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Editorial: It's All About the Kids
... In the blazing heat of early July in Texas, a herd of brilliant high school students representing schools from USA and Mexico drove their experimental solar powered cars through the quiet roadways of the Texas Hill Country. They spent the first night of an eight day cross country race...
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July 18, 2005...Ricoh, the Japanese company that is largely known for its copiers, has developed
a way to manufacture optical disks with a capacity of 100GB on one side, according
to a story
in Nikkei Net Interactive. This is twice the capacity of Sony’s 45GB Blu-Ray
technology and significantly more than twice the capacity of the somewhat lower
capacity 15 GB HD-DVD technology. According to the article, Ricoh plans on
quickly producing the 100GB optical disks. While other electronics makers
have reportedly prototyped 100GB optical disks, the company claims these are the
first to be achieved on a single platter. Ricoh's approach apparantly is similar to the two current competing standards
for next generation DVDs in that it uses blue spectrum laser diodes, the report specifically mentioning a violet laser, which we presume to be a LD. Nichia remains the leading supplier of blue spectrum LDs, violet being the most popular choice for next gen DVD applications. However, Ricoh's disk is read only and reportedly allows 40% smaller data areas by producing bumps
on the surface of only 90nm in width. The article says that the optical disk could
record 20 2-hour movies, or 9 hours of HD video on a single side. Reuters Reports on What It Calls First LED Street Lights
Scott McMahanJuly 18, 2005...In a Reuters' news story that was rebroadcast around the world including the CNN website, the author claimed that Philips, the lighting company from the Netherlands, has introduced the first LED-based street lamps. What's most troubling is not the claim of being the first, but not having any qualifiers on the claim. Perhaps they were the first in something. For example they might be the first LED based street lights in the world... to be used on that particular street in the Netherlands. However, the described street lamps are by no means the first ever. Even a search of the Philips web site shows other installations including a bridge in London. This is totally discounting the many smaller companies that have been selling the LED technology for street lights for years. A number of companies including Sharp Electronics have gone as far as introducing solar powered, LED-based street lights. Carmanah has a line of street lights with LED technology, and so does Leotek, a certified manufacturer of Lumileds’ Luxeon technology. In any case, feel free to point to my article for the people reading Reuters and getting the wrong idea. It was one of the applications discussed at Strategies in Light back in February. This is a good demonstration of how much we have to educate the public about LED lighting solutions before LED lighting becomes widely adopted by consumers for general lighting applcations. Fairchild Semiconductor Wins AwardJuly 13, 2005...Fairchild Semiconductor with headquarters in South Portland, Maine USA, has
received the Prime Minister’s Award in South Korea for excellence in occupational
health and safety. Fairchild has an accident free record for the last six years.
The award was presented in Seoul by Dae-Hwan Kim, the minister of labor of South
Korea.
"We're very pleased to receive this most recent honor,"
said C.S. Song, vice president of global operations, Korea. "Fairchild
implemented a very rigorous health and safety program including regular safety
education classes, a computerized safety management system, an ergonomics team,
an emergency response team, and a health club and physiotherapy center focused
on minimizing or eliminating on-the-job related injuries and illness.”
Company
News Release A Phosphorless Solution to White LEDs on Horizon
Scott McMahanJuly 13, 2005...GaN can be put on a Zinc Oxide (ZnO) subtrate to produce a phosphorless white LED. Some experts say, such a device might offer greater light output and improved efficiency. In the device, blue light
would be emitted by the GaN. Then the blue light emission from the GaN material
would excite the florescence of doped ZnO. According to an article
in IOP’s Compound Semiconductor Magazine, the emission spectra of the fluorescence
and the blue emission could then be controlled to produce the desired white output.
ZnO reportedly offers better lattice-matching between the epilayer and substrate.
The material also allows new structures and configurations. ZnO is also conductive.
A contact device can be fabricated from the material easily. Content continues for LIGHTimes SecondPage members... Robert Walker Becomes CEO of eLite
JoAnn McDonald, Founding EditorJuly 15, 2005...Official as of today, a man of considerable stature in the compound semi
(CS) and solid state lighting (SSL) industries, Dr.
