The Saint has spent almost his entire career in the electronics sector, first as a practising engineer and later as a technical journalist.Electronics News’ Editor jokingly says your correspondent reported on John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain’s invention of the transistor in 1947 (at least the Saint hopes he’s joking). That’s not quite true, but the Saint can clearly remember such significant events such as the introduction ofIBM’s PC in 1981, the emergence of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) in the late 80s and the first commercial use of the Internet in the mid 90s.
One thing that reporting on electronics technology over an extended period has taught the Saint is that technologies take an awful long time to go from inception to commercialisation. Consider the humble LED, for example. Dr Nick Holonyak – considered the father of the solid-state light emitting technology – first got practical red LEDs working in the early 60s. (Even though others had reported light emission on the application of a voltage to substances such as silicon carbide (SiC) as far back as the early years of the 20th Century.)
It took another three-and-a-half decades of pioneering work before Nichia pushed the technology far enough to make white LEDs that were bright enough to be seriously considered as an alternative to incandescent or fluorescent lighting. Working at the Japanese company, Shuji Nakamura used indium gallium nitride (InGaN) to produce a blue LED, the light from which caused an yttrium aluminium garnet (YAG)-based phosphor to emit white light suitable for mainstream illumination.
It’s hardly surprising that there is such a time lag between a successful lab experiment to product arriving on the shelves. It’s one thing to get a fragile prototype nursed into life in the confines of a cleanroom, quite another to ensure the same technology performs reliably over a long period while enduring the rough-and-tumble of an industrial, commercial or domestic environment. That’s without considering if the said technology can be manufactured, distributed and serviced for a price that makes the owners of the product a profit.
So, why then do reports of new technology always imply that it will be available tomorrow? Your correspondent suspects that this is down to pressure from company management on their marketing people to encourage investors and shareholders to believe the immediate future is rosy and they’re just about to reap a return on their investment. Or perhaps it’s just the marketing people getting excited about a quick sighting of a development in the lab and not really understanding just how much work it requires to reach commercialisation.
Against this backdrop, the Saint was pleased to see this week the University of Sydney’s Professor Simon Ringer taking a more realistic view regarding the technology of spintronics.
Spintronicsaims to use the “spin” of electrons as a method of storing the zeroes and ones of binary code. Electron spin can be defined as “up” or “down”, but because it’s a quantum variable, it’s possible for an electron to be in a state of superposition where it is spinning both up and down at the same time. By controlling the superposition it’s possible to conceive of processors, for example, that are vastly faster and more powerful than today’s devices.
“Spintronics is exciting because it’s one of the few technologies that’s based on an opportunity to exploit … a quantum variable,” saidDavid Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara in an interview with Physics World.
“In current [storage media] a physical piece of matter stores only one bit of information, either a one or a zero. But by using the spin of an electron as the indicator it’s possible in principle for that one particle to store almost an infinite amount of information. [In addition] spin is a quantum state, so it’s one pathway to building a [quantum computer].”
If the physics sounds complicated it’s nothing when compared with actually fabricating a working device.
Awschalow spends his working days researching spintronics in silicon devices and is quick to note “we’re quite far away from building anything practical”.
At a three-day conference hosted by the University of Sydney, Prof Ringer did succumb to a little hyperbole when he noted “the possibilities [for spintronics] are spectacular both in terms of designing new processors and information storage”.
Perhaps because the Prof. Ringer is free from the commercial pressures that bear on company employees’ shoulders or maybe because he’s just very familiar with his subject he was able to calm down and look objectively at the likelihood of us seeing spintronics devices any time soon.
“Spintronics is a multidisciplinary field involving materials science and engineering, and to eventually harness both charge and spin in real devices, we have a lot of fundamental materials science to work through,” he conceded.
Spintronics is now starting to move from the university lab to the research centres of companies like IBM. The technology has also found its way into Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) an emerging memory technology that has yet to well, emerge. Nonetheless the press releases extolling the capabilities of spintronics are issued on an almost daily basis.
But the Saint is willing to bet his reputation that even if he spends the rest of his career in electronics, he will never write about the commercial release of a semiconductor-based spintronic processor. That event is decades away.
Are we there yet?
News in
Electronics News earlier this week that Holden has teamed up with
Better Place – a company dedicated to the promotion of electric vehicles (EVs) – so that the forthcoming
Volt electric car can use the latter’s charging infrastructure, prompted the Saint to take a closer look.
Regular readers will know that the Saint has been scathing about some of the environmental claims made about EVs , particularly as the power used to charge the batteries is likely to be generated by Australia’s coal-fired power stations (although his stance has softened somewhat more recently).
According to the report, Holden says the Volt can charge from a regular household outlet, taking less than six hours to completely refill on a 240 V, 10 A supply, but customers who choose a Better Place Charge Spot will be at full charge in under four hours.
Meanwhile, Better Place is claiming an unofficial distance record for the furthest distance driven in 24 hours by an EV. Using an electric Holden Commodore developed by EV Engineering, a team drove 1886 kilometres. The Saint echoes the sentiment of Ian McCleave, CEO of EV Engineering who said “it’s a great feeling to see the electric car our team designed and developed here in Australia has beaten a world distance record.”
However, the Saint is not sure whether it’s the car or the drivers that should take the most credit for the marathon.
It turns out that the 1886 kilometres was achieved by driving fifteen laps of a 122-kilometre route between Port Melbourne and Geelong, primarily on the Princes Freeway.
Your correspondent has driven that road just a single time, and it’s not an experience he wishes to repeat. With no disrespect to the towns along the route, which are all delightful in their own way, the road is possibly the most boring on the whole continent. It’s a flat, straight piece of black asphalt through some fairly nondescript countryside. The Saint’s offspring continually cried out the refrain that will be so familiar to parents on long journeys with bored kids – “Are we there yet?”
So kudos goes to Better Place and EV Engineering’s drivers. It’s no mean feat to drive that road once in a dull saloon with mediocre performance in eerie silence, let alone repeat it 15 times over.