Solar cells made from common materials
Solar cells for everyone
Courtesy Dominic
Solar cells produce less than 1/1000 of the Earth's electricity. This is mainly because they are expensive and are made from rare, hard to obtain materials.
An IBM research team, managed by David Mitzi, is working on photovoltaic cells that are made from common materials.
The new solar cells are also cheaper to manufacture, using a “printing” technique that uses a hydrazine solution containing copper and tin with nanoparticles of zinc dispersed within it. The solution is then spin-coated and heat treated in the presence of selenium or sulfur vapor. PhysOrg
9.6% Efficiency
This new material, called kesterite, was 6.8% efficient in 2009. IBM increased the efficiency to 9.8% and is planning to increase the efficiency above 11 per cent, which is equal to or better than the traditional solar cells.
Abstract of published paper: High-Efficiency Solar Cell with Earth-Abundant Liquid-Processed Absorber Advanced Materials
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Graphene
Courtesy Carbophiliac
Graphene is great
Graphene is a single atom thick layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb like arrangement (read more about graphene here in ScienceBuzz.org)
Graphene transistors are the fastest
Transistors are like valves that can turn the flow of electricity off and on. Computers can use transistors and logic circuits to solve all kinds of problems. These problems can be solved faster if the transistors can turn on and off faster. Transistors made out of graphene now can switch on and off 100 billion times per second (100 GigaHertz). State-of-the-art silicon transistors of the same gate length have a switching frequency of about 40 GigaHertz.
IBM develops next-generation transistors
IBM just announced their breakthrough in the magazine Science.
Uniform and high-quality graphene wafers were synthesized by thermal decomposition of a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate. The graphene transistor itself utilized a metal top-gate architecture and a novel gate insulator stack involving a polymer and a high dielectric constant oxide. The gate length was modest, 240 nanometers, leaving plenty of space for further optimization of its performance by scaling down the gate length. ScienceDaily
Reverse engineering the brain
Courtesy Thomas Schultz
Engineering computers that can think
Even simple brains, like those in a mouse, are amazing. A brain the size of a thimble that requires almost no energy, can navigate through mazes, survive in severe weather, or escape from a cat. Will we ever create a computer capable of such adaptable and creative "thinking"? One approach is to reverse engineer the brain of a mouse, rat, or cat.
Computer simulation achieves cat brain complexity
Dharmendra S. Modha is a team leader at IBM who is attempting to understand and build such a brain as cheaply as possible. Their latest achievement is a brain simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.
Synapses are the key
Synapses are junctions between neurons and a key to how a brain learns. The strength of the chemical reactions within the synapses changes as the animal interacts with the environment These synaptic junctions are thought to encode our individual experience.
The problem with today's computers
Regular computer architecture has a separation between computation and memory.
“Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand. Thus programming is basically planning and detailing the enormous traffic of words through the von Neumann bottleneck, and much of that traffic concerns not significant data itself, but where to find it.”
DARPA's SyNAPSE program
The goal of a DARPA program known as SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) is to create new electronics hardware and architecture that can understand, adapt and respond to a a changing environment.
What is cognitive computing?
Cognitive computing is the quest to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse-engineering the computational function of the brain.
There is no definition or specification of the human mind. But, we understand it as a collection of processes of sensation, perception, action, cognition, emotion, and interaction. Yet, the mind seems to integrate sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell effortlessly into a coherent whole, and to act in a context-dependent way in a changing, uncertain environment. The mind effortless creates categories of time, space, and object, and interrelationships between these.
Learn more about cognitive computing
- Dharmendra Modha describes IBM's research in Whole Brain Emulation and their plans to simulate the brain by 2018 (video at Singularity Institute)
- Dharmendra S Modha's Cognitive Computing Blog
- Modha's cognitive computing page at IBM Research
- IBM Nov 18, 2009 press release about cognitive computing progress using their BlueGene supercomputer and BlueMatter programming algorithm in modeling cortical simulations of a complexity equal to a cat's brain.
Fortran punch card: I remember punching out code on hundreds of these cards.
Courtesy Arnold Reinhold Oct 15, 1956, John W. Backus published a manual explaining a new way to program computers.
“John Backus and his Fortran project members almost single-handedly invented the ideas of both programming languages and (optimizing) compilers as we know them today." Wired
Instead of compiling complex machine code which tooks weeks, Fortran code could be written in hours and was much easier.
I was even able to learn Fortran back in the late 60's. It even satisfied my foreign language requirement!
