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The Harrow Technology Report
Insight,
analysis, and commentary on the
Copyright © 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights
reserved.
Personal Fabricators.
Listen to this Issue.
Quote of the Week.
From "Information," To
"Things."
Challenge The Law!
It's The "E-thing!" And Look What It's Doing! Schedule Note.
The next issue of "The Harrow Technology Report" will publish on December 22, 2003.
Listen to this Issue.Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us? If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, M-P-3 version. If you have an M-P-3 player on your system (and most do, such as Window's Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.), the link below will either stream the file to you, or, depending on how your system is configured, it might download the file before playing it. Alternatively, if you specifically want to download the file, simply use the right-hand mouse button on the link, and choose "Save Target As..." Also, find out how you can listen at whatever speed is most comfortable for you through the FAQ at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/help.htm . Here's where to listen to this week's issue! http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20031124/20031124.mp3
Quote of the Week."Expect trillions of instructions-per-second (TIPS) performance by the end of the decade. There will be some major paradigm shifts, however, and "business as usual" will not be an option."
Shekhar Borkar That's a very good message to take to heart. Most of us have lived through, and viscerally understand, the results of moving from 1 MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) of commodity CPU performance around 1980, to today's 3,000 MIPS (or 3 'BIPS" - Billions of Instructions Per Second) of CPU performance. (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20021114comp.htm) That's more than ONE-THOUSAND-TIMES the computer performance, at essentially the same price, in just over 20 years. But now the very people in the best position to know how CPU performance will grow (such as Shekhar) are cautioning us that our CPUs will be performing ANOTHER ONE-THOUSAND-TIMES FASTER, at One-Million-MIPS (that's 1,000 BIPS, or 1 TIPS (Trillions of Instructions Per Second)), JUST SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW! (By the way, a major enemy of this type of progress isn't how finely we can draw the lines on chips, but it's about removing the incredible amount of heat produced by these ever-smaller, ever-closer-together transistors on each chip. Some of today's chips already produce more heat than a 100 watt light bulb, and their power supplies draw as much current as your car battery supplies while starting the car! Check out the article noted above for some very interesting insights into this significant issue, and for some ideas on how the chip industry might tame this caloric tiger. There
are also other interesting chip changes ahead that
may help address this critical heat issue, such as
reducing the transistor leakage current that
significantly contributes to this problem - see
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/ Given this trend, a salient question is what might YOU (and your business) do with another THOUSAND-TIMES INCREASE IN COMPUTER POWER IN JUST SEVEN YEARS? That increment of computing power, in such a short period of time, opens the door for many significant paradigm shifts -- potentially profitable shifts -- for those prescient enough to embrace, and plan for, and effectively implement the new capabilities. If you don't have some good ideas, and some plans in place for improving your business by taking advantage of this trend, I can promise you that some of your competitors, and some new competitors you haven't yet heard of, do. Want to bet on which type of business is more likely to prosper, long term...? Don't Blink!
From "Information," To "Things."
"Stereolithography," and
related techniques for turning computer-generated
models of things into REAL things (through laser
gel-setting, "inkjet" printing of physical objects,
and other techniques) is something we've explored
for years (see
http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ Stereolithography is a wonderful example of science fiction driving science fact, although we still have more than a few steps to Star Trek's "matter replicator" or the like. Nevertheless, stereolithography has already been a boon for many industrial and design processes, allowing "instant parts" to be created in minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks. What may surprise you, as it did me, is just how good today's (still rather crude) stereolithography is, and where it's heading in our increasingly NBIC world (the coming together of the previously disparate fields of Nanotechnology, Biology and medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences).
Think 'Personal Fabrication.' According to Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits & Atoms in an article published by Edge at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge123.html#gershenfeld (brought to our attention by reader Kenneth LaCrosse), "The next big thing in computers will be personal fabrication: allowing anyone to make fully functioning systems -- with printed semiconductors for logic, inks for displays, three-dimensional mechanical structures, motors, sensors, and actuators. Post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming. For a few thousand dollars, a little tabletop milling machine can measure its position down to microns, so you can fabricate the structures of modern technology, such as circuit boards."
