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Transparent Transistors Are Coming

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Dec 29, 2004 08:00 PM
from the invisible-keyboard dept.
Technology Science
Roland Piquepaille writes "Transparent electronics is an emerging technology which aims to produce invisible electronic circuits. Now, researchers from Oregon report they made a major advance in transparent electronics. Their zinc-tin-oxide 'thin-film' materials are amorphous, physically robust, chemically stable and cheap to produce at just above room temperature. These new materials and transistors offer many new possibilities for consumer electronics, transportation, business and the military."
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  • Roland Piquepaille (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DarkHelmet (120004) * <mark.seventhcycle@net> on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:01PM (#11214749) Homepage
    #1: This is a followup on another story. [slashdot.org]

    #2: This Roland Piquepaille stuff is getting on my nerves. There is obviously some kind of either backdoor deal, or favoritism for this guy getting stories.

    Where is your journalistic integrity?

    Hey Slashdot! I feel like having the option to block this guy out on my Edit Home Page [slashdot.org] Page. I mean, he has more submissions than "samzenpus," whoever the hell that is.

    Don't force me to write a RSS filter that blocks phrasewords out. I'm feeling too lazy atm.

    • "And are you paying for your access?"

      ...oh, wait, you are! :) Just kidding. If you look closely, you'll see that actually, a LOT of the submissions that make the cut are actually submitted by people who wrote the article or worked on the team, or whatever. Slashdot is acting as a news summary service, they don't go out and do their own reporting. So people who offer a lot of material often find it getting through, especially if the first batch is well received. Or if it's a slow day. Or it hasn't been post
    • If the story is interesting, what is the big frickin deal? If it's not interesting, what is the big fricking deal?

      Me personally, I'm sick of lots of stories Slashdot posts about. Do I filter them? Nah. Do I bitch about them? Admittedly I used to. But life's too short. Now I just scroll on.

      Lighten up.

      • If I remember correctly, Piquepaille responded to earlier popular slashdot criticism (correctly, in my view) by placing links to his summaries down low in his submissions.

        I don't bother to visit his site because it doesn't usually have anything unique to offer aside from "this is a cool thing" links.

  • Roland Piquepaille and /.: Is there a connection? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:02PM (#11214755)
    Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

    I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com] . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

    Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com [blogads.com]. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.

    Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

    Now let's talk about money.

    Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index [networksolutions.com]) . Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (
    • ... I haven't checked to see if the parent post is plagerized or anything but it's a valid point. Kudos.

      My post above [slashdot.org] states similar facts, though more ambiguous than hard data.

      Good work, son.
    • It appears that every single article submitted to Slashdot by Roland Piquepaille is accepted, and he submits multiple articles each month. As of today, it is clear that ten articles were accepted in October, six in November, and four in December (so far). See http://slashdot.org/~rpiquepa for yourself. Some generate lots of discussion; others very little. What is clear is that, on a whole, this generates a lot of traffic for Roland Piquepaille.

      You must be new here. Since when do Slashdotters read the arti
    • It appears that every single article submitted to Slashdot by Roland Piquepaille is accepte

      It does, doesn't it. Yet for the sums in question I don't really think that Slashdot media inc. (OSDN or whatever they're called this week) would be taking a backhander from him in order to get them published. Or, if they are, can they please open the channel up? I know a whole shitload of people that'd pay $100 a pop to put stories on Slashdot. Oh yes.

      Dave


    • I say we pillory him just because neither his first nor last name is properly pronounced by Americans.

    • I think that Roland Piquepaille's biz is entirely legitimate.

      His job is to research the web for people who do not have the time to do it, and he is getting $600 for his job.

      What's wrong with that?
      Ok, he didn't give credits before, but now he do.

      So, don't bother him.

      It's a differente story the issue about slashdot posting.

      --

    • I know the wrath of Sims, he doesn't like my .sig so he put my entire subnet in the "timeout corner". Big man Michael is. Lover of free speech as long as he agrees with it. I am sure I will get placed in the timeout corner again for this post or just have my account deleted. We will soon see...
    • A good read and an eye opener. Sadly I would say nothing will come of it and more then likely we will see more people do this.

    • Nice conspiracy theory. I don't buy it, but it's very cute.

      Some specific problems with your theory:

      First, Slashdot itself runs basically the same type of service Roland does; they link to other articles. Hell, Slashdot doesn't even have to go looking for the articles, they expect readers to submit them. Slashdot is sure as hell making more money each month than Roland. Should we hate Slashdot as well?

      Second, is Roland (and Slashdot) providing a service? Well, you're here, aren't you? Roland serv

      • Said the guy posting in an offensive story, thus providing more eyeballs to the related ads.

        I don't think that makes sense. Reading and posting to a slashdot article doesn't mean driving traffic to the linked articles. The slashdot articles are the only thing that links to the articles, postings in those threads doesn't necessarily mean more traffic for the linked sites.

        • Re:Roland Piquepaille and /.: Is there a connectio (Score:4, Insightful)

          by NanoGator (522640) on Wednesday December 29 2004, @09:41PM (#11215336) Homepage Journal
          It means more comments in the thread, which means more ad hits for Slashdot, which means more demand for the dude's work. Frankly, I resent my flamebait moderation on my previous post. It's a good point. The best way to keep this guy around is to keep the topic controversial. How do you think Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh stay on the air?

          You guys want Slashdot to take him down? Don't comment in his threads. The editors will get the point when they can no longer guarantee that certain topics will get x many pages served with client y's ads..

  • FYI (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistors [wikipedia.org]

  • Please (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:03PM (#11214764)
    Wearable computers, please.

  • A new form of swindling (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 (314817) on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:04PM (#11214768) Homepage
    "Yes sir, I know it doesn't look like there's an Athlon in there, but there is, trust me. It's the new transparent model."

