and marketing reasons).

The physics of these realities quickly collide. Signal integrity, dielectric losses, routing skew, cross-talk, power consumption... nightmares pile on nightmares for circuit engineers trying to move data where it needs to be and when, inside chips and between them, and between the boards they live on. How to meet tomorrow's needs?

One way would be to use optical interconnects, the workhorse of long-haul, high-volume telecommunications. But costs have blocked that. A few short years ago, EDN noted:

...optical interconnects are likely to displace copper only in buses and networks that route signals over distances greater than tens of feet. The reasons are economic. SI experts indicate that the cost of implementing shorter interconnects with optics is at least an order of magnitude greater than that of using copper and the silicon devices that drive it. In fact, typical optical-to-copper cost ratios are probably closer to 100-to-1. Indeed, one SI manager, despite forecasting its decline, suggests that the cost ratio might currently be as high as 10,000-to-1.

O, ye of little faith. That sets the stage nicely for the latest news from HP Labs, which is just rocking with innovations lately. As reported in EE Times:

Using silicon photonics to connect blades, boards, chips and eventually cores on the same chip has become a strategic goal for Hewlett Packard... By harnessing its expertise in nanoimprint lithography to fashion low-cost, high-speed silicon photonic devices, HP said it hopes to seed the fledgling community of optical interconnect component makers. Rather than doing it all, HP is seeking partners with other silicon photonic pioneers in hopes of developing its first optical interconnect technology in products by 2009.

Most reportage skips right over that important point. So let's pause for a moment and relate this back to a topic of some earlier posts (in particular this one) regarding the panel discussion on "Breakthrough Innovation" I was honored to join last summer. Here we have a team of galactic-class innovators... and they're not locking it up. Instead, they're building a community to make more breakthroughs happen faster. HP's CTO Terry Morris even uses one of my favorite innovation-related words, see if you can pick it out:

"Our business strategy is to pull parters along and build a community that benefits from the intellectual property at HP Labs--a community that provides the ecosystem to enable the delivery of photonic interconnects in volume."

Exactly on-target. Morris is channeling my co-panelists Patricia Seybold and Andrew Hargadon. They've studied innovation and have shown this is how breakthroughs are nurtured in savvy organizations.

EE Times continues:

HP described its laboratory demonstrations of the components needed for creating optical interconnects that handle communication among systems and boards... Its free-space optical connection provided a 240 Gbit/s optical connection that beamed information through the air between boards. Researcher also described a MEMS micro-lens scanner fabricated from silicon-on-insulator that focuses between-board lasers.

(Digression: That brings up topic dear to mine own heart, as photonic alignment automation is my home field, with a couple patents, a current emphasis on highly optimized microrobotic alignment and production assembly equipment, and a very enjoyable collaboration with some brilliant researchers at MIT who have developed a six-degree-of-freedom silicon MEMs nanopositioner ideal for embedded micro-optical tasks (see #6466-24 at the link, also this). Exciting work continues there; meanwhile we were able to implement both Hyperbit (allowing smaller/cheaper DACs to be used) and Convolve, Inc.'s always-amazing Input Shaping(R) technology (to eliminate motion-generated vibration without the complexity of a closed-loop implementation). The six-DOF control was implemented in an FPGA using LabVIEW and updated all six axes simultaneously at 10kHz. Here are some micro-scale laser vibrometry videos on YouTube (metrology courtesy of Polytec) which show the impact of what we accomplished, showing a square-wave input to the speck-sized MEMS hexapod, with metrology in the velocity domain: before and after-- the improvement in resolution, controllability and stability is dramatic. The MIT MicroHexFlex MEMS nanopositioner is a marvelous platform for embedded micro-optical pointing and coupling optimization.)

Back to HP's insightful plans. Another ingredient of Hargadon's observations of the innovation process is combinatorial leveraging of technologies from other fields. In this case, one example is the venerable concept of embossing. That's basically what nanoimprint lithography is all about. And it's key to burying the cost issues of small-scale photonic interconnects once and for all:

Instead of using telecommunications-type photonics--which is designed for 300 meter ranges--HP said it wants to craft a family of low-power signaling technologies that use silicon nanoimprint lithography to fashion low-cost alternatives for optical communnications.

Fascinating. And one of the more impressive aspects of HP's news is the breadth and depth of their nanoimprint-based toolkit. The demonstrations included:

...cheap plastic waveguides, micro-lenses and beamsplitters [allowing demonstration of] a 10-bit-wide optical data bus that used just 1 milliwatt of laser power to interconnect eight different modules at 10 Gbit/s/channel for an aggregate bandwidth of over 250 Gbit/s. "What we are working toward now are novel optical connections, such as board-to-board connections using a photonic bus that enables us to replace an 80-watt chip that performs the electronic switching function today with a molded piece of plastic," said Morris [including] a silicon ring resonator that it hopes to fashion with imprint lithography. "HP Labs has already demonstrated one of the world's smallest and lowest power silicon ring resonators. Now we want to show how to do it with nanoimprint lithography because a dense pattern that takes 60 hours to create with e-beam lithography could take only 30 minutes for nanoimprint lithography," Morris claimed.

And unlike many nanotechnologies, this development seems well-grounded and commercializable in the near term:

HP contends that its photonic interconnects are poised for commercialization, which will begin immediately along with business partners. In addition to HP's university partners, over a dozen companies attended the HP forum, including Avago, Corning, Intel and Lightwire. The goal is to develop "the infrastructure to get photonic interconnects to market," said Morris. "We already have photonic waveguides that can operate at up to terahertz ranges. Now we want to make sure that our solutions work in real computing environments," said Morris.

The potential impact is sweeping in scope, encompassing "...all communications in the range of 100 nanometers on a chip all the way up to 100 meters between systems." You'll see this in both existing and new applications:

"In the near term we want to connect boards and blades with photonic interconnects. In the long-term we want to build on-chip photonic connections which we think will break the core-to-memory bottleneck... Instead of going through a switch and out onto a congested bus then back through the switch, we plan on adding inexpensive direct connections that add a dimension of connectivity not possible today," said Morris. "For instance, we could add photonic connections between blades for true 3D meshes and toroids, while remaining within the confines of existing board infrastructures."

With its big memristor news of a few days ago, that's HP's second development in a week enabling radically new computing architectures with dramatic cost and power savings. Let's hope they keep it up.

Full disclosure: I'm an HP shareholder. And after I read about this development, I bought more.

Another insight into memristors

2008-05-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Thomas Kraemer has a nice alternative diagram of where the memristor (about which I blogged yesterday) fits in the compact constellation of passive circuit elements. By placing Voltage at the center of a triangle, some nice symmetry is revealed.

I'm having a bit of trouble getting the linked image of Kraemer's diagram to post here, so if it doesn't show up above, please visit the link to Kraemer's post.

True news from H-P-- memristor nano-memory element

2008-05-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

Seems Berkeley might be hanging a new Nobel plaque above some mantel soon.