Note: this particular
quote came from the intro to a shortened version of
Neil's paper, at We've often talked about the value in tearing down the historical (and somewhat arbitrary) walls between "disciplines," and that's just what Neil is doing -- cross-pollinating 20 disparate research groups including Engineering, Computer Science, Physical Sciences, and more, with the idea that it's all about "information" -- that "information" will be the common building block for future insights and results. And how "information" will, in the not too distant future, be the basis for making many of the things around us -- at home, in the office, and in the manufacturing plant. He begins: "Let's start with the development of 'personal fabrication.' We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world. With the benefit of hindsight, there's a tremendous historical parallel between the transition from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools to personal fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including sensing, logic, actuation, and displays. Mainframes were expensive machines used by skilled operators for limited industrial operations. When the packaging made them accessible to ordinary people we had the digital revolution. Computers now let you connect to Amazon.com and pick something you want, but the means to make stuff remain expensive machines used by skilled operators for limited industrial operations. That's going to change. Laboratory research, such as the work of my colleague Joe Jacobson, has shown how to print semiconductors for logic, inks for displays, three-dimensional mechanical structures, motors, sensors, and actuators. We're approaching being able to make one machine that can make any machine. I have a student working on this project who can graduate when his thesis walks out of the printer, meaning that he can output the document along with the functionality for it to get up and walk away."
Reinventing Literacy. Neil relates his experiences when non-engineering students have taken his classes titled "How To Make (almost) Anything," "... [These students] then used all of these ['make it so'] capabilities in ways that I would never think of." ... "From this combination of passion and inventiveness I began to get a sense that what these students are really doing is reinventing literacy...; a mastery of the liberal arts. ... In a very real sense post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming. I've even been taking my twins, now 6, in to use MIT's workshops; they talk about going to MIT to make things they think of rather than going to a toy store to buy what someone else has designed." ... "I had an epiphany last summer: that for about ten thousand dollars on a desktop, [they could, within limits, do this today!] What makes this possible is that space and time have become cheap. For a few thousand dollars a little tabletop milling machine can measure its position down to microns, a fraction of the size of a hair, and so you can fabricate the structures of modern technology such as circuit boards for components in advanced packages. And a little 50-cent microcontroller can resolve time down below a microsecond, which is faster than just about anything you might want to measure in the macroscopic world. Together these capabilities can be used to emulate the functionality of what will eventually be integrated into a personal fabricator." Given that we're talking about software files that define the production of physical things, could this also be the beginning of "Open-source hardware" solutions?
Computing For Fabrication. I suggest that Neil's full article is almost mandatory reading, especially as it goes beyond the concepts we're discussing here. For example, it touches on how Nature "computes for fabrication" -- and how we are now beginning to learn how to program this stuff of life, ourselves! "The real breakthrough may, in fact, be biological machinery that is programmable for fabrication. This may be the next manufacturing technology." (For
both good and bad - see
http://www.newscientist.com/news/ Neil's paper also explores ideas of how we're going to have to radically change how we think about the things we build, such as the rapidly approaching billion-transistor-chips; they may require, "...thermodynamic-scale engineering -- you have to make a transition from designing systems to designing principles by which systems work, without actually saying how they do it."