    "Really?"

    "Sure."

  • Sounds like just another ITO (Score:5, Informative)

    by gaber1187 (681071) * on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:07PM (#11214784)
    Sounds alot like the Nature Nov 25th issue which mentions another advance in indium gallium zinc oxide by a japanese group. They did theirs on a plastic substrate with an amorphous oxide.

    Zinc Tin Oxide sounds alot like indium tin oxide (ITO) which is pretty commonly used, but has commonly known downsides. I don't think this is all that impressive.

    • Sure. Just because two compounds shares two out of three chemical elements, they must be a lot alike. Hey, they sound alike, and that's all that matters, right?

      Or did you have an actual reason (other than similar names) for stating this opinion? If so, would you let us know what it is?

      • Re:Sounds like just another ITO (Score:4, Informative)

        by gaber1187 (681071) * on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:44PM (#11214960)
        After looking up the paper in applied physics letters, they mentioned more properties about the material and that it is in the class of amorphous oxide conductors (which is where you dope a heavy metal oxide with something like Tin to make it conductive). In fact, this material could be used quite easily just like ITO, but it actually has a lower conductivity than ITO. What these guys did is use the ITO as a semiconductor channel not just as a conductor. The ON voltage is 5V (due to the large 3.35 eV bandgap), compared to about less than 0.5 volts for most modern VLSI devices.

        The reason I mention the Japanese work is that they use multiple components molecules which apparently helps maintain the amorphous qualities of the film. In other words, I think this work is not as good as the Japanese work.

  • This is just what I need for that transparent Lucite(tm) computer case. A transparent MOBO!!!

  • thin-film is the key point? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by helioquake (841463) on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:09PM (#11214802) Journal
    So being "transparent" really doesn't mean much for sales point? It sounds like the key points are (1) the element can be made small (thin) and (2) cheap. I could be way off the mark, as I just skimmed the article out of curiousity on application.

    Perfect for a throw-away phone and such?
    • Something being cheap is a very important factor in the sales side of things. If I can produce something that works as well as something else for much cheaper, then I can sell that product for a price that would cause people to buy my product over the competitor.

      So, it being transparent causes it to look "cool" and also be "cheap". win win situation my friend....

  • I wonder if it contains... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Brad1138 (590148) <brad1138@yahoo.com> on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:12PM (#11214821)
    Transparent aluminum? [sun.com]
  • I hope the tech gets better than this. Still I'm Impressed.
    I don't think we'll see much of this implemented.
  • ... no one will be able to see I'm a nerd?

  • Reduced "screen door" effect (Score:3, Interesting)

    by K8Fan (37875) on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:43PM (#11214955) Journal

    Currently, the quality and definition of LCD screens and LCD chips used in projectors is due to the fact that the driver circuitry for each cell is in the area around the cell. And the yeild for both is limited by not having redundant driver circuitry for each cell. If these transistors truely are transparent, does this mean that the driver circuitry could be in the middle of each cell, and the area between each cell could be reduced to a bare minimum? And does this mean that they could have additional circuirty so the cells could be self-healing and could eliminate both "burned on" and "burned off" pixels?

  • Just in time for the latest Wonder Woman movie. With Star Trek's transparent aluminum and these new-fangled transparent circuits, she can finally go solid state.

  • how does this relate to silicon (Score:3, Informative)

    by cats-paw (34890) on Wednesday December 29 2004, @08:55PM (#11215002) Homepage
    From the abstract :

    Transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) with an amorphous zinc tin oxide channel layer formed via rf magnetron sputter deposition are demonstrated. Field-effect mobilities of 5-15 and 20-50 cm^2 V^-1 s^-1 are obtained for devices post-deposition annealed at 300 and 600 C, respectively. TTFTs processed at 300 and 600 C yield devices with turn-on voltage of 0-15 and -5-5 V, respectively. Under both processing conditions, a drain current on-to-off ratio greater than 10^7 is obtained. Zinc tin oxide is one example of a new class of high performance TTFT channel materials involving amorphous oxides composed of heavy-metal cations with (n-1)^d10 ns^0 (n>=4) electronic configurations. ©2005 American Institute of Physics

    For comparison pusposes positive carrier mobility in silicon is about 500 cm^2 V^-1 s^-1 and for negative charges (aka electrons) it is about 800. This means that this transparent dvice technology is on the order of 10 - 50 times slower than silicon. Not good for new CPU's :-) which is not the purpose of the research anyway.

    What's of much more interest and is not mentioned in the abstract is what the gain of these devices are and what kind of current density they can handle.

    The "drain current on-to-off ratio" is sort of an odd thing to put in the paper. I mean if the off current is 1pA then the on current is 10uA (woo-hoo). If they made an actual transistor they should be able to present very standard benchmark values like gain, cut-off frequency and breakdown voltages.

    So I'm not actually convinced they created a bonafide device, but maybe just characterized the films for use as a potential semiconductor, in which case they have a long way to go. They need to dope the material, attach a gate, etc... all things which could cause all sorts of complications.

  • It was so obvious. All they had to do was manufacture the transistors out of transparent aluminum [theverylas...ternet.com]!
  • I always thought that silicon transistors are transparent - OK, more translucent than transparent, but make them thin enough and they should be transparent. Silicon trannies have been around for decades, so what is new about this idea?
  • Tin oxide has been used for over a century to make cheap power resistors and heated windshields. Nothing new to see here.
  • Are not those already using transparent transistors on the glass? Or did i miss something in that class...
  • .. the (transparent) glasses ARE the battlefield computer..
    • And why, if he is listed as an foe do I even SEE his posts?
      Easy enough to blacklist 212.43.241.105 at the router for now I guess.

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