37 years ago, Dr. Leon Chua, a professor in the University of California's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, noticed an unfilled symmetry between fundamental electromagnetic equations relating charge and flux and their corresponding passive circuit elements. He filled this blank with a conjectural passive element he termed a memristor, a device with a hysteretic (history-dependent) behavior that changes its electrical characteristics based on past current-flow history:

(Image courtesy of IEEE Spectrum's superb article on the topic.)

Chua showed that such a circuit-element could be kludged for demonstration purposes with a handful of commonplace components, but actual memristors have not been seen in the wild. Or, at least, recognized... until now, thanks to insightful work, published this month in Nature, by R. Stanley Williams, Greg Snider, Dmitri Strukov and Duncan Stewart, all of HP Labs in Palo Alto. (Williams is director of HP's Information and Quantum Systems Lab).

Turns out memristors have been created before but were unrecognized until very recently:

“People have been reporting funny current voltage characteristics in the literature for 50 years,” Williams says. “I went to these old papers and looked at the figures and said, ‘Yup, they've got memristance, and they didn't know how to interpret it.' ”

Louis Pasteur noted, "Chance favors the prepared mind," but sometimes it's the hair-raising strangeness a person encounters that sets them off on a voyage of discovery... and innovation:

...Williams and his group were working on molecular electronics when they started to notice strange behavior in their devices. “They were doing really funky things, and we couldn't figure out what [was going on],” Williams says. Then [Snider] rediscovered Chua's work from 1971. “He said, ‘Hey guys, I don't know what we've got, but this is what we want,' ” Williams remembers. Williams spent several years reading and rereading Chua's papers. “It was several years of scratching my head and thinking about it.” Then Williams realized their molecular devices were really memristors. “It just hit me between the eyes.”

And guess what, it's "green." Since the memristor's memory effect is a fundamental physical property of its construction, it heralds an era when ultra-fast information storage can be implemented on a massive scale yet consume no power except when being read or written. Contrast that with today's spinning hard disks, power-inefficient DRAM, and then reflect on the electrical appetite of something like a server farm. For example, consider Google's new site in The Dalles, Oregon: 108 Megawatts according to a hysterical Harper's, "enough to power 82,000 homes," to serve up things like "a query on 'American Idol'," a top search on Google News in 2007. Or, for a less-Luddite example than Harper's hectoring screed, consider that the sale of 20 million digital picture frames has been projected this year, each consuming about 15 Watts... 300 Megawatts! No doubt Harper's outraged author, Ginger Strand, could write a whole tract about how many warm, healthful vegan breakfasts could be cooked for starving children instead... but consider that memristors could eliminate a large chunk of both examples' power usage. Technology--and capitalism--is both the problem and the solution.

And, in case it's not already obvious from the figures and discussion so far, the discovery of demonstrable (and manufacturable) memristors is a feat of nanotechnology:

...Memristance as a property of a material was, until recently, too subtle to make use of. It is swamped by other effects, until you look at materials and devices that are mere nanometers in size. No one was looking particularly hard for memristance, either. In the absence of an application, there was no need. No engineers were saying, “If we only had a memristor, we could do X,” says [Columbia University electrical engineering professor David] Vallancourt. In fact, Vallancourt, who has been teaching circuit design for years, had never heard of memristance before this week.

Well done, gentlemen.

Practical implementation seems to be within grasp:

HP Labs is now working out how to manufacture memristors from TiO₂ and other materials and figuring out the physics behind them. They also have a circuit group working out how to integrate memristors and silicon circuits on the same chip. The HP group has a hybrid silicon CMOS memristor chip “sitting on a chip tester in our lab right now,” says Williams.

But the novel behavior of memristors might open the door to entirely new computing paradigms:

In fact, he hopes to combine memristors with traditional circuit-design elements to produce a device that does computation in a non-Boolean fashion. “We won't claim that we're going to build a brain, but we want something that will compute like a brain,” Williams says. They think they can abstract “the whole synapse idea” to do essentially analog computation in an efficient manner. “Some things that would take a digital computer forever to do, an analog computer would just breeze through,” he says.

Wow. Optimism about the world ahead absolutely flows from nanotechnology. I live amid this stuff every day, and it never ceases to amaze me.

If Ginger Strand wants to pillory society's puerile fascination with American Idol, she might consider urging an episode of Idol devoted to Williams, Snider, Strukov, Stewart and Chua instead.

Resuming the festivities

2008-05-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

The world of nanotechnology doesn't hold still, but neither does life. Not long after my last post, my wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Fortunately we have awesome medical resources here in the U.S., and the neurosurgeon to whom we were referred (Dr. Kenneth Blumenfeld) was not only right in our neighborhood, he was regarded very highly by friends in the medical community whom we deeply trust. "He's the very best," one source advised. "Meet him and see what you think. If you're comfortable, there is no reason for shopping around." Remarkable advice, considering we'd expected to consult with Stanford Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco medical school (by all accounts, the absolute citadel of brain medicine), both of which are a stone's throw from us.

The MRIs showed that the tumor was about the size of a racquetball, and from its conformation we had hope that it would not be malignant. The surgery commenced just five days after first identification of the problem.

The tumor was in a difficult location, under the brain and behind/above her right eye, and the extreme morbidity of conventional surgical techniques would have rendered it inoperable just a few years ago. Now, however, the Stealth Navigation technology from Medtronic allows the surgeon to plan and execute surgery in formerly inaccessible locations with far less invasiveness than was previously the norm. The technology is likened to the global positioning system, and it provides a high-precision 3-D mapping of the tumor, brain and involved structures. The surgeon can strategize and operate blind, yet with sub-millimeter precision. Not quite nanometers, but remarkable nonetheless.

The surgery took eight hours, and she was home on the third post-operative day. The enemy turned out to be a benign meningioma, which is pretty much the kind of tumor you want to have if you're going to have a brain tumor. After a couple of months of recuperation, she's back at work, and gaining strength each week. Through it all, our friends, employers and church community were unbelievably supportive. We feel very blessed.

Much is going on in the field of nanotech, and I look forward to posting more regularly now.

The old is new again: a nanotube crystal radio

2007-11-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

Nanowerk has an especially nice description of a nifty development at my alma mater, U.C. Irvine:

Researchers in California have now reported another step towards showing nanoelectronics in systems: They have developed the world's first working radio system that receives radio waves wirelessly and converts them to sound signals through a nano-sized detector made of CNTs...

Peter Burke and Chris Rutherglen at the University of California, Irvine developed a CNT demodulator (a device that converts the radio frequency signal from the carrier into baseband signals such as video, audio, or data for further processing or amplification) that is capable of translating AM (amplitude modulation) radio waves into sound. In a laboratory demonstration, the researchers incorporated the detector into a complete radio system and used it to successfully transmit classical music wirelessly from an iPod to a speaker several feet away from the music player. In this setup, the carbon nanotube functions in the critical role as the receiver's AM demodulator. Burke, an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and leader of the UCI Nanotechnology Group, and Ruthergle, a grad student in Burke's group, reported their findings in the October 17, 2007 web edition of Nano Letters ("Carbon Nanotube Radio").

