Blogging the Chip Space

Parsing the new blog addresses

2011-06-02T23:30:00.001-07:00

Apparently the shift in blog providers re-worked the directory structure in a way that will break past links. I'll try to get a custom 404 page set up, but until I do links of the form

http://www.thinfilmmfg.com/blog/tfm/year/month/filename.shtml

should become

http://blog.thinfilmmfg.com/year/month/filename.html

I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Apparently it's a little more complicated than that. Blogger helpfully appended the day of the month at the end of each filename, too. We've got a redirect in place though: links to posts in the old blog will now send you to the appropriate monthly archive page.

Administrivia: A new place, new look, a new RSS feed?

2011-05-29T22:06:00.001-07:00

For those of you actively subscribed to this blog, please note that we've switched blog software and gone to a new address for it: http://blog.thinfilmmfg.com/. As a side effect of the move and/or new software, we may have broken any RSS feed you had, in which case you will need to resubscribe using the new address.

The good news is the software is easier to use to post, faster for both posting and reading, and less maintenance for the ace IT staff at Thin Film Manufacturing (that's me) as well.

(Not that it will be perfect, for example the service we are now using had a major outage in early May. But we won't personally have to fix any issues.)

As always, report any problems accessing the blog to Katherine, or to me at ahd@kew.com.

Pricing out solar

2010-07-28T03:12:00.001-07:00

When people hear I'm involved in the solar industry, they always ask whether they should put solar panels on their house. I don't actually know the answer to that -- I deal with the manufacturing side of things, which is far removed from what retail customers actually see. But a friend of a friend recently installed panels, so I jumped at the chance to find out more.

This particular installation used SolarBlend roofing, with panels by SunTech and installation by Eagle Roofing. It cost about $22,000 for a 4 KW installation. That's about $5.50 per watt, installed, before a 30% federal tax rebate. That's pretty good, and a substantial improvement from just a few years ago.

For the homeowner, though, the key question is how much electricity the array will generate, and how quickly the energy savings will pay back the cost. That's a hard one, because it depends on the climate. It's easy to see that western Washington gets less sunshine than southern Nevada, but even driving a few miles within western Washington will put you in a different microclimate. Fortunately, there's a very helpful resource, Gaisma, which merges astronomical and weather data to give solar insolation charts for many locations around the world. The installation I'm discussing here is located in Pahrump, NV.

Insolation is measured in kilowatt-hours per square meter, per day. That's the amount of light actually hitting a solar panel. Multiply by the area and conversion efficiency of the panel to get the amount of electricity generated:

Generated electricity = Insolation x Area x Conversion Efficiency

Suntech's Just Roof panels claim to produce 125 peak watts per square meter at 1000 Watts/square meter irradiance. So a 4KW installation will include 32 square meters of panels, and the panels are about 12.5% efficient. Plugging all of that into a spreadsheet, we get about 7150 kilowatt-hours per year from this installation. (Probably a bit less in practice, as panels are less efficient in hot weather.) That's probably more than an average household needs, especially if people aren't home during the sunniest part of the day. Which is why net metering -- the ability to sell power back to the grid -- is so important for residential solar installations. Let's assume that all the electricity generated by this array is either used on site or sold back to the grid.

The next step is to figure out how much the electricity is worth. That's difficult because many companies use tiered pricing: the more electricity you use, the more each incremental kilowatt costs. There is a push to implement time-sensitive pricing as well, reducing the cost for electricity use during off-peak hours. All of this is discussed in more detail here. For purposes of this discussion, I'm going to say the electricity generated is worth $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, for a total of $1072 per year, but that's just a back-of-the envelope calculation.

Without the 30% federal rebate, payback time for a $22,000 roof that generates $1072 worth of electricity per year is 20 years. With it, it's 14 years. The warranted panel life is 25 years. (This assumes that all of the $22,000 is for the array. Subtract any costs that would also be incurred by a conventional roof.)

For the sake of simplicity, I'm ignoring both the cost of money for the installation and the likely inflation in electricity costs over its useful life. I'm also ignoring any value that the installation adds to the overall value of the home. If we assume that electricity costs are going to go up over the next 20 years, then the combination of these effects should make a solar array more attractive, reducing the actual payback time.

Just for grins, I ran the same calculation for an installation in Bothell, WA. The relative lack of sun cuts the expected electricity generation to about 4850 kilowatt-hours per year. That's $727 per year at the same $0.15/kilowatt-hour rate.

Disclaimer: These values are estimates, and may not be applicable to any specific installation. If you are considering a solar roof, ask your installer to supply accurate cost and efficiency metrics.

Update: Michael Bluejay, author of the article on electricity costs linked above, emailed a link to the solar installation calculator on his site.

Yes, I'm still here

2010-06-24T15:27:00.001-07:00

Most of my long form writing has been for clients lately, hence the lack of updates here. Short snippets and such can be found in my Tumblr blog, simply because the software over there is more friendly to snippeting.

After Deepwater Horizon, we still need drilling

2010-05-12T01:43:00.001-07:00

Like just about everyone else who comments on energy, I was mildly embarrassed when one of the worst oil spills in history happened less than a month after this post on offshore drilling. As the Economist points out, though, the spill changes the politics of drilling, but not the underlying dynamics. Exporting drilling to countries with less environmental oversight doesn't help the environment or the long term energy picture.

If there is a silver lining, it is that the spill may help restate the case for clean energy, which has been battered by the combined effects of the recession and falling oil prices. And it will be a long time before anyone dares suggest that safety measures like remotely operated blowout valves are "too expensive." (Although, in fairness, it's not clear that a remote switch would have helped in this case.) If more intense regulation drives up the price of oil, that's one step toward making the price reflect its cost.

Fair winds and following seas

2010-05-07T08:23:00.001-07:00

I was saddened to learn that Jean LeMoin, founder and president of MCA public relations, passed away early this week. She's been a fixture for as long as I've been in the semiconductor industry, dispensing good humor and wise counsel in equal proportions. I'll miss hearing her laughter from across the room, but also her quiet suggestions.

Traces of her most visible mentoring, of PR folks, can be found in the many marketing departments that are populated with MCA alumni. Just as important though, was her gentle guidance of multitudes of journalists and executives, myself included. She never asked journalists for more than a fair hearing and an open mind, and she always made sure her clients had something useful to say. She worked tirelessly to cultivate an environment where mutual respect is more important than spin. She'll be missed.

My sympathies are with my many friends on the MCA team, who are carrying on as Jean would have expected through what has surely been an impossible week. They've asked that memorial donations be made to the Jean LeMoin Women in PR Scholarship Fund, in care of the agency. Their announcement is after the jump:

Jean LeMoin
1956 - 2010
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
It is with great regret that we announce the loss of MCA's founder and president Jean LeMoin, who passed away suddenly on May 3, 2010. A true trailblazer in the communications field, Jean founded MCA in 1983 as a one-woman shop and grew it into a highly respected boutique agency specializing in the global semiconductor, flat-panel display and microelectronics industries.
Jean launched MCA with an initial focus on semiconductor equipment and materials - one of the first agencies to do so - drawing on her marketing communications experience in the industry to build her client base. Over nearly three decades, Jean and MCA have influenced the industry outlook on many important subjects, launching game-changing technologies and creating new opportunities for outreach and dialogue. In 1994, VLSI Research Inc named her to its Chip Industry Hall of Fame for "pioneering the concept that a PR agency is a mechanism for managing a company's image across a broad front... creating an image that is cohesive with the media, customers, and the financial community." This vision remains a hallmark of MCA's approach.
A believer in giving back to the community, Jean sat on the boards of several industry associations, as well as such non-profits as Ronald McDonald House, the Support Network for Battered Women and Rubicon - organizations to which she also donated agency time in order to help reach those in need.
Those of us who knew and worked with Jean will remember many things about her - her keen mind and technology savvy, her love of the arts and good books, her affinity for Oprah and chocolate, her humorous stories about her exploits with best friend and life partner Kevin McCoy, how she always drank Diet Coke from a wine glass and never put croutons on her salad... Jean was a unique and fascinating personality, and the mark she has left on the communications profession, and our lives, is indelible.
To honor her memory, the Jean LeMoin Women in PR Scholarship has been created to enable a deserving student seeking a career in public relations or communications to pursue her dream. As a respected mentor to young PR professionals throughout her career, Jean's wish was for this effort to continue on. If you are interested in making a donation, please send your contribution, payable to The Jean LeMoin Women in PR Scholarship Fund, to MCA, 2119 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA 94043.
From the MCA Team

Where are we?

2010-04-27T17:37:00.001-07:00

Eek! I just realized that the new template doesn't include a link to the contact page. Better fix that soonest!

In the interim, you can find it at http://www.thinfilmmfg.com/admin/about.htm#contact

So you want to hire a writer...

2010-04-27T16:35:00.001-07:00

I've been chatting with a number of new potential clients lately, and realized I'm having very similar conversations with all of them. So this is something of an FAQ for people who think an outside writer might be able to support their efforts. While you don't need to have the answers to these questions before you contact me, it will save us both some time if you've started to think about them.

