optics.org blog
Daily news and views from optics.org. In-depth coverage of key industry events.
October 9, 2008
OIDA Photonics Integration Forum
Our sister website fibresystems.org is welcoming Jeff Ferry, Director of Communications at Infinera, as a guest blogger this week. Jeff is reporting from the OIDA’s Photonic Integration Forum, which is the first industry conference dedicated to the commercial development of photonic integration technology. As such it marks an important step forward for this technology area. The conference has been co-organised by OIDA and Infinera.
According to Jeff, the conference attracted an impressive 60 experts in photonic integration, filling the room to capacity at the picturesque Monterey Hotel and Spa, perched up against, and partially built out over, Monterey Bay, 100 miles south of San Francisco.
By Jeff Ferry at the OIDA Photonic Integration Forum (Tuesday 7 October: Day One)
The two most interesting themes of the conference’s first day were scalability and power consumption. The debate over scalability turned into a discussion of integration on indium phosphide (InP) versus integration on silicon.
The InP supporters, led by Infinera, have the benefit of having large numbers of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) deployed by real customers. According to the chart shown by Infinera co-founder Dave Welch, Infinera has accumulated 101 million hours of PICs running in live networks without a single failure, with each PIC pair integrating 60 devices. That translates to a FIT rate (reliability measure) of 9, which is better than many single lasers and modulators in the market today. “Everything gets better when you integrate, reliability, yield, performance, and costs,” said Welch.
Later in the day, Infinera PIC engineer Randy Salvatore provided some insight into how Infinera has achieved its reliability and yields, describing the six stage statistical process control methodology that Infinera borrowed from the silicon industry and applied at its PIC fab.
According to Salvatore, when compared with silicon chips and specifically Intel’s well-documented history, Infinera has in the last two years made progress equivalent to six years’ worth of Intel progress, moving from defect density numbers equivalent to Intel’s in 1987 to numbers comparable to Intel in 1993. This, said Salvatore, is the silicon learning curve successfully applied to InP.
Professor John Bowers of University of California at Santa Barbara emerged as the most charismatic advocate of silicon photonics. He showed slides on his UCSB team’s progress in several areas, including high-quality photodetectors made from silicon germanium, hybrid lasers made from a combination of III-V materials and silicon, and on the manufacturing side, they’ve reduced the time required to bond the two materials together from 12 hours to as low as 10 minutes - an important step towards making the technology practical, reliable, and commercial.
Bowers said that silicon CMOS technology makes it possible to reduce device size to the point where it becomes possible to get as many as 125,000 die sites (i.e. chips) on an 8 inch wafer. All those developments go towards making silicon photonics PICs more cost-effective than any other material, said Bowers. “Infinera is doing a great job, but the potential for lots more scaling exists,” Bowers said. “The platform for VLSI PICs exists. Millions of devices [on a chip] is possible.”
The next speaker, Meint Smit, of the Technical University of Eindhoven, brought a touch of Dutch pessimism to the conference. He said that neither InP PICs nor silicon PICs could get beyond 1000 devices on a chip before the power consumption of the lasers would make the devices impractical.
Smit presented an alternative, based on “digital nanophotonics,” two tiny “microlasers” working in tandem to generate a single lightstream with far less power dissipation. He has dubbed this technology “indium phosphide membrane on silicon” or IMOS, and said it allows for a much larger number of lasers per chip. His prediction was that IMOS technology could push PIC complexity to 100,000 devices on a chip.
Both IBM’s Clint Schow and Sun Microsystems’ Ashok Krishnamoorthy focused on the same problem: the growing power consumption of high-performance microprocessors in today’s multithreaded, multicore computer servers.
But what did they have to say? To continue reading Jeff Ferry’s thoughts from day 1 of the OIDA Photonic Integration Forum, visit his full blog entry on fibresystems.org.
October 8, 2008
MESSENGER’s images of Mercury are back
By Jacqueline Hewett
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Following my post on Monday about MESSENGER’s fly-by of Mercury, I’ve just gone back to the mission homepage and the first images are back. I was planning on adding a few to my previous post, but when you see the images, it seemed a shame not to give them a post of their own.
This first one was taken on 6 October by the wide angle camera (WAC) on the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) about 90 minutes after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Mercury. It was taken through a 430 nm filter and the image resolution is 5km per pixel. For reference, Mercury is about 4880 km in diameter.
Here is how NASA describes what you can see: “The bright crater just south of the centre of the image is Kuiper. For most of the terrain east of Kuiper, toward the edge of the planet, the departing images are the first spacecraft views of that portion of Mercury’s surface. A striking characteristic of this newly imaged area is the large pattern of rays that extend from the northern region of Mercury to regions south of Kuiper. This extensive ray system appears to emanate from a relatively young crater newly imaged by MESSENGER. This young, extensively rayed crater, along with the prominent rayed crater to the southeast of Kuiper, near the edge of the planet, were both seen in Earth-based radar images of Mercury but not previously imaged by spacecraft.”