"Our CNT-based amplitude-modulated demodulator is effective at detecting the modulation signal up to 100 kHz" Burke tells Nanowerk. "We also successfully demonstrated our demodulator in an actual AM radio receiver operating at a carrier frequency of 1 GHz and capable of demodulating high-fidelity audio."

...Digging into their publication in the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters, Rutherglen and Burke describe how their clever application of a carbon nanotube performs the exact same function the shiny gray/silver lead sulfide crystal did in the crystal radio sets of our childhood (at least, those of us Of A Certain Age): they're leveraging the device's nonlinear voltage-to-current behavior to detect the amplitude modulation of a carrier wave, in this case a 1GHz carrier.

Now, a post-publication appendix to the ACS report by Rutherglen and Burke notes that some similar work has been done independently in as-yet-unpublished work by the group of Professor John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Doug Natelson (whose informative Nanoscale Views blog I've added to my list of links) notes that the UCI development is perhaps receiving more than its fair share of attention given that something roughly similar has been done on an even finer scale using an AFM a couple years ago, but nevertheless I tip my hat to the UCI team: this is taxpayer-supported research, and folks who might not read professional ACS publications deserve to know what their withheld wages have accomplished. Besides, nanotech is exciting, and I love the parallels with crude crystal radios and what that says about the future of this sort of thing. Nice job, folks.

NI Week "Breakthrough Innovations" Panel can now be viewed here on CarpeNano

2007-10-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

Google Video now has the Breakthrough Innovations panel from NI Week up for viewing and downloading (and, joy, embedding). And a rockin' time it was, with fascinating and insightful commentary from my fellow panelists Patricia Seybold, Prof. Andrew Hargadon of U.C. Davis, SolidWorks' Suchit Jain and National Instruments co-founder Dr. James Truchard, moderated by NI VP John Hanks. What an honor to chat with such brilliant and accomplished folks! They had many things to say about the process of innovation and how it can be fostered in organizations of all types.

It's an hour and twenty minutes, so grab some coffee and enjoy. Maybe check out my other posts about the panel at some point too: 1, 2, 3

P.S. An insane travel schedule has kept me from updating CarpeNano as much as I'd like. There's a small stack of goodies to post, so check back often... or subscribe to the free email service (at the bottom of the blog kiosk column on the right of this page).

Turning steps into escalators, nano style

2007-09-07T18:09:00.001-07:00

With the week past, it's time to kick back a little, put work aside, and maybe reflect a bit. Idly checking my web hit statistics for the week, I note a few hits from people googling my name combined with "HyperBit™" --my technology to increase the resolution of digital-to-analog converters (DACs).

First, hello to you googlers. I hope the following answers your questions. Please email me at scott.c.jordan "at" gmail.com if not.

We live in an analog world. For our digital toys to connect to the world, their bits and bytes need to be converted to old-fashioned voltages and currents. DACs are the specialized chips which do that. Now, like any digital circuit, DACs have limits in terms of the size of the biggest numbers they can digest-- this defines the number of voltage steps they can produce. Most DACs are limited to 4,096 or 65,536 steps.

Sometimes you need more. For a nanopositioner of 300 micron travel, dividing its range into 65,536 steps equates to about 5 nanometers per step. Many applications can benefit from even more (finer) steps. Until now those would require really high-performance digital nanopositioning controllers. But if you are designing your own circuit to output a voltage or using a National Instruments multifunction board (or perhaps doing something completely outside the realm of nanopositioning), you might be out of luck. Higher-resolution DACs are available but most are optimized for audio and consumer applications rather than instrumentation applications, which can lead to drawbacks. And switching out DAC chips might not be an option; you might be limited to whatever's soldered into your setup.

Here comes HyperBit™ (U.S. patent 6,950,050). Implemented either in software or hardware, it teases extra application resolution--lots of it!--out of existing DACs. It can, for example, improve the resolution of a nanopositioner by two to three orders of magnitude. While your ultimate performance limit depends on your hardware and environment, it's pretty safe to say that the DAC won't be a bottleneck anymore.

Unlike the other YouTube videos linked in this blog, the video above is my own. It uses a home-made millivoltmeter to demonstrate the technology's benefits. It runs less than two minutes; take a look. We've already published on it for piezo and MEMS nanopositioners. Besides hardware implementations, it has been implemented in LabVIEW, LabVIEW FPGA and in a DLL.

Many other mechanisms and circuits can benefit. If it looks like something your applications or designs can use, drop me a line ...before your competitor does.

Nano-diamonds by the kilogram: bricks on a pallet for nanotech

2007-09-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Diamandoids (like the animated decamantane molecule at the right) are perfect, molecular-sized diamond crystals. They require no polishing or cleaving by expert jewelers, nor (being sub-microscopic) are they necessarily a girl's best friend. But they retain signature characteristics of jewelry-store diamonds: strength, rigidity, and interesting optical and mechanical properties. Where they differ from serious bling is in their newfound abundance: ChevronTexaco researchers have developed ways of making specific diamandoid molecules in kilogram quantities with high purity and yield.

Originally observed in raw petroleum, the ability to manufacture specific diamandoids has eluded researchers until now. Suddenly they're like any industrial chemical. Potential areas of significant import include drug delivery, lubrication, microelectronics, nanomechanisms and a host of other applications, including some quite exotic ones.

But mostly, advances like this illustrate how nanotechnology is at square one. These are the figurative building blocks (and literal bricks) of a future just beyond the reach of imagination. I liken this to the advent of the transistor as a commercial commidity in the 1960s. For legions of my fellow childhood Heathkit-builders, transistors were stubby little tin-can gizmos with three wires sticking out. They had to be meticulously soldered into place one-by-one, and they weren't cheap. Who at that time could have imagined that multicore processors, iPods, the Internet, WiFi, cell phones and everything else we take for granted would be reality today? Sure, there was science-fiction and Dick Tracy's wrist-communicator, but we all knew that stuff was fiction and that anyone who really believed that such things were on the horizon was either dreaming or slightly nuts. Yet the reality just 40 years later is even more stunning. (However, I'm still waiting for my flying car.)

Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has said that the next twenty years' technological progress will equal that of the entire 20th Century. This is a good example of why he's right.

Metals go organic: Ormecon's solderable "Organic Metal" nanofilms

2007-09-01T08:53:00.001-07:00

In everyday life, metals are quite recognizable: shiny, dense, moldable, malleable, good conductors of electricity and heat, and ...well, metallic. Ores for these materials are dug up from the ground, often in oxidized form, and processed into usable materials through smelting and other methods of refinement, some of which are quite energy-intensive. Everyone knows what metals are. (Except maybe astronomers, who stubbornly insist on calling everything but hydrogen and helium a "metal.")