1. What's the audience? What do you want to accomplish with this? An article for an industry journal serves a different function than a press release or a brochure.

2. What's it about? What do you want people to know after they've read it that they don't know now? What response do you want?

3. How long is it? A 100-word event listing is not the same as a 500-word news story or a 2000-word feature.

4. What's your budget? Your timeframe? These two questions define what is and isn't reasonable. If you have a ten hour budget, but need a twenty hour project done by next week, we probably don't have much to talk about. But if you're able to be flexible about delivery, small projects can often fit into scheduling gaps.

5. What's the best use of your time? Often, handing off a large project is more cost effective than handing off a small one. The reason is that any writing project has planning, information gathering, writing, and editing components. You'll need to be involved in the planning and information gathering pieces anyway, whether you delegate the project or not. The real time savings comes from handing off the writing and editing components, which are proportionally larger for longer projects. Those components are where I add the most value, too.

Administrivia - Site Blog Software Upgraded

2010-04-04T12:13:00.001-07:00

We've been seeing too much comment SPAM lately, so for the first time in too long a time (3 years), we've upgraded the Movable Type software which drives our blogs.

With Movable Type 5.01, we are now able to require commenters to sign-in order to reduce SPAM. We will not be collecting your login information, but rather relying on your choice of another web site (Google, Yahoo, AIM, Live Journal etc.) to verify you exist. (We won't see your password for that other site, they'll just us tell your name and maybe email address.)

The leap in software releases required us to change the look of the blogs; we're not done with Katherine's TFM blog yet. In addition, we MAY have broken some links.

Please notify of us any problems you have reading or commenting on the blogs.

Drilling into energy policy

2010-03-31T04:12:00.001-07:00

Much of the coverage of Obama's announcement on offshore drilling focuses on the politics. Yes, this co-opts a major Republican talking point ahead of the potential debate on carbon regulation. Yes, this will cause much consternation among environmentalists and will make oil companies happy.

But politics aside, this is just plain smart.

The "energy problem" is really two problems in one. The first problem is climate change, and you address that by reducing consumption of fossil fuels: renewable energy, conservation, carbon regulation, etc. Offshore drilling doesn't help the climate change problem, but it doesn't hurt it either, because the economy as currently structured burns the same amount of oil regardless of where it comes from.

Which leads us to the second problem. Oil is an increasingly scarce commodity, and large amounts of the world's oil are controlled by autocracies with unfriendly governments. As oil prices rise -- which they will as the global economy recovers -- those countries gain power far out of proportion to their overall importance. To gain leverage over those countries, you reduce the importance of their oil. That means reducing consumption, but it also means developing alternative sources, particularly sources controlled by the US or by other friendly democracies.

In the long run, switching the world to a post-fossil fuel economy would address both problems. Climate change policy and energy security policy have the same ultimate goal. But even the most starry-eyed optimists agree that such a switch will take far longer than a single presidency, and in the short term the US economy would be crippled without a secure energy supply. Hence the importance of clean coal, offshore drilling, nuclear energy, etc.

Yes, it's good politics, but it's also good policy.

Environmentalists are appalled, and not entirely without reason. The impact of offshore drilling can be huge. But there's a certain amount of hypocrisy in protecting Virginia's beaches at the expense of Nigeria's coastal rainforest. Until oil exploration is eliminated altogether, rigorous oversight is the best way to minimize its environmental impact. Democracies are much better at accountability and oversight than other systems.

A note about comments

2010-03-05T04:07:00.001-08:00

Recently I've had a spate of comments making innocuous but generic and not terribly relevant remarks, from people with names or web sites pointing to stock promoters, Viagra sales, and so forth. I've been deleting these as spam.

If you are a real person and your comment has been deleted in this way, I apologize. Make a substantive comment under an actual human name (ideally, but not necessarily, your own), and point to a link that is even remotely relevant, and your comment will get through. Behave like a spammer, and be treated like one.

More about jobs and energy policy

2010-02-28T15:32:00.001-08:00

In last week's post on energy policy, I skipped over the effect of manufacturing efficiencies. If an information-intensive technology can be manufactured in a way that reaps large economies of scale, then the know-how used to create it can still be very cheap on a per unit basis.

Exhibit A for this effect is the integrated circuit industry. Each individual transistor is a small masterpiece of engineering. The intellectual property contained in a few square inches of silicon is enormous, but the industry spreads out the cost by making billions of them. Thin film solar manufacturers believe that manufacturing efficiency will allow them to reach a competitive price point. That would be very good news for me, my clients, and the world as a whole.

But still not necessarily for job creation.

The disconnect between information content and job creation is explored in more detail in this recent post at fivethirtyeight.com, analyzing the decline of manufacturing jobs in the US economy. It isn't due to "evil corporations shipping American manufacturing overseas." Until the start of the recent recession, US manufacturing output was at an all time high. Rather, it's due to massive improvements in productivity, which in this context means replacing humans with automation of various kinds.

If solar becomes cost competitive it will be through massive productivity improvements, achieved in part by automating every step that can be automated.

Still, merely looking at the need for productivity improvements does undervalue the job creation opportunity. Even if the number of jobs per GW goes down -- which I think is not only likely, but necessary -- the total number of jobs will still go up as the market size increases. The current world solar market is about 6 GW per year, but the world's total electricity consumption is in excess of 17 trillion kWh. That's a whole lot of room for growth.

Unfortunately, that also leaves us back where we started. Promoting use of a product through subsidies is not usually a good way to make the manufacturing of that product more efficient. The government can improve manufacturing -- for example by investing in research and development through organizations like NIST and NREL -- or it can create jobs, but it isn't really good at doing both at once.

Disclaimer: Though my past and present clients may like this post better, my opinions are still mine alone.

For best policy, first define the goal

2010-02-22T07:28:00.001-08:00

Is the goal of energy policy to reduce the costs energy imposes on the US economy and/or the planet, or to create jobs?

As one of my favorite energy-oriented sites points out, the two goals don't necessarily have much to do with each other.

Thin film solar technology, for example, contains a lot of intellectual property. Lots of engineering expertise is required to build the deposition systems, optimize the processes, and keep the whole operation running. Add the skilled electricians who actually build solar farms and connect them to the grid, and you get a lot of high-skill jobs. You also get electricity that is substantially more expensive than that generated by plain old boring low-tech fossil fuel plants.

But if your goal is to reduce the world's (or America's) consumption of fossil fuels and generation of greenhouse gases, whatever alternative technology you pick needs to be as inexpensive as possible. Ideally, it should be simple enough for illiterate subsistence farmers to implement using locally available materials, perhaps with guidance from a handful of engineers.

Not that there's anything wrong with green jobs. I have one myself, since most of my current clients are in the solar space. And certainly the emergence of a renewable energy sector will benefit the communities where those jobs reside.

But the assumption that clean energy will both prevent climate change and revitalize the US manufacturing sector doesn't stand up to close examination. Energy is a commodity product, and as such will always tend to migrate to the lowest cost technologies and least expensive producers. The fewer high-skill manufacturing jobs an energy technology requires, the more likely it is to actually succeed in shifting the world's energy mix.

Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of any particular past or present client.

Let the good times roll?

2010-02-18T09:52:00.001-08:00

How to decide if a blog entry is worth writing: you have more to say than will fit in a 140 character Twitter post. (For those interested, my Twitter ID is kewms.)

In this case, I'm celebrating the end of the recession. North American semiconductor equipment manufacturers booked more than a billion dollars in orders in January, for the first time since May, 2008. Though still a pretty weak number in historical terms, that probably does mean people are buying actual equipment, as opposed to consumables, service contracts, and so forth.

(In the depths of the recession, people joked that even a single package of O-rings would be enough to move the book-to-bill number.)

Equipment purchases are good news for a couple of reasons. First, they usually mean that the purchasing fab is running at 80-90% of capacity and the demand outlook is positive. Second, they mean that the customer is able to get financing on terms it considers reasonable.

Dubai update

2009-12-09T04:10:00.001-08:00

Just a quick update on my post on the Dubai World debt restructuring. A spokesman for Dubai Silicon Oasis says that DSO is not part of Dubai World and will not be directly affected. The indirect effects are anyone's guess.

Be careful what you wish for: telecom edition

2009-12-09T03:42:00.001-08:00

Oh, this is rich.

First, the iPhone launches, with AT&T as its only US provider, and an unlimited data plan as the standard package.

Because the iPhone is popular, users flock to AT&T. Because internet access from the iPhone is easy, people do it, a lot.

AT&T's network staggers under the load, leading to dropped calls and poor performance.

AT&T's solution? "Some form of usage-based pricing for data is inevitable," according to the Associated Press.

What I want to know is why anyone was surprised by this. The history of the internet -- the history of computing -- tells us that if you make access easier, people will do more of it. And now AT&T is shocked, simply shocked, that people are actually using all those bandwidth intensive links that Apple so helpfully provides.

Of course AT&T's dilemma is real. They need to improve service, and the money to do that has to come from somewhere. But capping usage seems like such a late-1990s way to go about it. Given the bandwidth demands of the Apple Store, I wonder what Apple will have to say about this.

