kken

Ca 0.50$ is actually only the Material cost. This number does not include cost for manufacturing, development, distribution, quality control, etc.

Very cool! Any more detailed information about its construction? I bet they would also be interesting to a different audience - as toy.

Edit: Found this http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.1211.pdf

Its an Aluminium tube with a Lithium battery.

Horrible spelling, no content.

Yes, especially in the US. There is also a huge bureaucracy problem.

Even at the current cost of PV and the current electricity prices, residential PV generation amortises in areas where a lot of air conditioning is required. This basically applies to the entire south west of the US.

The problems rather seem to be ignorance and an unwilligness to see a house as a long term investment.

PV "breakthroughts" are a dime dozen. Usually things quickly break apart due to these reasons:

1) The solar cell has to stable for 20 years in the field, not the 5 minutes it requires to collect the data for your publication.

2) You have to make 200 million cells per year with a yield >98%. Can you really do that?

3) Manufacturing cost on paper and in reality are two completely different things. Reducing material consumption is good, but it is not the only cost driver. Again: YIELD.

The first point is something that can be partially answered with a lot of additional research. Doable by a university, but often much more frustrating than the research they'd really want to do.

The only answer to the last two points is to try it on a large scale. And people did that for many technologies, see Nanosolar, Solyndra and many more. The problem is that so many failed, that currently nobody is willing to invest in new PV technologies.

Right now there is only silicon, CIGS thing film and CdTe thin film on the market. I doubt that a new technology is going to become relevant anytime soon as all of these technologies still have some room to breathe.

The article mentions, that 15 years passed without a new efficiency record in Si based solar cells. This is completely meaningless until that number is approached by mass manufactured cells.

Clickbait much?

I am not sure, that is a good question. People have shown that it is possible to hack a nRF24L01 into sending BLE transmissions. But there are limits. It could be possible to sniff parts of BLE traffic.

>Hillis is what good scientists call a very bright guy -- creative, imaginative, but not quite a genius.

What an odd classification.

This is a nice hack.

BUT: This has been done years ago for under $1 (the price of a nRF24L01 board) by using a nRF24L01 itself.

http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.de/2011/02/promiscuity-is-nr...

>Basing opinion on citation index is like saying if this person is not widely cited he is likely to be wrong.

No, it does not say that.

Having published for 40 years with only very few citations means that his works were either irrelevant or only found extremely limited circulation. Both makes the claims less trustworthy. However, on the other hand, Perelman...

Kinda strange, I cannot find the manuscript and not even his homepage (http://otelbaev.com) is updated.

Wouldn't one expect this to be reported either after a successful peer review or after publication of a preprint?

His citation index is not very convincing either http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CU2sU8YAAAAJ

Smells fishy.

Quitting school at 15 to become a tech entrepreneur? Too much...

IEEE spectrum has a good and accurate general coverage of these topics.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors

This is insane in a good way :)

>That isn't a 'cliff' that is an inflection point, or perhaps a global minimum.

No, there may be an inflection point in the metric "cost per standardized transistor". But this does not equal "cost per function".

There are manys way to utilize transistors more efficiently or still make them smaller while performing the same function. You have to realize that not all transistors in a chip are of minimum size due to circuit design requirements. Furthermore, only a fraction of the transistors are actually involved in performing the logic function you see from the outside. There is an increasing number of transistors spent on "housekeeping" functions such as clock distribution, power gating, bus drivers etc.

All of these can be improved by working on circuit design, improved layout software, optimzing the materials in the transistors etc. Of course this is less straightfoward than simply making the transistors smaller and therefore more expensive. Therefore we are going to see diminishing returns, but there will not be an inflexion point in the business model of the entire industriy.

This does not mean that he is not able to present the things in proper context. However, the general situation with graphene in acedemia right now is that it is a good source of grant money. Hence you see wildy exaggerated claims of its capabilities.

Graphene is interesting, but nobody in the industry believes that it will be the holy grail:

http://www.techdesignforums.com/blog/2013/12/10/graphene-get...

(This is pretty different from what academia tells you...)

Companies started to introduce new technological features starting with the 90nm node. This slide is a nice top level summary:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_5_6/Intel-Manufact...

This is actually the same as Moores law. Dennard was the one to define scaling law in respect to the physical properties of the transistors.

>Now that the cost of wafers are going up, making a chip that is 50% better costs 50% more money.

This is not true. In the past, process optimization was straight forward: Make smaller transistors. The free ride ended with the 130 nm node more than ten years ago. Since then, manufacturers had to introduce new features to allow them to make transistors smaller. As you also noted, this leads to higher costs, and the economics did not scale proportional to Moores law anymore.

But: This has been going on for more than a decade. The technology did not fall off a cliff and it will not do so in the near future. Even if it is not possible to make transistors smaller, it is still possible to introduce new technological features to make them better and improve their area efficiency. There are still plenty of options, even without classical scaling aka Moores Law.

TL;DR: Nothing will go poof. We are going to see a less steep gradient, but this is part of a process that started ten years ago.

This is the only valid response! Classical scaling (aka Moore's law) ended with the 130nm node more than 10 years ago. The business model has been slowly changing since then.

Sure, you missed all the real stuff that is going on:

- II-VI channel materials on silicon

- Finfet, Nanowire FETS (the top down variant, not the academic bottom up version.)

- RRAM (Memristors are a sub-class of these devices. Memristors mainly exist in the PR department of HP)

- TSV integration

- 3D Flash

- Memory integrated processers (see Microns Automata)

This is definitely important, since I had the same impression and was a bit suprised how you could be that angry about a single conference.

Btw, is it also a requirement for students in India to send out a specific number of applications? I get a lot of phd position applications from indian students as response to my publications. They look like mass emails and are usually absolutely unrelated to the field.

Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are probably the best ones out there.

I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences.

>Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right?

No, absolutely not. Looking at the web site immediately raises two red flags:

1) It's a multi-topic conference. Usually these fall into two categories: Undergrad conferences and money-making scams. Participating in neither of them is "a big achievement"

2) The submission deadline is 9 days before the conference starts and three days before the registrations deadline. This would give them 2-3 days for the peer review process? That's is close to impossible.

>"In 1970, J. E. Thornton wrote a book called Design of a Computer: The Control Data 6600 http://ygdes.com/CDC/DesignOfAComputer_CDC6600.pdf

I love this book. The CDC6600 was the first architecture to implement many of paradigms that were later assigned to the RISC architecture. And Cray did it 15 years earler.

>There is a core of sadness there. 2nd world war was rough on a whole generation of Europeans, and the writer George Perec exhibited similar frenetic activity and the use of arcane games to fend things off? Erdos's chosen game field was more useful of course.

I think you are completely missing the point here. Erdős chose to live like that. The title "the man who only loved numbers" is not a hyperbole.

IEEE Spectrum, suberb article as always.

But maybe a bit too far fetched on the "Robot Dream". The way the silicon in Silicon Valley was seeded is by Shockley Labs and its (lack of proper) management.

This should be put in context. This is no unassuming teenager who downloaded a film via a file sharing network and was caught "distributing" it, due to the nature of file sharing.

He uploaded an unreleased movie that has not been released otherwise, thereby causing significant damage to the original producers. Furthermore he got fined extra to due uploading the film in bad quality, thereby damaging reputation.