Not so fast. Polyaniline, a polymer (that is, a substance composed of chainlike molecules based on carbon) with promising metal-like conductivity properties was first identified back in the 1930s and discussed with increasing interest as an actual "organic metal" as far back as 1995. This organic metal differs from the metals of everyday experience in significant ways. It can't be molded or hammered into shape. It isn't mined or refined. It can't be milled or polished. Instead it has been mostly used for coatings, for example as an anti-static or anti-corrosive film. Now Small Times reports, this venerable material is the basis of a useful new nanomaterial of significance for the manufacture of electronics:

Just 50 nanometres thick, [Ormecon's] Nanofinish consists of less than 10% silver and more than 90% Ormecon's proprietary organic nanometal... Nanofinish's performance and thermal aging resistance is said to be superior to any metal or OSP finish. The company says it is in use by renowned market players such as Flextronics. The new process consumes less than 10% of the energy compared to other metallic finishes, and promises to save more than 90% of (expensive and partially noble) raw materials, says Ormecon.

Ormecon states:

...Other metallic finishes which are outperformed by Ormecon’s new nanofinish, are electroless Nickel-Gold, immersion silver and immersion tin.

They also note:

It is insoluble and unmoldable, but we succeeded in making it dispersible - the only way of processing conductive polymers and Organic Metals. We manufacture this material in form of about 10 nanometre small primary particles. They agglomerate with very strong forces to powder particles, still hard to disperse. Therefore, we provide the Organic Metal as predispersions or ready-to-use dispersions, lacquers, paints and blends for various applications in printed circuit board manufacturing, corrosion protection, antistatic and conductive surface modification, organic and polymer light emitting diodes (OLEDs, PLEDs), "plastic electronics" and many other products. This is a new kind of nanotechnology.

(Furthermore, Ormecon has reported that polyaniline materials show promise for fabricating organic LEDs and other useful microscale devices. )

It's hard to imagine a technology as seemingly old-fashioned as soldering, but that is the foundation for the manufacture of all the electronic gizmos that we take for granted. Advances there advance everything.

Changing the world, one electron at a time

2007-08-30T19:05:00.000-07:00

Nanosolar is a fascinating company and a venture to watch. Well-funded (in part by some of the guys who brought you Google), with almost 700,000 square feet (65,000 square meters) of fresh manufacturing space, this company has figured out how to leverage self-assembling nanoscale materials to create flexible, printable solar cells of high efficiency and attractive durability and cost. While some credible detractors like Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers have their money on more mature silicon-based technologies rather than newer materials like Nanosolar's Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide [CIGS], the sheer coolness of what Nanosolar has accomplished makes it a standout.

There's another reason to cheer Nanosolar: they're doing their manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the US dollar held down as a strategy for turbocharging the export economy, this is a fine strategy for a fast path to profitability today, and a welcome boost for the Bay Area's fading manufacturing fortunes.

They're not alone in pursuing novel approaches to solar energy or even flexible solar cells, but Nanosolar seems well-positioned to succeed in the perilous jump from venture to enterprise.

Patricia Seybold on the "Breakthrough Innovations" panel

2007-08-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

Patty Seybold has a detailed and perceptive post on her Outside Innovation blog regarding the NI Week Industry Experts panel on "Breakthrough Innovation", on which I was honored to serve with her:

NI’s customers are scientists and engineers who are experts in a wide array of disciplines, from nanotechnology and photo-optics to the design of alternative energy power supplies in automobiles, the control of robots and other manufacturing processes, to the design of signal processing systems on programmable embedded chips in today’s cell phones.

These engineers and scientists use NI’s virtual instrumentation software innovation toolkit, LabVIEW, to design, prototype, and deploy applications that measure real world phenomena—analog signals and physical movement—analyze these signals, describe actions that need to be taken, send out the signals to execute those actions (usually in parallel), analyze the results, and take additional actions. Whether the device being programmed is a nanorobot being used to splice genes or a spectrum analyzer being used to measure radio frequency interference, the scientist is dealing with real world phenomena in real time.

Hanging out with these real world scientists and engineers got me thinking about the future of programming as we know it today. The future of programming is a topic to which NI’s top executives have also been giving a lot of thought.

Yes, they have-- over more than two decades, starting with the very fundament of LabVIEW. So it is considerably ahead of the game in programming's new world of parallelism (concurrency) enabled by multicore processors, which are now at the heart of almost every new personal computer sold. The ability of processes to execute truly in parallel poses all sorts of new possibilities... plus big challenges for programmers who aren't so fortunate as to be using LabVIEW, which is inherently parallel.

As pundits from Bill Gates on down have opined, parallelism poses a potentially bigger revolution in software design than object-oriented programming did. Some of these same folks contend it'll be a decade before programming tools catch up. Theirs, maybe.

As a guru on innovation, Seybold recognized an important comment from LabVIEW inventor Dr. Jeff Kodosky:

“We have a successful parallel language for multicore machines today. You can exploit the performance of multicore machines now. The ultimate architecture for parallel programming is the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) and, of course, LabVIEW is already there,” Jeff Kodosky exclaimed.

That underscores a key point that is often underplayed and under-appreciated: in one smooth move three years ago, LabVIEW wrenched the reconfigurability and raw parallel-processing power of Xilinx's top-end FPGAs from the hands of specially-trained engineers and placed these capabilities in the end-user's hands. No longer just field-programmable, thanks to LabVIEW FPGAs are user-programmable.

In my own native field of scientific instrumentation, this is a truly momentous development. My customers and colleagues will discovering new things this enables for years to come.

My own first FPGA application was to fashion an easy-to-use LabVIEW interface to an instrument whose speed otherwise would have required a custom logic circuit. Next came a controller for a novel MEMS nanopositioner from MIT that implemented my patented DAC-resolution enhancement technology, HyperBit™ and Convolve, Inc's remarkable vibration-cancelling Input Shaping® technology, all operating in six degrees of freedom simultaneously. Next came a high-speed multi-axis analog interface to a nanopositioning controller that didn't have one. Next came some contributions to a customer's novel fast controls for... well, I probably shouldn't say since publication is still pending, but it involves manipulating molecules and measuring forces on a sub-sub-nanometer scale.

...Did I mention those were all done with the same NI card, with reusable, modular code that could be emailed around and ported from application to application just by dropping an icon in and wiring it together? These applications were previously unapproachable without a major custom hardware/software design effort. I did each of 'em at my desk in a few hours. Or on airplanes. Or on my lap-- I implemented HyperBit™ on the FPGA one evening while relaxing on my couch.

Spinning multiple parallel processes on an FPGA is easy, and now multicore processors offer some of the same capabilities as a standard feature of new PCs. That, folks, is a revolution.

A video of the Industry Experts panel on "Breakthrough Innovation" can be viewed at http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm -- click on "Industry Experts Panel." All the keynotes make for fascinating watching and are recommended.