(Link by way of the Atlantic business channel.)

Yes, the Middle East matters to IC makers

2009-11-28T03:18:00.001-08:00

Interesting... The Advanced Technology Investment Company launched GlobalFoundries, a joint venture with AMD, earlier this year. Earlier this month, it agreed to purchase Chartered Semiconductor, thereby becoming a major player in the foundry market. ATIC is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, and has said it plans to build manufacturing facilities in Dubai Silicon Oasis.

Meanwhile, Dubai World, the Dubai government's largest investment vehicle, recently announced it would seek a six-month hold on debt payments as part of a restructuring, the same day it raised US$5 billion from Abu Dhabi banks. Both Dubai and Abu Dhabi are part of the United Arab Emirates, and the federal UAE government is under pressure to provide more support for Dubai World, which it may or may not do. The UAE has been hit hard by declines in the price of oil. More generally, the global economic downturn has put a lot of pressure on government finances around the world, and the Dubai World restructuring shows that support for underperforming investments can't be assumed. (Best coverage of the Dubai World restructuring is at the Wall Street Journal. Subscription required.)

I don't know how the problems at Dubai World will affect ATIC or, for that matter, Dubai Silicon Oasis. I've sent out some queries, but don't expect a response over the weekend. The situation definitely bears watching, though. The semiconductor industry rewards patient capital, but global conditions are making patience difficult.

It won't be zombies next time

2009-10-29T15:15:00.001-07:00

Yes, a blog post! Believe me, I'm shocked too. Though this year has been surprisingly good, given the economic situation, it's had me working on several larger, multi-month projects. That's taken me out of the day-to-day news flow to some extent.

But I did notice this, and it's well worth passing on. Atlantic Business Channel editor Daniel Indiviglio has broken down the recently released proposal on financial regulation and systemic risk. How do regulators deal with institutions that are too big too fail? Indiviglio's analysis is long -- I've linked to the last of eight parts, which summarizes -- but readable for those of us who aren't economic policy wonks.

At the same time, I can't help but think of an old story in which an adventurer complains that he knows all about zombies now, so of course it won't be zombies that attack him next time. Booms and busts appear to be inherent in markets, dating back at least to the 17th century Dutch tulip mania. The desire to build bigger and bigger institutions and accumulate more and more assets is as old as humanity. Any regulatory scheme that preserves the essential dynamism of markets is likely to contain the seeds of its own failure. The critical question may not be whether it will work, but what will contain the damage when it fails.

Be your own customer service advocate

2009-08-31T05:07:00.001-07:00

Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one, but the power of the press does, too. And in the Internet era, anyone can own a press.

Many major newspapers and TV stations have customer service features: a reader or viewer writes them with a customer service problem, they take it up with the vendor and essentially use the threat of public embarrassment to get the problem fixed. Heaven help the hapless vendor if the victim is actually a journalist.

But what happens when everyone can be a publisher, and many many people can command an audience of hundreds or thousands? Stuff like this, in which incompetent customer service confronts the power of Twitter, and loses, big time. (Sleep-deprived new parent rant. Contains shouting, some bad language, and references to baby poo.)

Full disclosure: I have occasionally played the journalist card myself. But it's always a last resort. Like many such weapons, it loses effectiveness if used too often.

Enough records to go around

2009-08-26T07:26:00.001-07:00

It's easy to achieve world record solar performance. You just have to define your niche properly. The following records were all announced recently:

Most efficient solar cell: a five-junction concentrator device from the University of New South Wales. 43% efficient.

Most efficient triple-junction cell: a concentrator cell from SpectroLab. 41.6% efficient.

Most efficient screen-printed monocrystalline silicon production cell: more than 18% efficient, from Suniva. The "screen-printed" qualifier is important, as SunPower's non-screen-printed production cells top 20%.

Most efficient multicrystalline silicon panels: 15.6% efficiency, achieved by Suntech Power. Though this is a lower number than the other records, it's actually pretty interesting. It's for a complete panel, not a cell, and beats Sandia's longstanding record.

Update: But wait, there's more! I missed this one...

Most efficient flexible CdTe cell. 12.4%, achieved by a group in Switzerland. This one is important because it uses a low temperature process, compatible with roll-to-roll processing.

Two great buzzwords that work great together

2009-08-18T08:33:00.001-07:00

This is interesting.

Carbon nanotubes have properties that make them very interesting as possible channel materials for advanced transistors. Unfortunately, precise placement of trillions of nanotubes is a difficult problem.

Enter DNA. DNA is very good at self-assembly, so it's (relatively) easy to make an array of DNA structures. It's also easy to modify a DNA molecule so that it will bind to, say, a carbon nanotube.

At least that's the idea behind recent work at IBM. So far they're still working on the DNA scaffold, but the potential is very cool.

What's happening in Iran?

2009-06-21T02:49:00.001-07:00

Useful sites for news from Iran:
Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish
Huffington Post
National Iranian-American Council

And for video:
CitizenTube
(Be aware that some of these videos show a great deal of graphic violence.)

The best foreign media coverage has been from the BBC. Still, most foreign journalists in Iran have been asked to leave and/or face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement. The above links depend largely on reports and video from citizens in Iran, either submitted by email or posted to sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. (Search for the IranElection tag on any of these sites.) Most of these reports are impossible to confirm.

Time for a Truth Commission

2009-04-22T02:13:00.001-07:00

Supposed links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were one of the main justifications for the Iraq War. Dick Cheney in particular continued to point to those links long after they had been debunked by both the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon.

That's bad enough. But now McClatchy is reporting that the search for proof of such links was one of the major motivations for the torture of "high value" detainees.

Let that sink in for a minute. Techniques used by Communist regimes to extract false confessions were deployed by American interrogators searching for evidence of a conspiracy that didn't actually exist. The Bush regime sacrificed the rule of law and 200 years of hard-earned American moral authority in order to achieve their own political goals.

(And incidentally, that last link is truly scary stuff. Katrina-level incompetence applied to interrogation policy.)

Yes, it really is that bad

2009-04-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

I just had a look at the latest equipment book-to-bill numbers, and they're pretty ugly. Both bookings and billings are below the levels reached in the depths of the dot-com meltdown, which was itself a historic downturn for the IC industry.

Worse, the ratio has not been above one since January 2007 (although it lingered in the upper 0.90s until May). The two years of the 2000-2002 downturn seemed like an eternity, and this one clearly isn't over yet.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that bookings seem to have stabilized, although at painfully low levels. I'm not going to call a bottom just yet, but I'm hearing hints of optimism rather than the unmitigated doom of a few months back.

The other good news is that the rise of consumer electronics in the last few years probably means a faster bounce off the bottom, at least for IC volume. It takes a lot less to get people to buy hundred-dollar gadgets than thousand-dollar computers. Of course the gadgets bring in less revenue, too.

The customer is always right, 450-mm edition

2009-04-20T07:50:00.001-07:00

I've had my differences with Robert Castellano in the past, but I think his view of the proposed 450-mm wafer transition is pretty accurate. The switch to 300-mm wafers was great for the chip companies, not so great for the equipment companies. So there are likely to be some tough negotiations about development funding and equipment purchase commitments before 450-mm equipment moves forward.

The bottom line, though, is that fighting with your customers is never a winning strategy. If big customers like Intel and Samsung are determined to build 450-mm fabs, the equipment companies who help them do it will be more successful than those who can't or won't.

Clean coal is part, but only part, of the energy answer

2009-04-07T11:52:00.001-07:00

Environmentalists often argue that investments in clean coal technology are just wasted money. It's a dirty fuel, it will always be a dirty fuel, and so the ultimate answer is to tax it into fiscal oblivion.

In a perfect world, I would agree with them.

But in this world, coal-generated electricity isn't going to go away. Coal is too plentiful and too cheap. Given a choice between turning the lights off and burning coal, countries will choose coal every time. Any workable energy or climate change policy is going to have to deal with the problem of coal.

Which is essentially the point Energy Secretary Chu made this week in comments supporting clean coal investments. Yet his other point was equally important: the problem of coal isn't going to be easy to fix. Clean coal is important, but it's not a strategy by itself.

There's something to be said for putting smart guys to work on energy policy.

DOE stimulates Solyndra

2009-03-25T09:12:00.001-07:00

Solyndra recently received DOE loan guarantees to support construction of a new manufacturing facility. Good for them. The guarantees illustrate the challenges as well as the benefits of government support, though: the law authorizing them was passed in 2005, applications were due by the end of 2006, yet Solyndra is the first company to actually receive a guarantee. Inclusion of funds in the recent economic stimulus package no doubt helped the process along.

Solyndra has an interesting technology, with CIGS solar material deposited on a cylindrical substrate. The idea is to keep the same cross-sectional area facing the sun at all times, without the complexity and cost of tilted mounts or tracking motors. It makes sense, but unfortunately they haven't shared much information about cost or performance. Third party sources tell me that their installation is as simple as claimed, but are more skeptical about how cost effective the panels are once installed.

So where have you been, anyway?

