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Welcome to the November 2008 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter
STORIES |
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This development of this new technique has been led by Amir Hirsa, professor and associate department head for graduate studies in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer. So how did the researchers build these lenses? The lens is made up of a pair of water droplets, which vibrate back and forth upon exposure to a high-frequency sound, and in turn change the focus of the lens. By using imaging software to automatically capture in-focus frames and discard any out of focus frames, the researchers can create streaming images from lightweight, low-cost, high-fidelity miniature cameras.
In fact, it doesn't look like a camera lens. By passing light through these droplets, the device is transformed into a miniature camera lens. As the water droplets move back and forth through the cylinder, the lens moves in and out of focus, depending on how close it is to the object. The size of the droplets is the key to how fast they oscillate. Hirsa said that with small enough apertures and properly selected liquid volumes, he should be able to create a lens that oscillates as fast as 100,000 times per second and still be able to effectively capture those images.
This new process for creating features on silicon wafers that are between five and 20 nanometers thick has been developed by a multidisciplinary team led by Craig Hawker, materials professor and director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UCSB and the members of his research group. Hawker describes the BCP approach. "'We've come up with this new blending approach, called block co-polymer lithography, or BCP. It essentially relies on a natural self-assembly process. Just like proteins in the body, these molecules come together and self assemble into a pattern. And so we use that pattern as our lithographic tool, to make patterns on the silicon wafer.' 'With this strategy, we can make many more features,' said Hawker, 'and hence we can pack the transistors closer together and everything else closer together -- using this new form of lithography.'"
This new process has been designed to be compatible with current manufacturing techniques, so semiconductor manufacturers could use it without losing their previous investments. These square arrays hold particular promise for simplicity of addressability and circuit interconnection in integrated circuit manufacturing and nanotechnology.
This DNA chip may allow physicians, crime scene investigators, pharmacists, even the general public, to quickly and inexpensively conduct DNA tests from almost anywhere, without need for a complex and expensive central laboratory. Landers said that with his a lab-on-a-chip, it takes just 30 minutes to do the work it would take three technicians and three instruments to complete in a week. It would also simplify genetic testing and the work of crime scene investigators. They could collect and analyze even a tiny sample of blood or semen on the scene, enter the finding into a genetic database, and possibly identify the perpetrator very shortly after a crime has occurred. Likewise, agricultural biotechnologists could do very rapid genetic analysis on thousands of hybrid plants that have desirable properties such as drought and disease resistance. Landers comments "we can now do lab work in volumes that are thousands of times smaller than would normally be used in a regular lab set-up, and can do it up to 100 times faster. As we improve our techniques and capabilities, the costs of fabricating these micro-analysis devices will drop enough to employ them routinely in a wide variety of settings."
Note some comments from Dr Liz Burd, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Dean in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. "Our vision is that every desk in school in 10 years time will be interactive. IT in schools is an exciting prospect - our system is very similar to the type of interface shown as a vision of the future in the TV series Star Trek! We can now by-pass the move-to-use whiteboard. The new desk can be both a screen and a keyboard, it can act like a multi-touch whiteboard and several students can use it at once. It offers fantastic scope for more participative teaching and learning." Another researcher involved in the project Dr Andrew Hatch added, "It changes the move-to-use principle; instead the computer becomes part of the desk. It's a practical change that will provide a creative interface for life-long learning for all students!" The team doesn't know when their system becomes available. But they said that the software will be available to schools for free as open source code.
Paperless boarding passes are expanding overseas, too. Last month, Lufthansa began allowing passengers to use the passes on all 1,000 of its daily flights from Germany to other European destinations. Air France, KLM and smaller European airlines also use paperless boarding passes. "Within two to four years, it's going to be standard across Europe," said Oliver Wagner, a vice president of Lufthansa. The International Air Transport Association, an airline trade group that has created global criteria for boarding passes, recently added the TSA security requirement to its standard for paperless passes.
Buckypaper is made from tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. Due to its unique properties, it is envisioned as a wondrous new material for light, energy-efficient aircraft and automobiles, more powerful computers, improved TV screens and many other products. So far, buckypaper can be made at only a fraction of its potential strength, in small quantities and at a high price. The Florida State researchers are developing manufacturing techniques that soon may make it competitive with the best composite materials now available. "If this thing goes into production, this very well could be a very, very game-changing or revolutionary technology to the aerospace business," said Les Kramer, chief technologist for Lockheed Martin."
"All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward as sort of Holy Grails," said Wade Adams, a scientist at Rice University. That idea that there is great future promise for buckypaper and other derivatives of the ultra-tiny cylinders known as carbon nanotubes has been floated for years now. However, researchers at Florida State University say they have made important progress that may soon turn hype into reality.
The figure comes from monitoring what Web server software is in use to deliver Web pages to people's browsers. The top two packages are Apache and Microsoft's Internet Information Services, but Google has been catching up since. Netcraft found 182 million Web sites total, of which 10.5 million used Google's software. Apache ran 91.5 million of them, and Microsoft's IIS ran 62.8 million. That gives Google about 5.7 percent share, according to Netcraft. But the fraction rises higher to 10.6 percent when measuring active sites, which screens out a lot of domains that just have token Web pages with no real content. According to a Google spokesperson, 'The Google Web server is a custom-built server that runs on Linux.'
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