Pretty much the limiting case for nanotechnology

2007-08-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

At the very frontier of nano-technology are researchers' endeavors to control and leverage the quantum nature of matter. Unlike the messily analog world we're used to, the quantum world offers the potential of orderly, defined states which can be used for fast and dense calculation and storage. Nanowerk reports on some interesting and rather beautiful work performed at IBM more than a decade ago but newly spotlighted in an art exhibit, of all things, at the United States Patent and Trademark Museum in Alexandria, Virginia:

Driven by their discovery of the STM's ability to image the wave patterns (more precisely known as the "density distribution") of electrons on the surface of a metal, IBM Scientists Michael Crommie, Chris Lutz and Don Eigler (the "artists") were compelled to take the next step -- building an electron's "quantum state" to their own design. Here they have positioned 48 iron atoms into a circular ring in order to "corral" some of the surface electrons and force them into quantum states determined by the circular corral walls. The ripples in the ring of atoms are the wave patterns of some of the electrons that were trapped in the corral. The mechanics-turned-artists were delighted to discover that they could quantitatively account for the behavior of the electrons by solving a classic problem in quantum mechanics -- a particle in a hard-wall box -- paving the way for building functional quantum states for potential use in future computer chips and other areas.

More fascinating images and discussion are posted at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html

Nanowerk notes,

IBM researchers continue using STM technology in an effort to pave the way for circuits made from atomic and molecular components. Such circuits could enable computers with hundreds of thousands of times more logic elements on a chip than today's state-of-the-art technology. That, in turn, could lead to smaller, faster, lower-power and even more portable computers and devices nobody has even imagined yet.

They also provide a nice "timeline of the legacy of IBM's Nobel Prize-winning Scanning Tunneling Microscope":

1981: Invention of the STM
1986: IBM Researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer win the Nobel Prize in
physics for inventing the STM
1990: For the first time, the ability to position individual atoms is
demonstrated by spelling out "I-B-M" using xenon atoms
1993: Quantum Corrals created
1998: Discovery of molecular wheels
2000: Discovery of the quantum mirage effect
2002: Molecule cascade created
2004: Single-atom magnetic measurement achieved
2006: Ability to control atomic magnetism achieved

Note the subscription box down on the right

2007-08-09T08:02:00.001-07:00

I set up a free (and spam-free) email thingie which will deliver fresh, steaming Carpe Nano posts directly to your inbox. Yum.

Scroll down to the right.

Welcome NI Week visitors

2007-08-09T07:55:00.001-07:00

The kindly folks who have shepherded NI Week into a hugely-attended monument to networking and collaboration this year have put a link to Carpe Nano up on their daily summary of external coverage of the event. Thanks!

Yesterday's "Industry Experts" panel on Breakthrough Innovation, in which I was so fortunate to participate (and even netted a pre-event press mention), went off well. We had some spirited discussion which I hope was as engaging for the audience as it was for those of us up on the dais. A video of the session will be available Real Soon Now. I'll provide a link when it's up.

-----

UPDATE, 30 Aug. 2007: The Industry Experts video is now online: http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm -- click on "Industry Experts Panel." More commentary on the panel and conference here.

"OAI adds nano imprint lithography option for mask aligners"

2007-08-09T05:29:00.000-07:00

Here's something clever, and good news for the nascent field of nanoimprint lithography-- the art of forming exceedingly small structures on planar substrates by, well, stamping 'em. The technology allows formation of much smaller and more sharply-defined structures than can be achieved via optical microlithography (the foundation of the semiconductor industry). Besides potentially enabling the semiconductor industry's next act in its methodical trudge along Moore's Law, the technique shows promise for forming useful patterned structures on next-generation disk-drive media and pole features for read-write heads, and for "laboratory on a chip" substrates for biomedical and homeland-security sensing. And it's an enabler for really groundbreaking new devices like the first room-temperature single-electron memory cell developed by Wei Wu at Princeton (where he studied under nanoimprint lithography pioneer Stephen Chou) and now at HP.

Now OAI, a semiconductor microlithography toolmaker, has mashed nanoimprint lithography into its mainstream tools as a swappable option, as reported by Small Times:

OAI adds nano imprint lithography option for mask aligners

August 1, 2007 -- OAI (Optical Associates Inc.) says that it has added to its mask aligners nano imprint lithography with sub-20 nm resolution. Working with Nanolithosolution Inc. (NLS), OAI is offering a nano imprint module as an option for all of the company's mask aligners -- which can then be used as imprint systems or as standard mask aligners (the module can be easily removed at any time). The module can be included with new orders or retrofit onto existing systems.... OAI's nano imprint module was developed by HP after years of research and development.

A nice solution, a fine differentiator for OAI (whose tools are touted for their flexibility), and a good way for deliberate and risk-averse chipmakers to position themselves to leverage this new technology.

Y.A.B.A.F.M.I. (Yet another brilliant AFM innovation)

2007-08-07T04:47:00.000-07:00

Atomic force microscopy is a leading tool for nanoscale studies of surfaces and objects as small as molecules and even atoms. With nanoscale features commonplace in semiconductor, data storage and life-sciences applications, AFMs are important for both research and industrial uses. These sophisticated instruments build a picture of the nano-world in much the same way that a blind man with a white cane does, using an atomic-sharp tip on a tiny spring cantilever whose motion is observed by sensitive instrumentation. But, as Nanowerk describes, researchers at Harvard and Stanford have literally put a new twist on the conventional way of doing things:

"In order to create a high speed and sensitive nanomechanical measurement tool, we have started from the most commonly used AFM technique called the tapping mode" explains [Harvard's Ozgur] Sahin. "The primary advantage of this technique is that it protects the tip and the sample during the imaging process and minimizes the interaction forces.
"For our goal of performing mechanical measurements, tapping mode also provides a unique opportunity because the sharp tip is moving back and forth against the surface and feels the variation of force during the interaction. If one can detect those forces varying with tip sample distance, one can perform a clear and detailed mechanical analysis."
Unfortunately, there are major difficulties in measuring the forces between the tip and the sample. These forces change at a rate much faster than the vibration of the cantilever, therefore the force sensing cantilever cannot respond to them. Indeed, there is a wealth of publications in the literature working on the non-linear dynamics of tapping cantilevers that seek indirect ways to measure these forces.

Hmph. I got bit by the non-linear dynamics they're talking about in a customer's advanced AFM application just ten days ago. Not being an atomic force microscopist, at first I had no idea what I was looking at and thought our instrumentation had gone bonkers. Nanowerk and Sahin continue:

"In a way, our work stands on the 'shoulders of these giants', because they have reached a very good understanding of the complicated cantilever dynamics in AFMs" says Sahin. "Nevertheless, we have taken a different approach by engineering the force sensing cantilever to measure the interaction forces directly."
The AFM cantilever has many vibration modes. Each one of these modes can act as an independent force sensor. The rapidly changing forces demand a fast (high resonance frequency) mode to be used. The problem with high resonance frequency modes is that they are stiff and do not bend easily to give a good signal.
"What we have noticed is that torsional vibration modes allow good signal levels and they have high enough resonance frequencies" says Sahin. "Unfortunately, tip sample forces do not excite torsional oscillations because the conventional cantilevers have their tips on the center line. Therefore, we designed cantilevers that have their tips off-centered. When this cantilever hits the surface, tip-sample forces generate a torque that bends the cantilever torsionally. Torsional vibrations can be detected in a commercial AFM system simultaneously with the vertical vibrations." When this cantilever is operated in conventional tapping-mode – touching the surface ever so lightly some 50,000 times per second (50 kHz) – the torsional vibrations can be simultaneously detected and translated into a time-varying tip-sample force waveform which contains detailed information about the mechanical properties of the sample.
"In principle, the speed of these measurements is limited by the oscillation frequency of the cantilever" says Sahin. "At the moment we are not fully benefiting from the speed enhancement, however, it is still more than a factor of thousand times faster than conventional mechanical measurements, yet it is much gentler to the sample.
"Improved speed enables mapping mechanical properties across a surface with nanometer resolution. I believe that in the near future we will see mechanical measurements performed within a microsecond. This will open up a new window to study time dependent phenomena at the nanoscale, such as protein folding and chemical reactions in general."