2009-03-21T15:12:00.001-07:00

I joined an Internet startup in 1998. Even then people were saying things like "biggest change since Gutenberg." The original Napster launched in 1999, and iTunes in 2001. I've been watching ad pages in industry print magazines shrink for most of that time. So count me among the flabbergasted that Traditional Publishing seems to be only just realizing that there might be a problem with their business model.

Really? You think?

Sheesh. What rock have they been hiding under for the last decade, anyway?

(Link by way of the Daily Dish.)

She's alive!

2009-03-18T03:16:00.001-07:00

No, I haven't died or quit. I'm sorry about the lack of posts in recent months. I've been transitioning into different (and mostly bigger) projects for some new clients, and am still working out the necessary load balancing. I hope to be more conscientious going forward, and appreciate your patience.

Apples vs. oranges

2009-03-18T03:04:00.001-07:00

A new study from MIT compares energy and resource consumption of various industries on a pound-for-pound basis. Yep, energy consumption per pound of output for manhole covers versus integrated circuits. Not surprisingly, integrated circuits consume a whole lot more energy. A more useful metric might be energy consumption per dollar value, or perhaps a ratio of value in to value out.

While it's tempting to dismiss the study as obviously ridiculous, energy consumption is an important issue for energy-generating technologies such as solar power. The more energy it takes to make a solar panel, the longer it takes for solar panels to start reducing net fossil fuel consumption: the panel has to recover its own energy cost first. Unless the solar industry generates more power than it consumes, it's hard for it to claim to be "green" or "sustainable."

How many new companies was that again?

2009-01-21T07:38:00.001-08:00

Greentech Media recently updated their list of solar industry startups. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of them. At least 200 who are willing to tell the world about their plans, goodness knows how many more in stealth mode.

Most new businesses fail, so many of these won't live long enough to grow up. But without entrepreneurs willing to take the chance, the Intels and Apples and Googles of tomorrow would never see the light of day.

Fifty years of Moore's Law

2009-01-07T07:17:00.001-08:00

The current issue of Technology Review has a nice photo essay illustrating the evolution of integrated circuits from Kilby's device to AMD's upcoming quad-core Phenom II. Techie that I am, I would have liked to see scale bars, but it's worth a look even without them.

Shoe moves to other foot, whiplash ensues

2009-01-05T00:51:00.001-08:00

Fascinating. Two of the most visible advocates of a strong executive branch have suddenly rediscovered the importance of checks and balances.

Just another day at the office

2008-12-19T01:17:00.001-08:00

Like many writers, I'm interested in how other writers work. This profile of Jon Favreau, President-elect Obama's chief speechwriter, is an interesting look at his process. Writing speeches for the soon-to-be Leader of the Free World is apparently not all that much different from the writing I do. The challenge is to keep The Muse from noticing the pressure and expectations, insane as they must be.

Where do we go from here?

2008-12-16T10:36:00.001-08:00

Ross Douthat has written a blog post for The Atlantic that captures, I think, much of the moral muddiness around the Bush administration's interrogation policies. As he says,

A term like "stress positions" sounds like one thing when it's sitting, bloodless, on a page; it sounds like something else when somebody dies from it.

Of course, people who use terms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "stress positions" do so exactly because of their bloodlessness, the filmy curtain they draw over what's really going on in places like Abu Ghraib. The photos from Abu Ghraib (benign introductory text, links to distressing images) yanked the curtain aside and forced Americans to see what was being done in their names. And now, having seen the photos, having seen the recently released Levin-McCain report (PDF), we have to decide what we want the new administration to do about it.

It's tempting, for all the reasons Douthat gives, to quietly put the curtain back in place, tiptoe away, and try to pretend it never happened. We can do that, but if we do we lose an opportunity to regain our moral authority. We lose the right to pretend that our proud defense of human rights and the rule of law is anything other than a rich nation's luxury, which we will abandon whenever it gets in the way. Americans may want to move on, but the rest of the world is watching to see what our promises really mean.

Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services
Committee in June 2008 that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” -- Levin-McCain report.

Memes that deserve to die

2008-12-05T02:48:00.001-08:00

It's not a depression if "depression-themed" merchandise is salable.

First, it's not a depression if people actually have money to buy cutsie depression-themed junk, as opposed to, say, food, clothing, and shelter.

Second, it's not a depression if people are able to see anything remotely humorous about the state of the economy or the possibility of a depression.

I'll be kind and assume that those who see economic depression as a market opportunity simply don't know what they are talking about. And so I'll suggest that such people browse the Dorothea Lange archives rather than speculating on the sort of personality that might see bread lines and massive population displacement as a good thing.

TGIF (Almost)

2008-11-20T07:00:00.001-08:00

It isn't Friday, but this link is for everyone who wishes it were. Mozart meets sidewalk performance art. (Video, with sound. Work-safe.) (Link by way of Andrew Sullivan.)

And now for something different

2008-11-14T04:04:00.001-08:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger for The Atlantic, has been running a Friday poetry feature. Intriguing, thought provoking, and worth a visit.

January 20, 2009

2008-11-05T16:15:00.001-08:00

Election Day is the day we Americans congratulate ourselves on the robustness of our democracy, the day the world's democratically elected leaders and dictators alike congratulate the President-elect and pledge to move forward. For at least a week or so, hope and bipartisanship reign. (Well, sometimes.)

But any two-bit dictator can hold elections. Even Zimbabwe held elections.

No, the real celebration of American democracy is Inauguration Day. For more than two hundred years, through wars, political scandals, brutally partisan campaigns and national tragedies, outgoing Presidents have seen their successors sworn in, and have quietly slipped back into their roles as mere citizens.

On January 20, 2009, George W. Bush will do the same.

Raise a glass

2008-11-04T00:47:00.001-08:00

When you vote today (you are voting, right?), be nice to the poll workers. Poll work involves long hours, grumpy people, and brain-crushing tedium for not very much money. In spite of that, most of the poll workers I've encountered are genuinely trying to do a good job, and our democracy couldn't function without them.

Economic Crises 101

2008-10-31T04:20:00.001-07:00

From Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, an extensive reading list for those seeking a better understanding of the current financial crisis.

Full disclosure: I've only read a handful of these myself.

Change is coming

2008-10-28T10:42:00.001-07:00

Barack Obama was born in 1961.

James Meredith, the first black student at the University of Mississippi, enrolled in 1962 with the help of 5,000 federal troops.

Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. Equality was only a dream at that point, as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act weren't passed until 1964 and 1965, respectively. The 24th Amendment, prohibiting poll taxes in federal elections, was ratified in 1964.

In 1967, when the Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriage, such laws still existed in sixteen states.

Just over forty years later, the son of such a marriage is the Democratic Party's nominee and a strong favorite to become the next president of the United States.

Win or lose, it's a historic moment. Don't forget to vote.

(Vote early if you can. Turnout is likely to shatter all records, so be prepared for long lines.)

Ink by the barrel

2008-10-23T03:13:00.001-07:00

The old saying "never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel," still holds. Press coverage of John McCain has become steadily more unfavorable since a senior adviser attacked the New York Times.

Now, attributing the negative coverage to McCain's attacks on the press is a bit simplistic. In the same period, McCain's poll numbers have dropped, he has attacked Obama, and the economic news has been uniformly bad, all of which might lead to negative coverage. Still, attacking the press for reporting unflattering facts (i.e. doing its job) is unlikely to improve your coverage.

What deregulation looks like

2008-10-01T02:05:00.001-07:00

Over in China, we're seeing a textbook demonstration of the importance of the rule of law and the need for government to guide the market's invisible hand. We're also seeing why government can't be trusted to supply that guidance on its own.

Milk producers -- either individual dairies or processing plants or both, it's not yet clear -- diluted milk with water, then added melamine to make the protein content look better than it was. Rather than being confined to a few rogue producers, this practice apparently took place on a massive scale and over an extended period of time.

Meanwhile, the government regulatory apparatus was either absent or corrupt, or both. Some of the largest offenders were exempt from government inspections under a self-regulation program. When children started getting sick, some of the suspicious products were recalled by individual companies, though without any explanation of the underlying problem or any coordinated effort to inform the public. Inquiries were suppressed in the runup to the Beijing Olympics. The whole mess came to light only when a foreign investor started to worry about its own liability -- after deferring to its Chinese partner for weeks -- and informed New Zealand's government.

There are episodes like this in America's past, too. They are why the FDA and the USDA exist. It's unfair to suggest, as some commentators have, that the Chinese people are any less ethical than anyone else. The problem is that there is no way for the ethical Average Wen to hold the unethical minority accountable. No whistleblower protections, no aggressive personal injury lawyers, no elected officials accountable to the people. When a major embarrassment like this happens, accountability is imposed from the top down -- I'm sure a good number of midlevel bureaucrats will lose their jobs or their lives over this -- but the emphasis is on containing the embarrassment, not fixing the underlying problem. Bottom up accountability would go a long way to reducing the frequency and severity of such incidents.

Hang on to your sneakers

2008-09-29T05:13:00.001-07:00

The bad debt recovery plan failed to pass the House. CSPAN has the roll call.