Robert C. Walker, becomes president and CEO of one of the most promising
LED innovative companies in the field, eLite
Optoelectrionics which will soon change its headquarters from City of Industry to Sunnyvale, California USA. With the addition
of Bob to the eLite management
team, current CEO/CTO and founder of eLite, Dr. Heng Liu, will now concentrate on his role as CTO and company visionary. Robert Walker and Heng Liu both hail originally
from Emcore, their tenures there beginning with the early days of the creation
of the first blue spectrum LED MOCVD epi platforms.
Robert Walker is well known to the CS and SSL industries, especially in Asia.
As a general partner of YEBY Associates, Bob chaired our recent BLUE
2005 event in Taiwan. His credentials in the field are impeccable and impressive.
Prior to forming YEBY, he was managing director - US of Vincera Ventures, a
US$150M venture capital fund based in Taiwan. Bob is credited as the catalyst
for several notable investments in the areas of HB LEDs and compound semiconductors.
While at Emcore serving as director of marketing. He oversaw the rollout of
the initial Spectra Blue and GaNzilla MOCVD platforms. As the GaN LED and LD
field rapidly expanded, Bob then served as Emcore's general manager of pacific
rim operations. In addition to helping CompoundSemi Online with the creation
and production of BLUE, he also co-published Strategies Unlimited's seminal
"Asia Producers
of HB-LEDs 2004". Bob holds a Ph.D. from Caltech and B.S. in math,
physics and computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And why all the excitement about Robert Walker joining eLite? With the addition
of Bob and the caliber of crystal growers working behind the scenes, this impressive California startup represents the most solid team of
USA-based advanced LED experts the field since Lumileds and
Cree came on the scene. eLite is well-funded, it has strong ties to key Asian manufacturers and packagers, their products are already selling well. Our congratulations
to eLite for their selection of Robert Walker as CEO and we look forward to hearing what they
come up with next... when the time is right.
Bookham Showcases Products at SemiconWest Exhibition in San Francisco
CompoundSemi News StaffJuly 12, 2005...New Focus, a division of Bookham, Inc. headquartered in San Jose, California USA, is to demonstrate a number of new technologies at this week’s SemiconWest exhibition in San Francisco, California USA, July 12-14. The showcased technology includes its high speed motion control system, which reportedly offers ground-breaking levels of speed and accuracy. According to the company another of their product lines on display, their fast actuator technology offers submicron positional accuracy, complete speed and acceleration profile control, scan rates to 300mm/sec and projected lifetimes in UV applications of billions of cycles. New Focus is applying this technology to applications, including precision scanning, shuttering, and apodization.
They are also displaying New Focus active mounts with integrated and clean room compliant Picomotor linear actuators and quad cell position detectors that can be used to achieve stable control of laser beam position. The devices can also be used with high intensity UV illumination. Other new products on display at the Bookham New Focus stand include a range of super luminescent diodes, designed with short coherence length for use in applications where spurious reflections caused by multiple reflective surfaces can compromise the accuracy of reflective measurements.Company News Release BOC Edwards News
CompoundSemi News StaffJuly 12, 2005...BOC Edwards has been doing especially well lately. They were awarded new long-term service contracts at eight leading microprocessor, flash and memory chip manufacturing facilities in the United States and Europe that are expected to yield about US$15 million in incremental revenue per year. They recently-announced formation of a joint venture in Taiwan with Highlight Tech Corp. (HTC) focused on high-value process equipment component cleaning and recovery. It is expected to contribute significantly in the coming months.
The company recently sold several of the Zenith CVD integrated vacuum and abatement systems, to Elpida, Memory Inc., a Japanese DRAM manufacturer, to treat toxic process exhaust gases and precursors. BOC Edwards also received an order from a DRAM manufacturer in Singapore, for an iSIS™ 2000 slurry blend and delivery system for high volume, accurate blends, and stable slurry flow.