This is looking like another fundamental advance in a field that's littered with them.

Off to see the wizards

2007-08-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

The Austin American-Statesman has a nice preview summary of the NI Week confabulation which commences tomorrow in Austin. I referenced this a few days ago here on Carpe Nano while expanding on the topic of innovation.

The article is really quite a nice set of examples of how innovation can be driven by customers and achieved by artful incrementalism and cross-pollination:

...because NI Week brings together a large group of LabView's most loyal users, [Omid] Sojoodi, a senior group manager, and [Aljosa] Vrancic, a principal engineer, use it to get feedback on what they've done and what they might do next.

"We'll have closed-door sessions with our power users and talk about some of our products in development," Sojoodi said. "We target our power users, and they really help shape some of the more specific features we add."

The article goes on to quote Yours Truly advocating collusion:

Scott Jordan will be one of the more than 2,000 people expected to come to Austin for NI Week. He's director of nanopositioning at Physik Instrumente-USA and one of National Instruments' earliest customers.
Jordan will head a panel called "Breakthrough Innovation" on Wednesday, discussing different ways people have applied National Instruments' technologies. Those sort of interactions make NI Week an annual stop, he said.

"There's a chance to interact, to collide and to collude with your fellow LabView users, and that's huge," he said. "There's nothing like that anywhere else in the industry."

...Actually, I'm not heading the panel, just one o' the guys, but I'll do my best to help make it hop.

The point is: after a good conference, one walks away with (among other things) the germs of new ideas, new ways of doing things, new perceptions on market needs and trends, new contacts with bright folks who can help you do things with a new twist. Played right, those can propel exploration and development in unanticipated directions.

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell

2007-08-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Hat-tip to StudioDaily.com for helping publicize a remarkable animation of life on the nano scale:

Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

The StudioDaily.com page referenced above has links to high-definition versions of this remarkable video. For blog purposes it was gratifying to find the whole thing posted on YouTube. The conception and content by were by Alain Viel and Robert A. Lue, and the animation was composed by John Liebler/XVIVO. See http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/ for more information.

Virus 'hybrids' can act as nanoscale memory devices

2007-08-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

NewScientistTech reports on a fascinating mash-up of viruses and quantum dots (nanoscale spheroids of selected materials including semiconductor atoms which yield remarkable electro-optic properties due to quantum containment effects). This research was performed at the University of California, Riverside, and published in a paper entitled "Microscale memory characteristics of virus-quantum dot hybrids" in Applied Physics Letters.

A new type of memory device has been made by researchers in the US and Italy by attaching individual viruses to tiny specks of semiconducting material called quantum dots. The "hybrid" material could be used to develop biocompatible electronics and offer a cheap and simple way to make high-density memory chips, the researchers say... "Interactions between organic and inorganic particles are quite fascinating," team leader [Mihri] Ozkan told New Scientist. "In our case, finding the memory effect was quite unexpected because each nanoparticle does not have any memory characteristics on its own, but only when connected as a hybrid."
Non-volatile memory
Ozkan and co-workers began by depositing cosahedral cowpea mosaic viruses (CPMV) on quantum dots (made of cadmium selenide and zinc sulphide) using different binding sites on the virus' capsid, or outer shell. CPMV, a plant virus that is harmless to humans, is about 30 nanometres across and consists of a capsid with an RNA core. Next, the researchers embedded the hybrids into a polymer matrix and sandwiched them between two conducting electrodes for testing. They found that each hybrid unit can be operated as a memory device with conductive states that can be switched between high and low, corresponding to a 1 and a 0, by applying a low voltage. These states are "non-volatile", meaning data is stored even when the power is switched off.

Remarkable.

"The struggle of nanotechnology companies to create value"

2007-07-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

Nanowerk has an interesting analysis of nanotech public stock performance, accompanied by a fascinating graph and some close looks at some recent players. As they note,

If you have been an investor in nanotechnology companies and been lured by the promised riches, the picture doesn't look very pretty right now... and the performance gap between the Dow Jones and the nanotechnology index funds has widened significantly... Of course, individual nanotechnology stocks have done better, but then, some have done much worse. That brings us to the question: What will it take for nanotechnology, taken as a set of enabling technologies, to realize its disruptive potential and create value for nanotechnology companies? An interesting answer can be found in an analysis of the recent Unidym and Carbon Nanotechnologies merger. Growth in the sector through consolidation may enable the creation of companies with the critical mass necessary to finally get public investors really excited about nanotechnology.
Just a brief recap on the performance of the nanotechnology indices. The three major exchange-quoted indexes are the ISE-CCM Nanotechnology Index (launched in late 2005; symbol $TNY), the Lux Nanotechnology Index (launched in late 2005; symbol $LUXNI), and the Merrill Lynch Nanotech Index (launched in early 2005; symbol $NNZ). We took November 2005 as the starting point (that's when TNY and LUXNI were launched) and mapped against the Dow Jones Industrial Index.

The graph isn't pretty. But, it's instructive to look back at the first days of earlier tech booms. The PC and software boom of the mid-to-late '80s, for example, certainly ran in similar tracks of consolidation, the search for critical mass, high fliers who crashed (Eagle, Kaypro, Osborne, Ashton-Tate...) and huge rewards for investors who bet on the right horses (Apple, Microsoft...). And the first list is much longer than the second. Why should this revolution be any different?

Another point: is it really advisable for investors to "[take nanotechnology] as a set of enabling technologies"? As Andrew Hargadon has deduced (see my earlier Carpe Nano post), most big advancements are recombinant in nature rather than stand-alone lightning-strikes, and even the lightning-strikes of legend were more often the result of cross-pollination than dramatic new synthesis. The lesson there is for investors to seek catalytic, market-focused opportunities rather than niche-y, technology-specific wanna-be game-changers.

Nanowerk continues:

On April 23, 2007, Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc. (CNI), a Texas-based manufacturer of carbon nanotubes and Unidym, a developer of nanotube-based electronics in Silicon Valley, announced the merger of the two companies. The combined company, called Unidym, will be operated as a majority-owned subsidiary of Arrowhead Research.

"This transaction should be viewed as an important sign of the growing maturity of the nanotechnology business community" Ruben Serrato tells Nanowerk. "The pooling of investment capital, alignment of strategy and integration of materials and device production reflect a move away from early technology arrogance towards the beginning of a more sober market approach necessary for the commercialization of nanomaterials."...