No word yet on when, or if, it will come up again, or what the next step might be. In the interim, this would be an excellent time to see how your Congressman voted and send thanks or concern as appropriate.

Where to draw the line?

2008-09-29T02:18:00.001-07:00

When is a company too big to fail?

That's one of the critical questions in the current credit mess. The Wall Street Journal explains how the decision to let Lehman Brothers fail turned out to be disastrously wrong.

It was wrong because it turns out that no one knows which investors have exposure to which financial instruments. Including the investors themselves. It's something like a financial butterfly effect: a subprime loan defaulting in Cleveland can cause a storm in Hong Kong.

That appears to be the logic behind the Treasury plan's focus on the underlying assets. If the bond secured by that subprime loan doesn't default -- or if the default is absorbed by the taxpayers -- then the damage to holders of related securities can be contained. We hope. Since no one knows how the various assets are connected, no one knows who the ultimate winners and losers will be.

(Wall Street Journal links; subscription required.)

Elitist is as elitist does

2008-09-27T15:47:00.001-07:00

Another campaign season, another chance for charges of "elitism" to fly back and forth. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that the word has no meaning if Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild can use it to describe anyone. And let's skip over the question of why mediocrity is more acceptable in a president than in, say, a surgeon or an airline pilot. Would you want a doctor who bragged about being last in his class at med school?

Instead, I'd like to look at the idea that attending a top school necessarily hangs that red 'E' around your neck. I can't say what the Ivies are like, but I did go to MIT, where any notion of one's personal specialness lasts about as long as it takes for the grades on the first exam to come back. Most MIT students were near the top of their high school class. Most will be merely average at MIT. Far from reinforcing arrogance, my time there was a four year lesson in humility.

Do some people come out of top-tier schools convinced that they are God's gift to the world? Of course. But would those people be any less arrogant if they'd floated through a less challenging program with fewer intellectual peers? Somehow I doubt it.

And still more about credit

2008-09-25T02:43:00.001-07:00

Megan McArdle at The Atlantic has lots of good discussion about the financial markets and why the rest of us should care. Worth a visit.

Why credit matters

2008-09-24T03:22:00.001-07:00

As the dimensions of Treasury's plan to buy bad debt become clear, I'm seeing lots of rumblings along the lines of "So what if credit gets tight? Lax credit standards got us into this mess! Maybe we should live within our means for a change!"

Which is true, as far as it goes. Certainly giving no down payment mortgages to anyone with a pulse turned out to be a remarkably bad idea.

But last week's problems weren't about mortgages, they were about commercial paper. Commercial paper is the short term loans that companies like Intel and Toyota use to finance their businesses. It's about the safest non-government debt there is, and it usually pays an interest rate only a hair above short term Treasury bills. Last week, the interest rate on short term Treasuries went to almost zero, and the rate on Intel's commercial paper went to six percent. (Why? Because the money market funds who invest in commercial paper started hoarding cash to meet a flood of redemptions.)

Well, okay, so what does that mean?

Suppose I decide to go to a conference. It's related to a particular project, so either a client has agreed to reimburse my travel or I'll pay for the conference from the project fee. The hotel and the airline want their money upfront, though, while the project fee won't come in for a month or so. My credit is good, so I just use a credit card, paying the card company a nominal fee to use their money for a month or two.

But what if the card company suddenly doubled or tripled my interest rate? Or refused to authorize the transaction? I might have the money socked away, in which case paying for the conference displaces whatever I was planning to buy instead. Or I might decide to stay home. Staying home cuts that amount of revenue from the hotel and airline, and it might even mean that I'd have to cancel the relevant project altogether. The credit environment changed for reasons that have nothing to do with me, but the way I run my business still has to change.

Companies like Intel are in the same position. When Intel builds a fab, it has to make substantial investments long before chips start rolling off the line. It has to buy equipment (and the equipment suppliers have to pay their vendors), it has to facilitize the building, it has to pay the designers and all the overhead they incur. Some of that money comes from existing operations, but some of it comes from credit. If the cost or availability of credit changes radically--as it did last week--suddenly the whole economic model for the project changes. Again, the economic model changed for reasons that have nothing to do with Intel: their business remains fundamentally healthy. Still, Intel might have to rethink their investment in the project.

Repeat that experience across the entire economy, and you have big big problems. If companies don't invest, they can't grow, and if they aren't growing they aren't creating jobs. People who scoff at the implications of a credit freeze just don't know what they're talking about.

Which is not to say that the Treasury plan is without flaws. As originally proposed, it gives way too much power to an unelected political appointee whose term expires in four months. It offers way too little upside to taxpayers who are, for the most part, completely blameless. And it's not at all clear that it will even fix the underlying problems. Congress needs to address all of these issues.

But Congress can't sit on its hands, either. The partial solutions we've been seeing for the last several months seem to be making things worse, not better.

Who watches the watchdog?

2008-09-22T02:10:00.001-07:00

The web is drowning in discussion of the current financial tsunami. For a reasonably accessible explanation of what's going on and what it all means, I like the economics columnists at The American Scene. Their conclusion seems to be that the Fed and Treasury had to do something to help the markets deal with all those bad assets (mortgages, but mostly over-leveraged financial instruments based on pieces of mortgages). Going forward, though, the massive transfer of debt from private actors to the US taxpayers raises the potential for all kinds of other bad consequences. It's critical to re-establish accountability, both among the executives who got their companies into this mess in the first place, and within government. It's not at all clear that Treasury's current proposal will do that.

Wanna buy an insurance company?

2008-09-16T11:40:00.001-07:00

This evening, the Federal Reserve agreed to take an 80% stake in AIG, the world's largest insurer. Between Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and now AIG, the portfolio of shaky assets owned by US taxpayers is becoming quite impressive.

More important, I think we can say that the notion that financial markets can be trusted to regulate themselves has now been well and truly kicked in the head.

I don't pretend to understand credit default swaps -- apparently the people investing in them didn't either -- but I can accept the argument that the Fed had to act because the consequences of AIG's collapse would be catastrophic. The corollary, though, is that market discipline can only be trusted if one is willing to accept the occasional catastrophic collapse. Which, clearly, we are not.

History repeats

2008-09-16T10:09:00.001-07:00

Last year, American house cats. This year, Chinese infants. Apparently melamine is still the food adulterant of choice.

Fox guards henhouse

2008-09-12T03:56:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times article about corruption at the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service:

They also said they did not view socializing with oil company representatives and taking gifts as inappropriate because they said they needed to be part of the marketing culture in order to market the program’s oil and gas. Several of the lower-ranking program officials have been transferred out of their old jobs, the report said. It recommended stronger supervision and a series of changes to make clearer the limits of acceptable behavior, some of which Mr. Luthi said have already been implemented.

Let's be clear here. Socializing is one thing. But on what planet does anyone believe that the "limits of acceptable behavior" include things like having sex or snorting cocaine with customers? Is there any manager reading this who wouldn't fire such an employee on the spot?

One of the arguments for government investment in renewable energy has been that oil and gas technologies have had a cozy relationship with government for years. Investments in renewable energy have ample precedent, and simply serve to level the playing field. But leveling the playing field is pointless if the other side has bribed the referee.

Update: Energy Outlook offers more context, explaining why anyone would bother trying to corrupt a bunch of accountants in Denver in the first place.

The limits of talking points

2008-09-11T11:10:00.001-07:00

I don't talk to a lot of politicians, but I interview plenty of business executives and technologists. The difference between someone who really knows the topic and someone who is repeating prepared talking points is obvious almost instantly. In this interview, Governor Palin is clearly repeating prepared talking points.

There's nothing wrong with talking points. They're a quick way to summarize a complex position, a business strategy, or a technical argument. They're a good starting point for further discussion. The public relations people I work with use them all the time.

But most of the public relations people I know understand their limitations, and will happily connect me with someone knowledgeable when I ask questions that require more expertise. They present the strategy, but they don't decide the strategy, and they know it.

Unfortunately, Governor Palin isn't running for White House press secretary.

Eight US presidents have died in office. One has resigned, and two more have been (unsuccessfully) impeached. Does even Senator McCain believe that this pick truly puts "Country First?"

(More politics, I know. I keep trying to stop, but the election keeps making smoke come out of my ears. I do promise to work on topical balance, though. Thank you for your patience.)

Your way or the highway, Senator?

2008-09-06T02:35:00.001-07:00

There are two kinds of political bipartisanship.

On one hand, there's the kind that realizes that, as Americans, we all share a lot of common interests. It seeks to use those common interests to build consensus. That's Barack Obama's kind of bipartisanship, much to the dismay of his more partisan supporters.

On the other hand, there's the attitude that says, "be reasonable, do it my way." Under this approach, prominently displayed during the last few years, calls for bipartisanship are just a weapon with which to bludgeon your opponents into supporting your most extreme policies.

John McCain's acceptance speech, with its call to "put the country first," sure sounded like the first kind of bipartisanship. Good for him! Except most of the rest of the Republican National Convention, and of McCain's campaign to this point, sounded depressingly like the second. Actions speak louder than words.