Pour Out Computing By The Pound. He also touches on how we may have to learn to INVERT today's movement towards $10 billion semiconductor fabrication facilities ("fabs") that produce ever-larger wafers of ever-larger chips. Instead, we may find ourselves turning out individually tiny chips that are, "...the tiniest viable fragments, about a tenth of a millimeter or so. Literally sprinkle them into a viscous medium; and then pour out computing by the pound or by the square inch. In this way you can paint a computer on your wall and if it's not powerful enough for you, put on another coat of computer." ... "Right now we are working on devices that can [turn] the computer from a monolithic box to a raw material that gets configured by instructions traveling through it." Neil also explores a "less is more" variation of today's Internet, called "Internet 0" (as in zero) that may have a significant effect on lowering the design and installation complexity of future building lighting and control infrastructures, while it also makes it easier for us to assure that we correctly take all of our medications as we age. Looking towards the future, just wait until we add organic ink printing to inexpensive desktop stereolithographic "printers;" something that is already well underway in the labs and getting ready to break into manufacturing! Welcome to the very real possibility of home-printing active electronic circuits. And later, perhaps, printing the antibiotic your doctor just prescribed that he custom-designed at the protein level, just for you (see http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/pu-bbs103003.php for recent breakthroughs in CApD (Computer-Aided Protein Design)). Or eventually, could your doctor print a specific tissue sample of "you," that you need for a "repair?"
From Information, To Things -- The Next Revolution! Neil's comment above, of six-year-olds planning to create their own toys, might just be a natural progression from some of today's PC game (such as "Impossible Creatures" - http://www.microsoft.com/games/impossiblecreatures/ ) where players create and evolve new life forms as part of the game. In fact this may turn out to be a prescient metaphor for how our next generations will be changed by the information revolution that you and I have started -- and are living today. (Wait 'till you read the last article in this issue!) Today, we think absolutely nothing of having a world's worth of information at our fingertips over the Web -- we expect it; we'd now be lost without it. And as efforts at places like MIT improve the capabilities of stereolithography (there's a name that desperately needs Marketing help!); as they reduce its cost; and as those efforts further shrink the machines to the desktop, I see another revolution, akin to today's information revolution, expanding our instant expectations from "information," to "things." If this sounds ridiculous, consider that fifteen years ago (or perhaps even ten years ago) the idea of high school and college students doing a vast majority of their research from at home, or from the shade of a tree on campus, WAS ridiculous -- unless you were aware of, and integrated in your mind, the many technology and development efforts that subsequently, serendipitously, made the Internet and its World Wide Web. And made inexpensive and powerful notebooks and PCs. And brought us broadband connections; even wireless broadband connections! (Which is, of course, the point of "The Harrow Technology Report.") It's time to start thinking similarly about that cumbersome, scientific name "stereolithography," and how it too seems poised to change our world. Again. Don't Blink!
Begin Self-Serving Advertisement There's MUCH More I Can Do For You!
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No, this isn't a return to the protests of the '60s, but it is a fact of life -- that as we increasingly become more knowledgeable about how things work at the nanoscale, we're beginning to achieve results that seem to fall outside the scope of many of our cherished "fundamental laws of physics" (and of other sciences) -- results outside of those same "laws" that have helped us harness technology throughout our history! (This really isn't a surprise, since those laws were formulated from experimental and theoretical work performed before we had contemporary nano tools and knowledge, which together now lets us "peel back the knowledge onion" a bit further.) For example,
let's consider a "photonic crystal," which is a very
specialized nanoscale "array of holes used as an
optical semiconductor." Among other attributes,
photonic crystals have the ability to filter various
frequencies of light.
(http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm? If a photonic crystal is designed to pass only 1.5 nanometer infrared light, and if a wide spectrum of light (such as from an incandescent light bulb) were shined on it, the crystal would only let the 1.5 nanometer light through. Additionally, these crystals have the ability to direct light through a maze with minimal loss, and to switch it on and off. Which opens the door to the potential for fully optical computers in the (not so near) future.
Sidebar. By the way, speaking of at least partially-optical processors, progress is already being made. Brought to our attention by reader Robert Hannah, the Oct. 29 ABCnews.com (http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20031029_40.html) has reported that Lenslet Inc. recently unveiled what they call "the first commercially available optical DSP" at Boston's MILCOM expo. In its prototype form it can perform: "...8 trillion operations per second, equivalent to a super-computer, and 1,000 times faster than standard processors, with 256 lasers performing computations at light speed...., geared toward such applications as high resolution radar, electronic warfare, luggage screening at airports, video compression, weather forecasting and cellular base stations " Could it be that your grandkids will be unable to imagine how you once used those huge and massy electrons to deal with information, while their agile and massless and fast photons work so much better? If you think that's improbable, just recall the revolution that you (or your parents) lived through -- from the vacuum tube to the integrated circuit!