Eco-Snow Systems, a member of The BOC Group, introduced the WaferClean 3600 cleaning tool that uses a new dry, carbon dioxide-based process that does not have the negative effects of oxygen plasma cleaning. BOC Edwards’ thermal processing unit (TPU) has quickly evolved as the only technology proven to destroy production levels of SF6, the most environmentally harmful exhaust gas commonly used in TFT manufacture. The company’s electronic materials group reports that it has qualified its 99.999% trimethylsilane on both 200 mm and 300 mm platforms as the primary low k dielectric at semiconductor fabs in the U.S. Columbia Prof Sues Four of the Big Five LED Makers for WBG Patent Infringement
LIGHTimes StaffJuly 11, 2005...USA Professor Gertrude F. Neumark of Columbia University in New York has filed lawsuits against four of the "Big Five" in the solid state lighting industry. According to Jed Dorsheimer, equity research analyst at Adams Harkness, Dr. Neumark has filed separate patent infringement suits against Cree, Lumileds Lighting , Toyoda Gosei, and Osram Opto Semiconductors. Sidley, Austin, Brown, and Wood, the law firm representing Neumark, confirmed the lawsuits. The four separate lawsuits containing basically the same wording pertain to two of Neumark’s 1988 patents, patent # 4,904,618 entitled “Process of Doping Crystals for Wide Band Gap Semiconductors” and # 5,252,499 entitled, “Wide Band Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation” which carries Dr. Neumark's other last name, Rothschild. The suit against Cree was filed in US District Court Southern District of New York on June 24, 2005. (case 05 CIV 593). Content continues for LIGHTimes SecondPage members... Our news features are reported
by the CompoundSemi News staff writers.
For submissions or content suggestions, you can contact us using
editor -at - compoundsemi.com
For more information and to reserve promotion space contact
Info7 -at - compoundsemi.com
or call +1 (512) 257-9888 |
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The
McDonald Report
Commentary & Perspective...
It's All About the KidsJuly 11, 2005...In the blazing heat of early July in Texas, a herd of brilliant high school
students representing schools from USA and Mexico drove their experimental solar
powered cars through the quiet roadways of the Texas Hill Country. They spent
the first night of an eight day cross
country race to California in the tiny backroads cowboy town of Brady, Texas
which is very near Legacy Ranch in
Placid, home of our founding editor, Jo
Ann McDonald, author of The McDonald Report. She reports on this
extraordinary invasion.....
I was thrilled when 180 extremely bright teenagers descended on Brady, Texas
Friday evening, July 8th because they spoke my language: Advanced Technology.
(They were a bit surprised to find a veteran technology journalist there
too). Dialog in that language isn't heard much in small town Texas, where
the only sport thought of when you say the word "team" is football.
They stayed in Brady for the first night of their trek and were treated to a
hamburger supper by the town's service clubs. The kids proudly showed off their
entries to an admiring town.
These extraordinary teens were following their dream for a better future by
harnessing the sun to travel across the highways and byways of Mother Earth.
There were teams
from USA high schools in New York, California, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona,
Texas and Mississippi, and Chihuahua, Mexico. One of the teams (the one with
the most elaborate rig and most cool car, actually) was from the Choctaw
Nation of Native Americans in Mississippi. Brady had never seen anything
like it. Some of the cars looked more like satellites than automobiles while others
were simply modified golf carts. All sported large areas of solar arrays, of
course. Excellent still photos and videos of the event were taken and are accessible
via this link.
The kids knew all about silicon solar cells and some of them had actually heard
about the more efficient multijunction cells made of our industry's compound
semi materials used to power spacecraft. Unfortunately, the rules require the
use of silicon cells only, but CS cells are definitely on their drawing boards.
The teams couldn't wait to reach their final destination in Pasadena, California
where scientists at JPL know a great deal about multijunction cells.
While the kids were following their dreams, after talking to these budding
scientists and technologists and looking at their solar car creations, what
I dreamed of--once again-- was a world no longer hooked on oil, with humans
driving solar power cars that used our more advanced, environmentally benign
technologies. Mother Earth would like that.
