"ENERGY: Smarter Solar Cells Made Cheaper, More Plentiful"

IBM Research recently broke the world's efficiency record for inexpensive, thin-film solar cells by substituting widely available elements for the rare elements that make photovoltaic devices so expensive today. Look for IBM-licensed thin-film solar cells to begin appearing within three years. R.C.J.


If only an hour's worth of the sun's energy pouring down on the Earth could be harvested, it would power the entire planet for a year, according to David Mitzi, who leads the team at IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) which developed its world's record holding thin-film solar cell. IBM's low-cost manufacturing technique nevertheless results in a new world's record for kesterite thin-film solar cells, 9.6 percent efficiency – 40 percent higher than the previous world record of 6.8 percent set last year by a Japanese research group at Nagaoka National College of Technology.
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"WIRELESS: Fujitsu's Smarter RFID Tags Track Loads of Laundry"

RFID tags have been revolutionizing inventory control and now track expensive assets, but have yet to crack the inexpensive asset market, which is Fujitsu's aim with its new UHF tags. Look for RFID tags to begin tracking garments in hotels and rental agencies in 2010. R.C.J.


The millions of commercial textiles cleaned every day -- from linens to uniforms to cleaning rags -- can now be logged, tracked and reconciled using a smarter RFID technology that scans whole hampers simultaneously. When the new Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel opened this month in Vancouver, British Columbia—just in time for the Winter Olympics—it served as the showcase for a smarter radio frequency identification (RFID) system that is tracking its 10,000 employee uniforms and 25,000 bathrobes, towels, tablecloths, sheets and other linens. All 35,000 textiles in Fairmont's real-time inventory have now been made smarter by having Fujitsu WT-A511 RFID tags sewn into them.
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"CHIPS: OmniVision CMOS imagers debut"

OmniVision pioneered back-side illumination for commercial imagers--whereby light enters the backside of the chip through a window to directly shine on photodetectors--and has now introduced its scaled down second generation back-side illumination CMOS imager. Look for other CMOS imager makers to move to back-side illumination in the next few years. R.C.J.


OmniVision Technologies, Inc. will show its second-generation back-side illuminated CMOS imaging chip to OEMs during next week's Mobile World Congress (Barcelona, Spain Feb. 15-18, 2010). OmniVision (Santa Clara, Calif.) uses a novel backside illumination technique in which photodetectors are fabricated at the bottom of the chip stack situated on a transparent window. After fabricating metal interconnection layers, the chip is then flipped so that its photodetectors are on top (under the window).
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"CHIPS: IBM demos 100-GHz graphene transistor"

Its official--carbon transistors are faster, lower power and scale down without heating up, as demonstrated by the world's fastest graphene transistor. Look for carbon to replace silicon as the material of choice for electronic chips by the end of the decade. R.C.J.


A 100-GHz transistor has been demonstrated by IBM Research. Fabricated on new 2-inch graphene wafers and operating at room temperature, the RF graphene transistors are said to beat the speeds of all but the fastest GaAs transistors, paving the way to commercialization of high-speed, carbon-based electronics. IBM has patterned graphene transistors with a metal top-gate architecture (top) fabricate on 2-inch wafers (bottom) created by the thermal decomposition of silicon carbide. Almost four times faster than previous demonstrations, the graphene transistors were fabricated at the wafer scale using epitaxially grown graphene processing techniques that are compatible with those used to fabricate silicon transistors..
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"ALGORITHMS: Magnetism seen as key to superconductivity"

Supercooled superconductors are already levitating trains magnetically and imaging magnetically, motivating researchers worldwide to speculate that magnetism is the common source for superconductivity. Look for room temperature superconductors by the middle of the century. R.C.J.


Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are citing evidence that high-temperature superconductivity derives from the same mechanisms regardless of material That finding has prompted speculation that magnetic spin excitations that couple electrons is the key ingredient for superconductivity. Spin excitations in a superconducting material's performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory support the theory that magnetic properties cause high-temperature superconductivity. High-temperature superconductivity could result in ultra-fast electronic devices that capitalize on high-speed electrons traveling in a material whose resistance has been reduced to zero. Levitating trains, ultra-sensitive sensors called superconducting quantum interference devices and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging use superconductors. Superconductor devices must be super-cooled, which relegates their use to high-end applications. If room-temperature superconductors could be perfected, then electronic devices could operate faster through electron transport without resistance.
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"WIRELESS: NIST Shrinks Antennas 50-fold with Metamaterials"

Smarter antennas can be made 50 times smaller by harnessing the unusual properties of metamaterials, periodically spaced free-air elements that reverse the natural direction of reflected radio waves. Look for near microscopic antenna designs in the future able to shrink a cell phone down to finger-ring size. R.C.J.


Metamaterials were made famous a few years back by opening the door to invisibility cloaks. Now scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology , the University of Arizona (Tucson) and Boeing Research & Technology (Seattle) have repurposed metamaterials to create a "Z-antenna" design that is 50 times smaller than today's antennas—enabling a cell phone antenna to be shrunk small enough to fit on a finger ring. The researchers hope their novel antenna designs will enable pint-sized emergency communications devices, ultra-small sensors and portable ground-penetrating radar devices that can find underground tunnels, caverns and similar geophysical features.
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"CHIPS: IBM Preps Carbon Transistors for Post-Silicon Era"

IBM Research demonstrated a carbon-based transistor technology that could make obsolete silicon-based CMOS chips over the next decade. Look for graphene semiconductors to begin taking over for silicon chips by the end of the decade. R.C.J.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that the silicon-based CMOS transistor technology used by microchips today will run out of steam by the end of the decade, but IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) has a ready replacement already on the drawing board: carbon-based transistors. IBM paved the way for commercialization of carbon-based semiconductor chips with its dual-gate bi-layer graphene field-effect transistors.Unfortunately, graphene field-effect transistors (FETs) have dismal on-to-off current ratios that are hundreds of times smaller than silicon. The key to enhancing graphene's on-to-off ratios, according IBM, was its invention of a bi-layer construction method for graphene transistors.
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"CHIPS: Graphene wafers ready to fab carbon chips"

Carbon chips will likely replace silicon circa 2020, with one holdup being the difficulty in fabricating pure crystalline sheets of carbon--graphene--on big wafers. Look for semiconductor researchers to announce commercial availability of graphene wafers within three years. R.C.J.


The next-generation of semiconductors could be based on carbon instead of silicon, according to Penn State researchers ,who claim to have perfected a method of fabricating pure sheets of carbon semiconductor—called graphene—on 100 millimeter (4-inch) wafers. Penn State's Electro-Optics Center Materials (EOC) Division claims its process can be used to fabricate graphene chips that are 100-to-1,000 times faster than silicon, as well as enable more sensitive sensors, electronics, displays, solar cells, sensors and hydrogen storage devices.
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