If Nanowerk is correct, then capitalism is doing its job, and that's a good thing.

DNA Replication, up close and personal

2007-07-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

This animation illuminates how the molecular basis of life is understood through today's research, with profound implications for medicine. Blogger "Xantox" explains of this video from The Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Australia,

Using computer animation based on molecular research it is possible to see how DNA is actually copied in living cells. This animation shows the “assembly line” of biochemical machines which pull apart the DNA double helix and output a copy of each strand. The DNA to be copied enters the whirling blue molecular machine, called helicase, which spins it as fast as a jet engine as it unwinds the double helix into two strands. One strand is copied continuously, and can be seen spooling off on the other side. Things are not so simple for the other strand, because it must be copied backwards, so it is drawn out repeatedly in loops and copied one section at a time. The end result is two new DNA molecules.

What you see here is occurring countless billions of times in your body right now. It gets even more wondrous: research by Steven Block and his students and post-docs at Stanford University show that processes like this essentially edit their own work. The discovery mechanism for all this is the astonishing nanotech tool of optical tweezers. See my article on that from Biophotonics International here.

They get it.

2007-07-24T22:15:00.000-07:00

Today, no commentary on a fast-birthing technical field like nanotechnology a can be complete without understanding how the ecosystem National Instruments has built on its LabVIEW platform impacts each enterprise's development, validation, production, and the process of innovation.

More than two decades after its introduction, LabVIEW's consequences for tech enterprises range from the stark (for example, ambitions of selling hardware to a technical or systems-integration community today often hinge on its LabVIEW-compatibility) to the vaguely-acknowledged (LabVIEW's global community as a crucible for innovation; LabVIEW's development speed as a competitive edge; LabVIEW's role in reducing the great unfunded liability of support; LabVIEW's libraries as facilitators for technological cross-pollination; etc., etc.).

NI's trademark is "The Software is The Instrument," and while they've certainly delivered with a comprehensive family of products and libraries, there's more to it than that, just as there's more to a university than its buildings and curriculum, more to a city than its neighborhoods and nightclubs, more to a country than its borders and monuments. Within each of these lies a certain abstraction, a culture, a churn and an energy which makes things happen.

As a LabVIEW user since its earliest version and the holder of several LabVIEW-based patents, I've been highly honored to join the Industry Experts discussion panel at the NI Week conference in Austin in early August. The topic is Breakthrough Innovation, and the panelists will discuss how innovation takes place.

When my interest was solicited, I replied:

Looking back, NI has a track record for providing tools for folks like me to devise, develop and deploy our own wild ideas. NI has made it accessible for non-specialists to interface with and coordinate instruments, construct virtual instrumentation, and now construct their own intelligent instrumentation including custom silicon logic that runs processes synchronously and truly in parallel. Each of these represents an enabler for innovation in its own right. And I'm struck that all have been brought together under the LabVIEW framework. Maybe "The Architecture Is The Innovation"? Enabling folks to cross disciplinary boundaries and mash solutions together into groundbreaking new hybrids is one of its key benefits-- and that speaks to the "networking" aspect that is foundational to NI Week.
So: Can innovation be made to happen, and what role does the LabVIEW architecture play in that? (Or is innovation always like lightning striking, with LabVIEW playing no more of a role than a screwdriver?) Also, given that organizational, interpersonal and managerial practices can strangle innovation in its crib, what are the business-model enablers for innovation? In particular, how can cross-pollination across diverse fields happen, and how can such mash-ups be nurtured in a way that swiftly benefits customers and the bottom line?

Well. Turns out the other panelists are:

Andrew Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen
Suchit Jain, Vice President of Strategy, SolidWorks Corporation
Patty Seybold, author of Outside Innovation
Dr. James Truchard, National Instruments CEO and Co-Founder

What a rockin' group! Dr. T, of course, I first met more than twenty years ago; no finer businessman walks this earth. Jain has been very visible in the area of design and analysis software and should have much to say on how to facilitate innovation, based on his efforts to drive new tools for innovation into communities of engineers used to doing things the tried-and-true way.

But though I'd heard of Hargadon and Seybold, they were unfamiliar to me. So I've been reading up.

Frankly (and in vivid contrast to the turgid, disconnected case-analyses too typical of scholars of management) some of what they've written has made me pause and exclaim "Whoa! These folks have been reading my mind!" My own proudest work has occurred when my group somehow stumbled backwards into living examples of their customer-partnered (Seybold), combinatorial and networked (Hargadon) methodologies: when we chanced to put the customer in the driver's seat for strategy and design, when innovation followed from mashing stuff together, and when we relied on a team approach which crossed organizational, technical and social boundaries. Often we'd missed the memo that something was impossible. And that's key, too.

Hargadon and Seybold's contribution is to illuminate and illustrate the process of innovation with examples and cogent distillation. Consider the following from the foreword to Hargadon's book, in which Stanford's Kathleen Eisenhardt, coauthor of Competing on the Edge, succinctly summarizes some of its key points:

"...From my vantage point two observations are crucial. The first is that innovation is the result of synthesizing, or 'bridging,' ideas from different domains... In short, extraordinary innovations are often the result of recombinant invention.

"The concept of bridging reveals a couple of counterintuitive points. First, whereas it may be appealing to focus on the future, breakthrough innovation depends on exploiting the past... A second counterintuitive point is that organizing structure can dominate individual creativity. ...Successful innovators are not really more gifted or creative than the rest of us. Rather, they simply better exploit the networked structure of ideas within unique organizational frameworks.

"The other crucial observation is that breakthrough innovations depend on 'building' communities..."

Exactly right.

Both Hargadon and Seybold maintain insightful and energetic blogs. See the links in my "Recommended Reading" list.

NI Week is August 7-9 in Austin and is stuffed with technical sessions and strategic discussions. The Breakthrough Innovation panel is Wednesday afternoon; check the website a week or so in advance for schedule details. It should be a blast. Hope you can join us.

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UPDATE: 30 August 2007: The Industry Experts panel is now available as an online video: http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm ...click on the "Industry Experts" button.

Nanotubes' amazing little brother

2007-07-24T00:17:00.000-07:00

Think of graphene as a carbon nanotube slit lengthwise and laid flat, like a ribbon. First synthesized just three years ago, my sense from research reports to-date is that it may be more tractable as an interconnect material than nanotubes, and more readily manufacturable. As with carbon nanotubes, its electrical properties are remarkable, and it would not surprise me to see this material in microchips within a decade. If the process and manufacturing challenges can be licked--and they will be if the promise is what it seems to be--then the payback in terms of circuit speed and energy savings will be substantial. When you meet those gloom-and-doomers who beset every conversation with predictions of woe, just point them at this stuff, which looks likely to let us do more with less. Way more, with way less.