But It Gets Even More Interesting. Getting back to our main topic of photonic crystals, and with thanks to reader George Daszkowski for his pointer to an Oct. 4 article in Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/20031004/bob9.asp), consider how Shawn Yu Lin and his team at Sandia National Laboratory are currently applying photonic crystals to Edison's light bulb (which is virtually unchanged since it originally entered commercial service - http://science.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=light-bulb.htm&url=http://www.misty.com/people/don/bulb1.html ),
This team has redefined the tungsten filament (above) along some startling lines (below), with equally startling results:
Lin and company have used techniques developed by the semiconductor industry to build this "woodpile" of nanoscale metallic tungsten rods which form the photonic crystal. During initial testing they were rather surprised to find that when light was shined on the crystal, it, "Absorbed dozens of times more radiation at relatively short infrared wavelengths than did an ordinary tungsten film." Because of the corollary that when a material absorbs light at a given frequency, it will generate light at that frequency when heated, they realized they had a light source that might be perfect for generating a particular wavelength of light needed for many photonic and special "solar cell" applications.
Challenging The Law. But what really surprised them, when they clamped this tungsten photonic crystal between a couple of electrodes and passed current through it to heat it up, was that, "... they [measured] up to tenfold the amount [of emissions] that traditional physics seemed to permit." "[According to Lin], the photonic crystal may not be merely shunting energy from long to short wavelengths. It might also be emitting more energy across the electromagnetic spectrum than Planck's Law deems possible. Some of the team's data indicate that this is probably the case." This is why elements of Planck's Law (which doesn't allow for this type of efficiency) may need some rethinking. (Not all scientists currently believe that these measurements are necessarily correct, but I assume that others will reproduce the experiments to finalize the results, one way or another.)
How Might This Matter? One interesting opportunity is to apply this nanotechnology to specialized light bulbs. According to Lin, "Today's radiation sources in telecommunications are 'typically as big as a shoebox . . . . Ours [will be] on the centimeter scale.'" Additionally, once the team is able to make photonic crystals far smaller so that they can produce visible (instead of infrared) light, this "loophole" in our understanding of how things work may finally, dramatically, change Edison's light bulb. Today's common household light bulbs only transform 8% of the electricity they consume into useful visible light; most of the rest escapes as infrared light (heat) which we can't see, yet we're still paying for. Forthcoming LED bulbs are expected to raise efficiency to about 25%. But the team's Ihab El-Kady anticipates that using photonic crystals instead of traditional tungsten wires might increase the incandescent light bulb's visual light efficiency to as much as 60%. At that point, a bulb emitting the same amount of visible light as today's 100 watt bulb would consume only 15 watts! (That's about the same efficiency as today's fluorescent lights, but assumedly this new bulb would produce the same color of light we're used to from today's incandescent light bulbs, which most people seem to prefer.)
It's About New Ways Of Doing Things! The point of this introduction into photonic crystal research isn't to excite each of us about this narrow field (although if you DO get excited, that's a plus). Rather, this is a good example of how, as NBIC research crosses old boundaries and allows us to conduct our observations and experimentations at the same scale where Nature works, we're going to continue to be forced to incrementally re-examine many of the "fundamental scientific truths," or "Laws," that we've built-up over thousands of generations. This is not a failure of the old Laws at all; it's an ongoing process that has been around since we first began codifying our "Ah Ha!" observations about how the world works. Each time we've made significant strides past historic boundaries of how small (or large) we can observe and experiment, we've had to re-think things. I recall that my Jr. High science textbook was quite adamant that protons and neutrons were the smallest possible sub-atomic particles; something that would rather upset today's physicists. And it wasn't too long ago that the first microscopes helped us debunk the "vapors" that caused disease, thereby starting us down the road towards pasteurization, antibiotics, tissue engineering, and cloning.