Yeah, I know, another political post. I should really ignore the news until November, huh?

They made me do it

2008-08-31T14:47:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to avoid political posts, I really am, but this is too much.

After spending months bashing Barack Obama as a neophyte with little experience in government and less experience in foreign policy, John McCain selected a running mate with even less experience in government and no foreign policy experience at all.

Except she's a woman. Chosen, the pundits say, in order to attract Hillary Clinton's core supporters. (Who are apparently expected to overlook her hardline conservative positions on social issues.)

This goes well beyond pandering; it's sexist and insulting. Clinton was a serious candidate. Palin is a token.

How to really support renewable energy

2008-08-26T03:40:00.001-07:00

I was going to write a political post here. I decided against it: the election is generating enough sound and fury on all sides without my help.

Instead, I'll link to an especially sensible proposal on funding for the political football known as the Renewable Electricity Production Tax Credit. What about a tax on non-renewable electricity? An extra penny per kilowatt hour would add only a dollar or so to the average bill, but would more than cover the cost of extending the tax credit indefinitely.

Unfortunately, the idea that more expensive energy might actually be a good thing is likely to be too toxic for either party to touch, especially in an election year. Sigh...

The new power breakfast

2008-08-15T03:38:00.001-07:00

If you get enough exercise, you can eat anything you want. According to the BBC, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps consumes about 10,000 calories a day but maintains himself at only about 8% body fat.

The problem for us mortals is that "enough exercise" can add up to a pretty enormous commitment. Phelps spends five hours a day in the pool, and it's a safe bet that his workouts are a bit more demanding than your average recreational swim.

Watch what they do

2008-08-12T02:58:00.001-07:00

NATO is a military alliance. Members explicitly agree that a military threat against one is a threat against all, demanding a collective response.

Clearly, NATO members are not interested in mounting a military response to Russia's invasion of Georgia. Yet equally clearly, that's exactly what NATO membership for Georgia would mean. (At least in theory.)

It's unfortunate that the Georgian people are the ones who have to experience the difference between words and actions.

Making space

2008-08-07T02:00:00.001-07:00

What's your job? Is it making stuff, or answering email? And how much time do you spend actually doing it?

Merlin Mann has a short series on the importance of making time for real work. It also explains why you may not get an email response from me right away.

All sunshine not created equal

2008-08-05T02:32:00.001-07:00

Conversion efficiency, open circuit voltage, and other solar cell performance parameters are critically important to solar cell manufacturers and their customers. These parameters define the financial model for an installation, from the size of the array needed for a given output power to the installation's likely generation revenue. They set a viability threshold that new technologies must cross. Yet measuring them accurately turns out to be surprisingly challenging.

Though the whole point of solar energy is that the sun is readily available, the sun is a terrible light source for accurate measurements of solar cell parameters. Clouds, haze, and the time of day and time of year all cause deviations from the often-quoted 1000 W/sq. meter solar irradiance value, and from the "standard" solar spectrum. Instead, companies use solar simulators.

No solar simulator will precisely match the sun's spectrum, though, which means the cell being tested might respond differently in actual use conditions. Correcting for spectral mismatch is especially complicated for organic solar cells (as discussed in an article in April's IEEE Spectrum -- free for IEEE members), but several people have warned me not to trust non-certified reports for inorganic thin film cells, either.

With the solar industry's rapid growth, it was only a matter of time before someone stepped up to fill the need. VLSI Standards has introduced an NREL-traceable Solar Reference Cell, using a monocrystalline silicon cell for calibration of solar simulators. The company also offers calibration services for certification of customer reference cells. (This product is so new that it isn't on VLSI's site yet. Contact the company for more information.)

Reading the tea leaves

2008-07-24T03:00:00.001-07:00

I've added the Energy Outlook blog to my regular reading list. It's pretty dense, but a good window into issues like oil prices and alternative energy policy. I wouldn't say it's a must read for people interested in photovoltaics, but it's worth a look.

Comments Enabled (a note from the friendly system admin)

2008-07-17T00:16:00.001-07:00

From your friendly sysadmin ...

Comment posting has been turned on again, if we get more SPAM beating our filters we'll need to disable it again without notice.

Priceless

2008-07-15T16:12:00.001-07:00

Semicon West is just one day old, and I've already accumulated five thumb drives. I like them a lot better than paper press kits or even CDs. The materials are right there in electronic form, and when I'm done the thumb drives themselves come in very handy.

I remember the first time I ever saw one of those things, holding it in my hand and thinking "ubiquitous data." The most valuable part of any computer, from low-end PCs to massive server farms, is the data it contains. Flash memory puts that data in the palm of your hand, and that's why demand for flash seems to be perfectly elastic. The more people have, the more they want. An address book is useful, but having your favorite music and pictures of your family with you when you travel, that's valuable.

This is getting ridiculous

2008-07-14T15:55:00.001-07:00

I was at a presentation this afternoon in which the Safe Harbor statement in the beginning itemized all 37 forward-looking statements from the presentation, then itemized all the uncertainties inherent in both the semiconductor industry as a whole and the particular company's outlook. It was almost as long as the presentation itself. I think lawsuit phobia is just a little out of control...

Coming soon to a web near you

2008-07-10T04:56:00.001-07:00

Yep, it's shameless plug time. One of the reasons I've been so quiet lately is that I've been working on a study of thin film photovoltaics for NanoMarkets. The study takes a comprehensive look at the various thin film photovoltaic technologies, and considers how they are likely to match and expand the universe of applications. I'm quite proud of it.

Sow the wind...

2008-07-05T09:40:00.001-07:00

Last year, President Bush pushed for a comprehensive immigration reform package. The bill lost, mostly due to hardliners in his own party who demanded, and got, a crackdown on illegal immigration. Now business owners are reaping the whirlwind.

The alliance between the socially conservative and fiscally conservative wings of the Republican Party has never been a comfortable one. So far it seems to be holding together, but the difficult economy tends to pit the two sides against each other. We'll see if the stress becomes a fracture over issues like immigration.

Senator McCain, meanwhile, is caught on the fault line. His own instincts seem to favor immigration reform, but he took a hard turn to the right after that position nearly cost him the nomination.

Around the blogosphere

2008-07-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

The folks at Solid State Technology have invited me to maintain a blog under their umbrella, so I'll also be posting at http://thinfilmmfg.blogspot.com/. I expect that incarnation will be a bit more consistently on-topic than this one.

Where's the growth?

2008-06-20T02:48:00.001-07:00

I haven't been following the SEMI book-to-bill ratio closely, mostly because I've been doing so much work in the solar space. It's been struggling along below 1.0 for more than a year, though, and really started to slide last July.

That, more than anything explains why semiconductor equipment suppliers are so interested in photovoltaics. Solar is growing fast. ICs are not.

Now, as I've said before I'm not convinced that solar cells are the long-term savior some people claim. But for the short term 50% growth is 50% growth.

Here comes India

2008-06-19T02:26:00.001-07:00

Nikkei BP reports that the first customer for Applied Materials' SunFab turnkey solar cell manufacturing line will be Moser Baer Photo Voltaic Ltd. The new plant, located just outside New Delhi, is part of an aggressive expansion plan that will take the company to 500 MW of capacity by 2010.

The article is part of a three part series on the growth of India's electronics industry. Like most Nikkei coverage, it's excellent.

Throwing transistors at the problem

2008-06-17T04:48:00.001-07:00

What a difference Moore's Law makes.

A few years ago, I briefly tried PersonalBrain, a visual notes organization tool. I thought the concept was interesting, but the program was too slow and it was too difficult to see enough information to be useful.

Skip forward two or three technology generations, double or triple my amount of monitor space, and those limitations have pretty much vanished. Yes, the software itself has evolved in that time, but the basic interface is unchanged. You still need a lot of space to see what's going on. It's just that now that space is available on my secondary monitor, leaving my main monitor free.

I don't yet know if PersonalBrain is going to become part of my toolkit, but the hardware has caught up enough to at least give it a reasonable trial.

Jumping on the solar bandwagon

2008-06-17T02:50:00.001-07:00

Semiconductor manufacturing equipment suppliers have been looking at the photovoltaic space for a couple of years now, seeking a way to leverage their expertise as IC growth slows. This week, Intel and IBM joined them.

These are smart companies, so I'm not going to say they're wrong, but I am skeptical. Solar cells make DRAMs look like highly differentiated products, while both Intel and IBM live in the performance-driven microprocessor space. It's not clear to me how they're going to get the margins they need to make the solar business interesting.

(Yes, I know that Japanese companies like Sharp and Sanyo have been in the photovoltaic space for years. Those companies are structured quite differently.)

Yes, we have laws here

2008-06-12T04:19:00.001-07:00

The US Constitution survived the Civil War, World War II, and McCarthyism. It looks like it will survive the war on terror as well. Once again, the Supreme Court affirms the rule of law.

Journalism meets politics, chaos ensues

2008-06-11T04:36:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, I finished a feature on high-k dielectrics. I read about ten technical papers, conducted a few hours of interviews, and distilled it all down to just over 2000 words. I probably did a pretty decent job, though I won't know for sure until it's published and I hear feedback from readers.