Researchers in both industry and academia are looking for alternative materials to replace copper as interconnects. Graphene could be a possible successor to copper, Nayak said, because of metallic graphene’s excellent conductivity. Even at room temperature, electrons pass effortlessly, near the speed of light and with little resistance, through metallic graphene. This would almost ensure a graphene interconnect would stay much cooler than a copper interconnect of the same size.

Nano forecast, hold the hype

2007-07-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

The folks at Nanowerk have compiled a readable, sober overview of "Forecasting Nanotechnology." Worth a read, and they make laudable use of hyperlinks to some interesting publications, analysis and commentary.

Old Spice smells like... a cure

2007-07-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

Curcumin is worth googling about. It may well be the next wonder drug. Its nanotech connection is in some research being performed at Johns Hopkins:

Anirban Maitra, a professor of pathology and oncology at Johns Hopkins, and his collaborators in Delhi--including his father, Amarnath Maitra, a professor of chemistry--used special polymers to synthesize tiny nanoparticles about 50 nanometers in diameter. The particles have hydrophobic interiors and hydrophilic exteriors. The hydrophobic component holds the curcumin, while the hydrophilic exteriors make the particles soluble. This way, they can pass easily from the gut to the bloodstream. Once in the blood, the curcumin leaks out as the polymers slowly degrade.

This is a fine example of how nanomaterial technologies can provide new properties and facilitate new promise, even for something as venerable as curry spice.

Good-bye to the Diffraction Limit?

2007-07-23T23:09:00.000-07:00

I love the sound of laws of physics wailing in the morning. Check this out:

The laws of physics dictate that the lenses used to direct light beams cannot focus them onto a spot whose diameter is less than half the light's wavelength... Now Harvard University electrical engineers led by Kenneth Crozier and Federico Capasso have discovered a simple process that could bring the benefits of tightly focused light beams to commercial applications. By adding nanoscale "optical antennas" to a commercially available laser, Crozier and Capasso have focused infrared light onto a spot just 40 nanometers wide--one-twentieth the light's wavelength.

Remarkable. There's just gobs of applications this could enable.

I say it all the time but it bears repeating: we ain't seen nothin' yet, folks. Nano is big.

"Nanotech Disappoints in Europe"

2007-07-23T20:33:00.000-07:00

For starters, this recent article in Business Week goes to the heart of some fundamental confusion about this thing we call nanotechnology: what in blazes is it?

Key quote:

...despite massive injections of government money, analysts say Europe is actually doing a worse job of commercializing nanotech than other regions. According to Tim Harper, a nanotechnology specialist at London consultancy Cientifica, while European firms have emphasized research into materials such as nanotubes and nanopowders, U.S. startups have focused more on real-world applications for the technology.

In layman's terms, that has translated into a handful of U.S. products that frankly seem almost trivial, such as stain-resistant trousers and more durable tennis balls. But the U.S. also is laying the groundwork for success in years to come by wringing out about twice as many nanotech patents as Europe has from roughly similar levels of public research funding, says Spinverse, a Finnish consultancy that advises governments and startups on nanotechnology.

Early on, author Jennifer Schenker's definition of "nanotechnology" makes good sense: "the cutting-edge science of manipulating materials and microscopic devices at the atomic level." Yet she seems to forget that definition after it appears in the first paragraph. From then on, her focus is on the development of novel materials, period, and how disappointing that has been for European businesses.

But what of European powerhouses such as semiconductor toolmakers ASML or Zeiss? Are we to regard their relentless pursuit of feature sizes of a few dozen nanometers as something other than "nanotech"? What of the groundbreaking video-rate atomic force microscopes from the UK's Infinitesima, or the nanoscale metrology breakthroughs from Renishaw or Heidenhain? What about Germany's Physik Instrumente (full disclosure: my employer), by far the world's dominant nanopositioning manufacturer for industry and research? Or Germany's Ormecon, whose new solderable trace material--90% organic nanometal--offers immense energy savings for circuit-board usage? There are dozens and dozens of examples.

The issue isn't that these success stories don't involve "nano." Clearly they do. Instead, it relates to two problems:

First is the press' penchant for nay-saying. There's little risk in ridiculing a mighty endeavor as failed (especially one that is highly touted or--let's face it--over-hyped), and readers eat it up whether or not such negativity is unwarranted or premature. After all, most readers don't attempt mighty endeavors, else they'd be in the stories rather than reading them. I'd remind the author, "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." [T. Roosevelt] Such appreciation is too rare in journalism today; writers seem to find it mawkish and sentimental, rather than essential to human progress.

The second problem lies in the hidden premise in Schenker's fifth paragraph, already quoted above. Take another look: "Yet despite massive injections of government money, analysts say Europe is actually doing a worse job of commercializing nanotech than other regions." [Emphasis is mine.] The blunt fact is, governments are lousy at investing because it's not their money. Inherent in governmental investing is a perversion of the risk/reward equation. It also percolates a top-down approach to the marketplace which can disconnect managers from customers. Changing Schenker's "Yet despite" to "Because of" illuminates a different premise that just might hold some merit.

Happily, towards the end of the article, Schenker gets it right:

"Europe's weaker entrepreneurial culture also hurts startup activity. When nanotech companies are formed in Europe they often lack clear business models and exit strategies, and their teams tend to be short on commercial experience. That's one reason Europe gets a proportionally smaller share of global nanotechnology venture capital investment, according to Spinverse. And though public funding makes up some of the difference, it doesn't offer venture capital's other benefits, including strong industry knowledge and networking."

Even more happily, there is good reason to expect that Europe's "weaker entrepreneurial culture" is strengthening steadily. I look forward to the day when Business Week salutes European entrepreneurs' triumph of high achievement while exalting those who failed while daring greatly.

Meanwhile, if you want to see someone succeeding at mighty endeavors in the nano-materials arena that Business Week seems to think is the whole extent of nanotechnology, read about David Soane. I met him and his charming wife Zoya last Fall at the 4th International Symposium on Nanomanufacturing, where he gave the concluding keynote address, and could not have been more impressed, nor more confident of his ventures' success.

The macroeconomic situation -- Exchange rates

2007-07-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

The U.S. is in its fifth year of a competitive-ness turnaround thanks to the "weak" dollar, which has benefited exporters (and penalized importers). What's often missing from the discussion is historical context. Today's "weak" dollar (and I do detest that loaded adjective) represents something of a return to historic norms. This graph, from the National Association for Business Economics, provides some perspective. They note it is "from the latest NABE Outlook, from November, 2006, and shows the panel's forecast for the US dollar". The graph is entitled, "US Dollar Exchange Rate: Trade-weighted broad currency index." The NABE concludes, "The panel continues to see some modest softening in the dollar, which may help to improve the trade picture. The dollar is expected to fall on a trade-weighted basis from 97.0 in 2006 to 95.3 in 2007, and drop from an average of $1.26 per Euro in 2006 to $1.28 next year." As we see now, that prediction was conservative, with the euro at $1.38 today. (Of course, countries whose currencies are tied to the U.S. dollar have seen their global competitiveness improved, too-- notably China.)

For nanotech ventures, this is a welcome trend for their export ambitions.