The eight day USA driving event is called the Dell-Winston
Solar Challenge. Lead sponsor is Dell Computers of Round Rock, Texas (an Austin suburb) where the race began, and the
organizer is the Winston School in Dallas. I didn't see one name in the sponsorship
list, or promoted on the cars, from our industry. Hopefully, after reading this
column, that will change. The Dell-Winston Solar Challenge is an ideal opportunity
for companies in the compound semi and solid state lighting industries to sign
on with the real shakers and movers in our fields: the kids that design, create,
and drive these cars of the future. I envision a demonstration vehicle that
not only uses multijunction CS solar cells, but one that also utilizes high
brightness LEDs. If you sign on to support one of the teams, I promise I'll
sign on to publicize the blazes out of your participation.
Why? I believe passionately in promoting alternative energy solutions. And
it's about time we all did something to make that happen. The sooner we get
off this dependency on oil as the source of cheap fuel (yes, even at just over $2/gallon
in the USA, it's still "cheap" compared to what other countries pay)
the sooner the USA might quit invading countries just for their oil.
Did you know that electric cars were once all the rage? According to
the Solar Challenge literature, by 1900 38% of all pleasure cars sold in the
USA were electrically powered. 22% were gas-driven and 40% steam. 1912 was the
high point for electric vehicles with almost 34,000 cars, truck and buses registered
for road use. When did we start to steer in the wrong direction? When power-hungry vehicles (and humans) took
over. Speed soon meant everything and resource wars for oil and gas ensued...
and haven't yet stopped. In 1967, when people like me were marching in the streets
to change the overall mentality--pushing for wind, solar and anything other
than oil wars or nuclear solutions (for power or bombs), General Motors was
busy making electric car history. GM worked with NASA to develop a means of
using a non-liquid membrane and platinum electrodes which acted as a catalyst
in the presence of hydrogen and oxygen.
Electric vehicles even made it to the moon, but are they being taken seriously
on our roads today? Not yet. But that could change, with your help, and following
the lead of these Solar Challenge kids. The cars they're driving only go about
20-30 miles per hour, but it's a beginning. I looked from their silicon-heavy
cell laden demo vehicles over to my white GM Buick and thought to myself...
"Couldn't we somehow simply put some Emcore multijunction cells on the
roof of the Buick and off we go? I wouldn't have to go 70 mph on the backroads
of Texas. The speed limit when I get to Brady is only 30 anyway!" I
envisioned driving an electric version of my comfy Buick in a separate lane,
like a bike lane, until I reached the busy interstate to one of the big cities,
where I'd hop on some kind of mass transit to the airport, etc. When away from
the interstate, all travel would be electric. Just imagine the cleaner air in
suburban towns if its population signed on to such a concept.
We seriously tried to shift to precisely that type thinking in the 60s. Yet here we are,
40 years later, with little or no progress. Now all we have is more people
on earth and most of them in a hurry and hungry for speed. We've gotten ourselves
in such a mess that it'll obviously take the brilliant kids of today, like
the 180 that invaded Brady, to change things for the better. While too many
teens are being pressured into signing up for the military to fight yet another
insane resource war for politicians indebted to oil companies, these Solar Challenge
kids are taking another route. They're investing in a sane future and putting
all their resources into getting scholarships to colleges to major in things
like solar science. Are you helping? Is your company helping? The kids of today
don't need to be taught how to be kids. They have that part knocked. What we
need to do is help them become well educated, caring, responsible adults. Visit
the Dell-Winston
Solar Challenge site and see for yourself what you're missing. Or call me
and I'll help talk you into doing something really good for a change. If you have questions about the
solid state lighting and compound semiconductor industries or have news
or views to share, I'm Jo Ann McDonald, Editor of LIGHTimes and CompoundSemi News.
Feel free to contact me directly, anytime. 
My direct tel at the ranch is
+1-325-463-5345
From time to time Jo Ann may comment on companies in which she holds a
modest investment - be sure to read
her disclosure at some point in time... |
