Building our own iPhone

As some of you might have guessed an iPhone is not what I would build although you can make lots of money with it ... According to some analyses that I found on Caschys Blog the iPhone components cost about 140 EUR and screwing it together makes another 6 EUR. (link) Selling it for a few hundred EUR afterwards earns you quite some cash.

So maybe I would not build an iPhone but I could agree on any other smartphone you can build for 200 EUR and sell it for 600. ;) Starting last week and continuing today and in the next weeks we are basically doing just that in the lab. We are growing transistors. Those are the small magic devices that make your smartphone smart. And your tablet. And your computer. And everything else with electronics. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica transistors are by far the most common human artifact ever produced. (The article is probably not free to view completely - sry! Mabe wikipedia states the same ...) With up to a few billion transistors in every computer CPU this is not hard to believe.

Below there are some pictures we took in the lab with a microscope. You can see two of the main contacts of the transistor. The strucutres are around 20 to 50 µm small. (If you are interested in how a transistor works read below the pictures. :) )

Image 2: Microscope images of transistor structures.

You can clearly see that our smartphone is almost ready. The screwing afterwards is just odds and ends after the transistor growth. ;)






Picture on top: Source (in the middle) and Drain (circle around) contact. The Base contact is still missing and will be added later.

Image 3: Microscope images of transistor structures.

Picture below: Zoomed in. You can see the edges of the structures where they are etched into the photoresist.

If you want to know how a (MOSFET) transistor works here is a short and (hopefully) easy to understand explanation of its basic principle:

Image 3: Schema of a MOSFET transistor.

The green areas in the image to the right contain some charge carriers and the reddish-pink one contains charge carriers of opposing charge. Thus, no current can flow between source and drain if you apply a voltage between them. If you now apply an appropriate voltage at the base contact it will act as one side of a plate capacitor. This will move the charge carriers in the reddish are away from the base and attract carriers of the opposing charge to the base. (There are some few of these in the reddish are as well.) Now there is a so called conduction channel near the base between source and drain. So now a current can flow between source and drain if you apply a voltage here. Maybe you already guessed that this behaviours makes transistors usable as switches. And that is exactly what they are used for in computers, smartphones, tablets, ... (They are all based on binary operations: 0 and 1, off and on - exactly what a simple switch can provide.)

The next Star Wars will be real!

Uuuh too much going on. :D Science never stops, science never sleeps. On phys.org/ there are two articles today that get science fiction quite close to our present days: Researchers at Harvard and MIT managed to get photons to interact with each other! The physicists of you will know why this is astonishing. For the non-physicists: Photons usually do not do that. Never. But now they suddenly do ... What does that mean? Well, this means light sabre. We will finally get light sabres! Men I have been waiting for this for years. :D What will be next? Spaceshuttles to go to galaxies far far away? Or maybe Pokeballs?

One of the things that will be next quite certainly is a Star Wars kind of thing as well: Processors made out of carbon nanotubes. (Stanford this time.) Short version: They have the potential to be way faster than current processors and consume less energy at the same time. Sounds too good to be true, right?

The smartest mind of our time

Who might that be? Maybe you guessed it: It is Stephen Hawkings. (At least I would say so. ;) ) Today I found an artivle on gizmodo where they posted a video by The Guardian in which they again summarized Stephen Hawking's work in a nice and simple animation! Take a look, it might change your view on the world. :) If you do not get it at first sight, do not worry - watch it again! After all, this was devised by the smartest mind of our time.

YouTube going facebook - or useful?

One of the biggest parts of the internet 2.0 - if not the symbol of the internet 2.0 - is youtube: a video portal where you can find videos about everything. And watch them, of course. But youtube works the other way around as well. Youtube watches you. Starting this week all of you will notice this more than ever before. Yesterday google announced on their official youtube blog that they will change the commenting system for youtube based on your preferences, your interests, your friends. Sounds promising. Probably there will not even be any more cookies or spies watching you as before. (As everything google needs they get from you at the moment anyway ...) So is this the end of flame wars, haters and stupid comments in general? Or is it another infringement on your freedom on the internet? What do you think?

Shattered study dreams ...

The title of this post might be a little misleading because what is really behind it is a quite sensational progress in data handling - although it has been already a while: IBM managed to store one bit of information with the bare use of twelve atoms - instead of the usual one million that are used on conventional hard drives. Pretty awesome, only - that is what I wanted to engineer after studying some nanoscience ... Well, then I will probably go back to the teleporter - might be interesting to start with as well. Or maybe one electron - one bit. We will see ...

In any case here is a 3 minute video summing up the story and explaining how it works - understandable for everybody (I hope ... ask, if not. :) )

In addition, here is the IBM link (you can find the video there as well in case the one on this page does not work) and here is the official press announcement from 12 January 2012.