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Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand, pictured for first time
Read more about this at MailOnline or read the IBM Zurich press release.
We demonstrate imaging of molecules with unprecedented atomic resolution by probing the short-range chemical forces with use of noncontact atomic force microscopy. The key step is functionalizing the microscope’s tip apex with suitable, atomically well-defined terminations, such as CO molecules. Science Magazine
Growing computers with DNA
Scientists from California Institute of Technology and IBM have for the first time coaxed components made from DNA to self organize in a way that could serve as a template upon which additional components like wires and switches could attach.
This technique, which "grows" nano circuits rather than "tooling" them, could result in smaller circuits and save millions of dollars.
Learn more at SiliconValley.com:
IBM scientists take big step toward DNA microchips
3D microchip cooling system: H2O in a cooling container (purple) is pumped through spaces between the chip's layers (orange).
Courtesy IBMIBM scientists in Europe announced this week that they’re working on a 3D stacked microchip that will use water running through tiny micropipes as thin as a human hair to transfer heat away from the circuits.
As integrated circuits get smaller and more sophisticated, cooling becomes a real issue, and so far water-cooling seems to be the most efficient solution.
3D chips have their circuits stacked vertically rather than side-by-side. This allows information to travel much more efficiently between them. But the gain in processing speed also generates a tremendous amount of heat. IBM’s solution is to interweave the chip layers with tiny micropipes that will move water throughout the internal workings and carry the heat elsewhere. Silicon and silicon oxide hermetically seal off the tiny 50 microns-wide pipes from other chip components to prevent against an electrical short.
The water-cooled technology is not a new concept – both IBM and Hewlett-Packard have used the liquid to cool some of their mainframe supercomputers. In fact, just this past April, IBM announced a new supercomputer that cools its processors with water. Here's a video about that.
But the idea is moving now to the desktop PC. (Water-cooled technology has been used in some versions of Apple's Power Mac G5 computer but the microchips were standard configuration, and not arrayed in a three-dimensional vertical formation.)
Scientists from both the IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin are involved in the project, and the company believes the new micropipe technology could appear in products as early as five years from now.
Hard drive cost 3,000x cheaper
Fortran punch card
Courtesy Arnold ReinholdI bought a hard drive yesterday that can store a million MB of data for $202. That is about 20 cents per megabyte. My first hard drive purchase cost over $600 for just one megabyte.
First computer "bugs"
The first computer I got to play with used relays. I programmed it by moving wires creating a circuit called a "flip flop" that could play tic-tac-toe. The relays used electromagnets to open and close electrical contacts and if a bug got in between the contacts the program failed to work and had to be "debugged".
Paper punch programming
When I switched majors in college from engineering into education I needed to take a foreign language. Luckily I was allowed to use my class in Fortran (a computer language) to qualify. In the Fortran coarse we stored instruction data on punch cards. The holes in the cards allowed electrical contact between appropriate circuits within a huge mainframe computer.
Magnetic tape data storage
Before I had enough money to buy that first hard drive, I used magnetic tape. Audio pulses on a regular audio cassette would be converted to connections being made within an integrated circuit comprised of millions of transistor switching circuits.
IBM calls new data storage, "racetrack"
Soon personal memory devices will hold thousands of movies, run for weeks on one battery, and will last for decades.
IBM just announced another breakthrough in data storage that could lead to electronic devices capable of storing far more data in the same amount of space than is possible today, with lightning-fast boot times, far lower cost and unprecedented stability and durability.
To learn more, click on the video below.
Source: IBM Press release
IBM computer, Deep Blue defeats chess master Garry Kasparov on May 11, 1997. Read Wired interview with coder here.
Molecular memory: photo from Wikipedia commons
IBM memory the size of one molecule
Electronic memory circuits "remember" by switching between two distinct conductive states, (on or off). These conductive states need to be stable and allow non-destructive sensing of their bit state. In the August 4 issue of SMALL, IBM researchers Heike Riel and Emanuel Lörtscher reported on such a single-molecule switch and memory element.
With dimensions of a single molecule on the order of one nanometer (one millionth of a millimeter), molecular electronics redefines the ultimate limit of miniaturization far beyond that of today's silicon-based technology(100 X smaller).
How small can we go?
Whenever memory technology appears to approach physical limitations, a new paradigm allows ever smaller memories. The evolution of memory started with electromechanical relays. Then came vacuum tubes, transistors, ferrite cores, integrated circuits, magnetic tapes and discs, optical discs, and holographic discs. Now we have memory the size of a molecule. Will atom sized memory be next?
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