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
This next close-up image of the surface was also taken by the WAC, this time through a 480 nm filter. The resolution is 330 meters per pixel and this time the image is just 340 km. The spacecraft altitude was 1800 km. The image was acquired just 9 minutes and 14 seconds after MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury, when the spacecraft was moving at 6.1 km/second.
This image is one in a sequence of 55: a five-frame mosaic with each frame in the mosaic acquired in by all 11 of the WAC filters. NASA says that this new MESSENGER image mosaic is the highest-resolution colour imaging ever acquired of any portion of Mercury’s surface.
The largest impact feature at the top of the image is about 133 km in diameter and is named Polygnotus. A second, comparably large crater at the top left of the image, is named Boethius.
I’m sure NASA will be adding more images to its MESSENGER science images gallery so its worth checking back to see what else gets posted over the coming days.
October 7, 2008
Just how good is Google?
By Susan Curtis
Power search: search.optics.org
“Just Google it” has become something of a mantra of our times. Established just 10 years ago, Google is now so popular that its brandname is now synonymous with all that’s good about Internet search engines - and in the same way that Hoover transcended its original purpose to become an everyday word, the verb “to Google” is now widely used and understood.
But the vastness of the Internet means that Google doesn’t always return the results you’re looking for - particularly when you’re looking for specialized information. Try typing “wavelength” into Google, for example. Below the obvious listing from Wikipedia, you’ll find information on Wavelength Surfing magazine and Wavelength Records (which, if you’re interested, features Georgie Fame and Van Morrison among its more illustrious recording artists).
That’s why optics.org has developed a Google-like search tool for the photonics community. Called search.optics.org, the tool has been engineered to return results from websites that have been selected for their relevant optics content. The search results are also categorized by type - news, products, jobs, etc - to make it easier for you to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Type “wavelength” into search.optics.org, and you’ll find that the results speak for themselves: the first page returns results on swept-wavelength characterization, wavelength meters and wavelength calibration. Drill deeper into the different categories, and you’ll find product listings, research papers and events that in some way reference the word “wavelength”.
Try it out for yourself at search.optics.org. And if you like what you see, you can download search.optics.org to your Internet browser to get instant access to search.
October 6, 2008
MESSENGER knocks on Mercury’s door, again
By Jacqueline Hewett
Taken on October 4 as MESSENGER approached Mercury. The time of closest distance is October 6, 2008, 04:40:22 EDT. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Back in August 2004, I wrote a feature about NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury and the laser altimeter that would provide a topographic map of the planet. I subscribed to the mission’s emailing alerting service at that time, but knew that there would be a while to wait for news as MESSENGER had a 7.9 billion km journey to go on.
In my Inbox this morning though is the fantastic news that MESSENGER is (at this very moment) making its second fly-by of Mercury, passing just 200 km above the planet’s surface. The main reason for the fly-by is a “gravity-assist” that will set MESSENGER on the right track to enter orbit around Mercury in 2011. It is also a fantastic opportunity to observe the planet.
We reported on MESSENGER’s first fly-by back in January 2008 when the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) cameras imaged almost half of the planet including terrain that had never previously been viewed by a spacecraft. The encounter added another 21% of Mercury’s surface to the total imaged close-up by spacecraft. The camera data include high-resolution (less than 200 m per pixel) images and colour images using the instrument’s 11 colour filters. This provided the most comprehensive colour data of Mercury to date. The Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) provided the first measurements of the topography of Mercury as determined from a spacecraft.
This time, NASA says that the MDIS will acquire around 1200 images of a completely new area of Mercury’s surface, the opposite side of the planet compared with the first flyby. The MLA will also be in action as the second fly-by will allow the first comparison between previous topographic observations and the high-resolution images. I’ll add some images to this post in the next few days - they haven’t made it back to the NASA website as I write this.
The excitement will soon be over however, and we will have to wait until late September 2009 for the third and final fly-by before MESSENGER enters Mercury’s orbit in March 2011. Keep your eyes out for those updates! It’s fascinating science, and certainly worth waiting for.
October 3, 2008
Setting the standard
By Matthew Hidderley and Eve Gaut, Aston Science Park
After a long second and final day at the LEDs 2008 event, we decided to make our way into San Diego’s Old Town for dinner. The Old Town can only be described as very ‘Mexican’ and within a minute of arriving we realised that the only food option was going to be Mexican. We headed to Cafe Coyote and sat down for a reflective meal on our visit to LEDs 2008.