But is my article the definitive word on high-k dielectrics? No. There were people I would have liked to interview, but couldn't in the time I had available. There were papers I should have read, but didn't have time or didn't even know about. This was a 2000 word article for a general audience, not a comprehensive review for specialists. I'd encourage anyone in the field to use it as a starting point for further research, not as their only source.

The same is true of most political coverage. Most journalists do the best they can, and try hard to capture the nuances of policy positions, but they're human. They have their own biases, which they may or may not be self-aware enough to see. They have limited time to do the research, limited access to sources, and limited space to explain what they learn. Most would readily admit that they can't give the definitive last word on a subject at the time. Maybe in the book they hope to write once the campaign is over...

And so, sometime in the last few days, a reporter for the (London) TimesOnline had a conversation with the Obama campaign. They probably talked about the various unfounded rumors spreading about Obama, and how it appears that a substantial fraction of the American public actually believes them. The reporter probably asked something like, "Wow, that's definitely a problem. Is there anything you can do?" Then the campaign spokesman probably said something like, "We hope so. We're setting up a team of people to find sites that post this stuff and try to get the facts out there."

The reporter wrote his story, and gave it this lead:

A crack team of cybernauts will form a rapid response internet “war room” to track and respond aggressively to online rumours that Barack Obama is unpatriotic and a Muslim.

The article goes on to discuss what some of the problematic rumors are, the impact they may have had on polling data, and public statements that the candidate has made. It includes no further details on the proposed war room. Nothing about how many people it involves, which particular sites the campaign is likely to track, how it decides which rumors to counter, or exactly how it plans to respond.

I read the article, shrugged, and thought, "Yeah, I can see why they would need to counter some of the sludge that's going around."

Holly read the article, and went ballistic, using phrases like "thought police" and "intimidating bloggers." In the lengthy threads that ensued, both yesterday and today , she clarified that her primary objection was to the squelching of rumors that Obama is "unpatriotic."

Who defines that? Who defines what is a negative statement, and what is or is not a rumor of being unpatriotic?

“Unpatriotic” can mean anything the candidate doesn’t like. It is not, as Shakespeare would have said, “an ever-fix’d mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken…”

It is, instead, a wide-open field perfect for what the military would define as “mission creep.”

And THAT is where I drew my line.

I've never met Holly personally, but I've known her online for a long time. I think it's fair to say that I have a more generally benign view of government than she does. Maybe I'm being complacent in seeing nothing more than a politically savvy attempt to deal with damaging rumors. Maybe her use of terms like "thought police" is justified, maybe it's paranoid.

Based on the evidence of the article alone, it's impossible to tell. The article contains no details beyond the lead I quoted above. We don't know what other details are in the reporter's notebook and didn't make it into the article. Since the war room doesn't actually exist yet, we don't have any independent evidence of what it's actually doing, either. Without more information than is provided here, any comment about the war room's activities has more to do with the commenter's views than with what the campaign is (or is not) actually doing.

But the point is not the righteousness (or not) of the Obama campaign's rumor-debunking efforts. The point is that no piece of political journalism (or any journalism) should be seen as more than a starting point for further research. Read journalism from multiple sources, especially those with whom you disagree. When primary sources are available, as they often are for government agencies and political campaigns, see what they have to say. The more important the question is, the more careful you should be. No one cares if you are wrong about Britney Spears, but a one-sentence lead in a British paper is a pretty shaky hook for an opinion (positive or negative) about a candidate for President of the United States.

Plague descends, comments turned off

2008-06-11T02:18:00.001-07:00

Comments are temporarily off due to a plague of comment spam that I don't have time to address at the moment. It's purely bad timing that this cuts off further comments on yesterday's post. If you'd like to comment, send me email and let me know whether you'd like your comment published, and what attribution (if any) you prefer.

Toward vigorous public debate

2008-06-10T04:54:00.001-07:00

One of the blogs I read is hosting a vigorous argument over the announcement that the Obama campaign is putting together a team to debunk Internet rumors. The original post suggests that they are attempting to intimidate critics. (Please follow the links, as the linked articles are far less inflammatory than the base post.)

Purely as a practical matter, I think it's highly unlikely that they are going to visit lots of individually run blogs and yell at people who post falsehoods. They just don't have the resources. It's far more likely that they are going to take on the likes of Instapundit and Drudge Report, who have audiences larger than many newspapers. Once a rumor is repeated on sites like those, it takes on a life of its own and really can't be ignored.

But even if they did respond to smaller blogs, so what? The whole point of blogging is that individuals can get their opinions out there, and now it's intimidation if campaigns actually pay attention?

Sorry, I don't get it. Yes, it would be intimidation if representatives of a campaign appeared at your door in person, or threatened dire consequences for speaking your mind, but that's not what's happening here. We're talking about public responses to comments made in a public forum. It's the adult equivalent of freaking out because your parents read your MySpace page. Only less rational, because you can bet the Obama staffers will make sure their behavior (in a public, hostile forum, remember) is absolutely above reproach.

(I'm also a bit puzzled that this is even newsworthy. Political campaigns on both sides of the aisle have had "war rooms" and "truth squads" for years. The only thing new is the emergence and influence of Internet media, coupled with a candidate who understands their importance.)

Nanotubes creep forward

2008-06-05T02:50:00.001-07:00

Nanotube electronics are gradually making their way toward commercialization. Nantero announced a collaboration with SVTC Technology that will make Nantero's CMOS-friendly nanotube process available at SVTC's development fabs. This news builds on the earlier announcement that Brewer Science had commercialized a carbon nanotube coating.

I remain skeptical, but this is the kind of effort needed to convince the skeptics.

Isn't it ironic

2008-06-04T02:38:00.001-07:00

The first viable female candidate for the US presidency lost, in part, because she was perceived as the candidate of the establishment. She couldn't break the glass ceiling because she very carefully positioned herself as part of the old boys' club.

Looking for energy strategy, not tactics

2008-05-17T01:51:00.001-07:00

Kissing up to a repressive regime is not an energy policy. Massive subsidies for corn-based ethanol -- which takes almost as much energy to make as it yields -- are not an energy policy.

Both parties are equally at fault here. President Bush visited Saudi Arabia, but Congress has been loudly demanding increased Saudi oil production. The Farm Bill faces a presidential veto, but Congressional leadership appears to have the votes for an override. Neither seems able to see energy as a critical strategic issue, too important to be held hostage by partisan bickering.

Barack Obama's energy proposals nod toward ethanol production, but also call for significant investments in conservation and alternative energy technologies. John McCain's web page ignores energy issues.

PDMS suppliers wanted

2008-05-12T15:50:00.001-07:00

Does anyone out there know of a source for PDMS sheets, about 3 mils thick? A reader inquired, and I came up blank as well. Most people seem to make their own, but apparently that's not an option in this case. Send me an email or leave a comment if you can help.

Again, this is only a request for prefabricated sheets. The raw material is easy to find.

More recognition for OLEDs

2008-05-12T15:43:00.001-07:00

I guess I'm not the only person who was impressed by Sony's OLED TV. The Society for Information Display will give it the Display Device of the Year Gold Award at their conference next week in Los Angeles.

Show us the money

2008-05-08T02:56:00.001-07:00

Much to the relief of the equipment companies, the chipmakers seem to be shouldering the burden of the 450-mm wafer transition. Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have agreed on a common timeline, targeting production by 2014.

The 300-mm transition, you'll recall, created a lot of bad blood between the supplier and customer camps. The fabs pushed for an aggressive timeline, but (due to the dot com bust) failed to actually buy the equipment once it appeared. Oops. As a result, SEMI members have been pushing back hard at aggressive 450-mm proposals.

Last dog has died

2008-05-06T16:47:00.001-07:00

It's all over but the shouting in the Democratic nomination race. Barack Obama will be the nominee. With a strong win in North Carolina and a near tie in Indiana, he's pretty much slammed the door on whatever chances Hillary Clinton might have had.

There may be plenty of shouting yet, but it won't change the outcome.

I don't have a horse in this race. I've been undecided for months. But I'm paying a lot of attention to energy policy these days because of my work on photovoltaics, and the proposed gas tax holiday is one of the most blatant examples of political pandering I've ever seen. From a policy standpoint, it's idiotic, and Senator Clinton is smart enough to know that. I'm glad to see that the voters saw it for what it was.

DRAM market claims another victim

2008-04-28T03:36:00.001-07:00

This just in: making money in the DRAM business is (still) hard. SMIC joins Elpida and Qimonda among companies who have recently abandoned the sector. Naturally this is good news for other DRAM suppliers.

Fresh food? How quaint!

2008-04-23T08:09:00.001-07:00

From Texas, a reminder that modern life has its downside. Apparently the children taken from that FLDS compound are headed for foster care, at least temporarily. And apparently the Texas child protection authorities have a long list of ways in which these children differ from most children in foster care: they're polite and modest. They're used to eating fresh vegetables from gardens they helped tend, and meat, eggs, and dairy products from animals they helped raise. Educationally, they're probably at least equal to and possibly ahead of students their age from public schools.

