Watching the dawn of a new technology is sure exciting. When I was a student at UMASS I remember hearing about the invention of the blue/violet LED, which was followed by the white LED, which is just a blue/violet LED painted in phosphors. That was well less than two decades ago. I knew it would be widespread technology back then, and it has been amazing to see how fast it went from lab to mass production.
LEDs have started to change the whole way the world looks, and will continue to do so. Watch an old movie wherever they show lighting -- all those neon signs in shop windows, the bulb-behind-plastic-button control panels in the old scifi movies -- you can instantly tell the footage is old before you even see an actor on the screen. It just feels old.
Here's another technology that will change the way the world looks, even though you'll probably never actually see one face to face.
http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800561469_480200_NT_b2dceaa5.HTM
A team of Duke University chemists has modified a method for growing long, straight, numerous and well-aligned carbon cylinders only a few atoms thick that paves the way for manufacturing reliable electronic nanocircuits.
After making the nanotubes by chemical vapor deposition in a small furnace set to a temperature of 900°C, the researchers assembled some of them into field-effect transistors to test their electronic properties.
"I think it's the holy grail for the field," Liu said. "Every piece is now there, including the control of location, orientation and electronic properties all together. We are positioned to make large numbers of electronic devices such as high-current field-effect transistors and sensors."
What they are saying is they have figured out how to make a neat row of carbon nanotubes -- lots of them lined up side by side. While a few of them lined up side by side can help make much smaller, more powerful, and less power hungry computers, lots of them lined up in a row can make a high current device called a FET.
So what is a "high current FET?"
Let's put it this way. Every computer, compact fluorescent bulb, uninterruptible power supply, audio-visual gadget -- just about everything that has advanced electronics in it, has to convert the power from the plug into a more digestible form. Even in a laptop powered on a battery, still, the power has to be smoothed and chewed, many times, because different parts of the computer have different needs. Inevitably, some of it gets wasted in the process.
These days we use a hybrid transistor called and IBGT for that. These days, in off the shelf equipment, we waste 10 to 15% of the power we use every time we have to convert it.
Before that we had the plain old FET. Back then we used to waste 15 to 25% of the power we used.
Back in what seems like ancient times, we used very simple transformer and rectifier circuits, and many times something called linear regulators. Well let's just say we wasted a whole lot of electricity back then.
These new FETs will not be just a nudge up to 5-10%, but two steps up from where we are now. We'll be under 5% wasted power when these hit the market. This one invention will shave a few percent of the total U.S. residential energy consumption.
Before you say "meh, just a few percent?" consider this:
If we are going to have a "smart grid" to allow distributed power generation from individually and community owned renewable resources, we're going to be doing a whole lot more power converting -- back and forth as power is moved up and down power lines instead of just going down. Somewhere in some board room, some bean counter is deciding how fast a power company can smarten up their grid. Among the numbers he is crunching is the amount of energy that is wasted if a power company borrows electricity for ten minutes from a plug-in hybrid car parked in joe six pack's garage. It will actually be a pretty important number in the equation...
By the way. Here's a word you'll be hearing a lot as carbon nanotubes become more and more important -- "chirality." Here's what that is. Take a two cans of soda and a sheet of bubble wrap. Cut a strip 3 bubbles wide from the bubble wrap. Cut another strip 4 bubbles wide. Now wrap one strip around each soda can snugly in a spiral, lining up the bubbles at the edges. See how the rows of bubbles line up differently? That's chirality.
As it turns out you can grow carbon nanotubes with a lot of different chiralities. Some of them will behave like a metal wire, and others will behave like a glass wire. Within those two groups there are other more subtle differences in the properties of nanotubes -- all just because they spiral around in different ways from one another. Figuring out how to manipulate and exploit these differences is one of the fascinating things scientists are up to these days.
And even though you can't even see the stuff they are working on with visible light, no matter how powerful a microscope you have, it's that work that enables the stuff you use today, and what tomorrow's skylines, streets, sidewalks, and rooftops will look like.
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