Change Is A Given! Change is a given in an exponential technological environment, and it will necessarily result in our challenging the Laws that no longer seem to completely measure up as we explore new areas and gain new insights -- it would be sheer hubris if thought otherwise! For example, imagine the insights we'll gain (and the obstacles we'll run into -- and then topple) as we implement the first "nanoassemblers," as explored in a paper by Chris Phoenix, Director of Research for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, at http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/Nanofactory.htm (courtesy of Mike Treder.) So get ready for an increasing number of challenges to The Laws of Science as we know them, as we further debunk the "vapors" of times more recently past. The results of our new understandings will be truly incredible. Remember -- Don't Blink!
It's The "E-thing!" And Look What It's Doing!
Finally, since we began this issue talking about things "Exponential," we should finish up by revisiting an essential aspect of Exponential growth that reader Kim Allen brings to our attention. It's something that most of us non-mathematicians tend to forget as Moore's Law and other factors keep that "E" word "in our faces" as it fundamentally changes how we work, and live, and play. Specifically:
"What is stunning about Moore's Law is not the fact
that it is exponential -- but [it's Moore's Law's]
doubling time of just 18 months. Human population growth is also exponential (roughly-- it isn't anymore). And yet, it took *tens of thousands of years* to reach a world population of a mere 1 million people. If you lived almost anytime except in the last few centuries, you would hardly care that population growth was exponential [you'd have been in the seemingly "flat line" prelude of an exponential growth curve]. Certainly if you lived before, say, 500 BC, it would seem like there weren't that many people in the world at all, and that the total number didn't seem to change that much. 'Exponential' is not [necessarily] a synonym for 'fast.'" Which is an important thing to remember. But as Kim points out, when you change the doubling time from centuries or decades, to 18 months as Moore's Law has done, things get very interesting, very fast. And ever-faster, as long as that short doubling time remains constant. And that continues to describe today's growing number of scientific fields that are increasingly being powered by the results of Moore's Law. (Think of how little time it has taken us to move from the years that it took to map the first Human Genome, to today's ever-more-capable "DNA chips" that hold the promise of virtually instant DNA mapping!)
You Think I'm Kidding? To get an idea of just HOW
powerful exponential growth is, you might recall
that I've used the idea of a "home DNA kit" in
several past issues (such as in
http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ Well, it's "absurd" no more, as
demonstrated in Popular Science's "Great
Innovations" section of its "Best of What's
New for 2003" (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2003/ "...the first to feature a bona fide centrifuge and electrophoresis chamber -- [it] will turn your kid on to the intricacies of genetics at an even younger age. Realistic lab equipment transforms the kitchen into a forensics lab, where your breakfast-bar biologist can extract clumps of real DNA from fruits and vegetables or solve "crimes" by revealing DNA "fingerprints"--telltale blue protein stripes in a gel mixture."
For $79.95, your TEN YEAR
OLD can be the first on her block to explore DNA
mapping on the kitchen table! She'll be able to
"extract, view, and map real DNA...," using
tools such as a centrifuge, magnetic mixer,
electrophoresis chamber, and more, according to the
Discovery Kids site at
http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay? I haven't seen this kit yet, so I can't form an opinion as to how well it lives up to its claims. But assuming it that it does, we've already begun another phase of our journey towards "make it so" -- between breakfast and lunch! For the last time today, Don't Blink!
About "The Harrow Technology Report."
"The Harrow Technology Report" explores the innovations and trends of many contemporary and emerging technologies, and then draws some less than obvious connections between them, to help us each survive and prosper in the Knowledge Age. "The Harrow Technology Report" is brought to you by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal of The Harrow Group. http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com . Where To Find "The Harrow Technology Report:"
Copyright (c) 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All
rights reserved.
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