Regardless of whether the allegations against the FLDS are true, it ought to be possible for us all to agree that maybe their parents were doing something right. We're in a pretty sad state as a society when polite, educated children with healthy diets are seen as unusual.

Hype overshadows graphene's real promise

2008-04-22T03:59:00.001-07:00

Graphene is in the news again, with the announcement that researchers at the University of Manchester have demonstrated (PDF) a graphene-based single electron transistor. That's an exciting development, but the hype machine immediately went completely out of control. Wired declared that Moore's Law is saved, while less restrained corners of the blogosphere announced that "silicon is out, carbon is in".

Well, not exactly. First of all, most of the devices in question were measured at 0.3 K, not exactly a practical temperature for commercial electronics. Second, the whole point of the referenced paper is that the behavior of Dirac fermions(*) under such extreme confinement is chaotic. Somehow I don't think the CMOS industry is quite ready for design models based on quantum statistics. And finally, all of these experiments used mechanically exfoliated graphene, which is a fancy way to say "we rubbed a pencil lead on a silicon wafer and told a grad student to find the graphene flakes." Again, not a commercially viable strategy.

This is not to denigrate the very interesting work being done at the University of Manchester and elsewhere. Graphene is an excellent system for important studies of very fundamental physics. But researchers have a long long way to go to develop a commercializable process, much less make a noticeable dent in the silicon market. Let's keep our expectations in line with reality, shall we?

(*) What's a Dirac fermion? Did I mention that carriers in graphene don't behave like normal electrons?

My brain is full

2008-04-15T16:59:00.001-07:00

After all my good resolutions about posting more, I got kicked in the head by an article I'm writing about graphene. Graphene is a 2-dimensional carbon crystal with all sorts of interesting properties, among them being that the electrons behave like relativistic particles. Who knew! Being a materials scientist by training, I learned what little I know about relativity from Star Trek.

It's been a tough slog, and I'm not quite done, either. The good news is that it's also been fascinating. Always a good thing.

Journalism 101

2008-04-10T05:08:00.001-07:00

Heheheh. The Economist offers insider tips for getting the most out of conferences. They are talking specifically about the recent NATO summit, but the same general ideas apply just about everywhere.

Virtualizing conferences

2008-04-07T01:21:00.001-07:00

While researching graphene electronics, I found an excellent resource courtesy of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. They held a two week seminar on the subject last year, and put all of the talks online. Not just the slides, but audio and video of all the presentations. Definitely worth a look.

(Highly technical: physicists talking to other physicists. As this is a fast-moving field, these talks may not represent the current state of the art.)

The research was for a feature for Solid State Technology magazine, hopefully the May issue.

No education system can exceed the quality of its teachers

2008-04-03T04:30:00.001-07:00

"The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction."

That's the key takeaway from a big McKinsey study (PDF file) on global education policy. Regardless of country, teacher quality has more impact on student performance than any other factor, including class size and per capita spending.

That's not exactly news. The interesting part of the study is its examination of best practices for improving instruction, both by recruiting better teachers in the first place and by developing the skills of teachers once they've been hired.

Where does hydrogen come from?

2008-04-02T04:54:00.001-07:00

Over at Unmassed.com, I've been participating in a blog thread about the economics of hydrogen vehicles and the outlook on energy issues in general. Interesting stuff.

Tweet?

2008-03-29T12:04:00.001-07:00

Anyone out there using Twitter? I've just started playing with it. Few-to-few twittering is clearly useful, for instance as a way to help a small group converge on a meeting place, receive travel updates, and so forth. I can't decide whether many-to-many broadcast twittering serves any purpose at all, though.

For those interested in helping me investigate the question, my Twitter name is kewms. You'll need to ask to follow me.

(Political) life is a fantasy

2008-03-29T05:40:00.001-07:00

Having been at MRS all week, I mostly missed the latest campaign brouhaha. I do think, though, that the suggestion that it's possible to "forget" or "misspeak" about something like dodging sniper fire (with your daughter!) is ridiculous. Repeating such a provably fictitious story, with increasing amounts of detail, even in the face of ridicule by people who were there, suggests a disdain for one's audience that's extreme even by political standards.

And now the news

2008-03-27T15:28:00.001-07:00

(Once again, all references are to MRS paper numbers, abstracts for which can be found at the conference site.)

Today at the MRS Spring Meeting, John Robertson reported (paper A13.1) that his group at Cambridge University has achieved n-channel mobility of 450 cm²/V-sec in microcrystalline silicon TFTs, and 100 cm²/V-sec p-channel mobility. Both those values are very good, and that's a problem. Plenty of models exist to explain why the material's mobility might be bad, and those models break when the mobility is good. More research needed.

(Special thanks to Dr. Robertson for walking me through yesterday morning's session on graphene, too.)

Meanwhile, Yifei Huang and a Princeton University group demonstrated (paper A13.2) a self-aligned process for low temperature polysilicon TFTs. It uses nickel silicide source and drain regions, aligned using the gate structure. At low annealing temperatures, the nickel doesn't react with the gate and can simply be etched away. Results were among the best ever recorded for top gate TFTs.

In the solar cell sessions, Makoto Shimosawa described (paper A14.1) Fuji Electric's FWave flexible solar material. It laminates roll-to-roll amorphous silicon/amorphous SiGe tandem cells (deposited by PECVD on plastic) onto steel foil. Each 2 square meter sheet generates 92 watts at peak output and weighs just 16 kg (including the steel foil). The company is now ramping production to wider rolls, targeting production of 40 MW per year.

The a-Si/a-SiGe tandem cell may be on its way out, though, as Xixiang Xu's group at United Solar Ovonic reported (paper A14.2) better results with small area triple junction a-Si/nanocrystalline-Si/nc-SI cells. Scale-up to large areas and optimization of the nc-Si component cell are the next steps.

The conference's own coverage is definitely worth a look as well.

Moses lists FTW!

2008-03-25T16:11:00.001-07:00

*snort* What if the Bible were (a) a blog and (b) open for comments? What might the blogosphere have to say about Genesis or Exodus?

Guide to the perplexed

2008-03-25T15:51:00.001-07:00

For those who don't know what the last two posts were talking about, MRS stands for Materials Research Society, the professional society for materials scientists. I'm in San Francisco for the MRS Spring Meeting this week.

Among other things, MRS gives people in the field a handy crib sheet to use when people ask, "so what's materials research?"

Briefly, materials science is the glue that pulls together subjects as diverse as Mayan bronzes, high temperature superconductors, organic and inorganic semiconductors, and ink rheology. All of these areas involve manipulating the structure and processing of materials in order to achieve the desired properties.

A whirlwind tour of this evening's MRS poster session

2008-03-25T15:26:00.001-07:00

References are to MRS paper numbers. All abstracts can be found at the meeting site.

Two papers from Kyoto University, by Hideo Ohkita et. al. (AA5.32) and Jiamo Guo et. al. (AA5.33), presented good fundamental studies of charge generation and transport in fullerene-polymer bulk heterojunction solar cells. Extra points for providing copies of their posters as takeaways.

In paper KK5.14, Hagay Shpaisman, et. al., take a skeptical look at multiexciton solar cells, questioning whether they offer much improvement over the more conventional, and more tunable, tandem cell.

Yong Soo Kang, et. al. (KK5.1) presents a novel electrolyte for dye-sensitized solar cells, in which hydrogen bonds pull oligomers together in situ to form a self-solidified polymer that can still penetrate the cell's titanium dioxide nanostructure. Someone who saw me taking notes added the caveat that one of the components of the electrolyte is still a liquid; the author wasn't around to answer questions.

I'm not sure I quite understand this one, but in paper AA5.86 Janelle Leger and Glenn Bartholomew propose a single-layer polymer-based p-i-n transistor. The semiconducting polymer incorporates ion transport agents and ion-paired monomers, apparently creating an all-in-one electrochemical cell.

Everyone talks about how nice roll-to-roll fabrication would be, but Daniel Tobjork and coworkers (AA5.45) have actually done it. They used reverse gravure coating to put P3HT:PCBM / PEDOT:PSS organic semiconductor structures on plastic. Results were comparable to those achieved with spin-coating; roll speed controlled the coating thickness.

MRS breaks down the energy puzzle

2008-03-25T15:11:00.001-07:00

Recommended reading for anyone interested in renewable energy and related issues: the MRS Bulletin's April issue. It's a comprehensive look at everything from controlling fossil fuel emissions, to hydrogen storage and transportation, to energy conservation. There's a lot of material here, but it's well worth the time. Reasonably accessible to nonspecialists and nontechnical people.

Scraping the bottom

2008-03-20T04:30:00.001-07:00

How bad is the silicon shortage? People are sending email asking to buy Thin Film Manufacturing's inventory of silicon scrap.

No, I don't have any.

Old-style organizing, online

2008-03-12T05:24:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Barack Obama may be the first Internet president (if he wins). Apparently Rolling Stone thinks so too, and they have much better access to his operations than I do. A very interesting look at mixing newfangled tools with old-fashioned activism.