Our experience at LEDs 2008 has been a great one. We have learnt a lot more about the industry, including the hot topics of the moment, as well as met with and networked with some key players in the industry. Visiting the show has also allowed us to meet up with many of the existing euroLED exhibitors, which can only be a good thing!
After a reflective dinner, we made our way back to the hotel where we arranged to meet up with some people for an after show drink. Throughout the remainder of the evening, alcohol certainly loosened everyone’s tongues and real opinions came out. The general consensus is that the number of delegates this year seemed to be down from in previous years and that the exhibition area was a little quieter, however the quality of visitors were described as ‘better’ by being serious about the industry and focused.
Now seems a good time to thank the organisers of LEDs 2008, IntertechPira, for being so accommodating to their UK visitors throughout the event. We really have been treated well and felt the event was extremely well organised.
LED Measurement and Standards is taking place on October 2 and 3 at the Sheraton Hotel, San Diego. Topics discussed today ranged from Standards Making and Government Bodies through to LED Components and Manufacturers’ Perspectives. There was an insightful talk on ANSI & IEC solid-state lighting standards by Andrew Jackson of Philips Lighting Company as well as others on development of LED performance standards, energy star SSL, photometrics for LED luminaries, SSL standardisation and high-power LED lamp testing.
We’re heading back to the UK now so thanks for reading. Watch out for the Photonics Cluster (UK) team’s next adventure to Tokyo to the Strategies in Light show! Coverage for this will commence to October 13 on the optics.org blog.
October 2, 2008
Illuminating discussions about LED lighting
By Matthew Hidderley and Eve Gaut, Aston Science Park
After a well deserved sleep (it seems be getting hotter every day over here) we were up at the crack of dawn again to join in the breakfast sponsored by Dow Corning - again greeted by many bleary eyes. The breakfast was an excellent opportunity to network with conference delegates, who are usually inaccessible throughout the day due to attending and giving presentations.
This morning’s conference line-up was very appealing, including topics such as recent developments in luminaire design and powering LEDs for mainstream illumination. Industry speakers included Kevin Dowling, Vice President of Innovation for Philips Solid State Lighting/Color Kinetics and Steven Parker, President at Lightech Electronics.
LEDs 2008 is taking place at the Sheraton Hotel on the Marina, San Diego
Following a rather intense yet informative morning in the conference, we made our way to the outside luncheon, this time sponsored by Seoul Semiconductor. We had the pleasure of sitting with Aristides Wade, General Manager of Seoul Semiconductor, who stimulated some great discussion amongst the rest of the table about when, rather than if, LEDs will move into the general lighting market. The truth is that only time will tell, but our discussions had timescales ranging from 2 to 5 years, so keep watching!
Following lunch, we took the opportunity to catch up with a few more exhibitors, before everything was broken down and packed away. Tim Bushnell from Oxley Developments has accepted our invitation to attend the Photonics Cluster (UK) Breakfast and Photonics Strategy Launch taking place at Photonex08 on 15th October. We also spoke with Mark McClear, Director of Business Development, Cree.
All in all we made many new and exciting contacts today, and after a hard days graft the only way to relax is a night out on the town. So with goodbyes to all of our friends at LEDs 2008, we made our way to the Old Town district of San Diego for dinner.
In tomorrow’s blog, we will be introducing the LED Measurement and Standards 2008 event, also taking place at the Sheraton Hotel on the Marina, San Diego, for two days.
October 1, 2008
Meeting and greeting
By Matthew Hidderley and Eve Gaut, Aston Science Park
Nuventix booth at LEDs 2008
We had our alarm clocks set for 6am this morning and were anticipating an exciting day ahead. It kicked off with a breakfast sponsored by Dow Corning, which was well received even though there were plenty of delegates looking rather bleary eyed. The breakfast was closely followed by a welcome from the Advisory Committee before LEDs 2008 was officially declared open.
After networking, we strolled around the exhibition hall to meet up with some friends in the industry, the first being Mick Wilcox from Nuventix. Last time we saw Mick and the team was in June at euroLED in the UK. It was great to be welcomed on the other side of the pond by a friendly face. Nuventix is already confirmed as exhibiting at euroLED 2009 so it was a great opportunity to catch up with them and to be introduced to some new faces in the Nuventix team.
Following our chat with Mick, we visited the Carclo stand to speak with Ian Bryant, another fellow UK traveller. Ian fascinated us with plenty of ‘technical talk’ about the new products Carclo is currently launching - so keep your eyes peeled for them.
Al fresco lunch at LEDs 2008
The round-table luncheon was sponsored by Rohm and really was the highlight of the day. We sat outside in the Californian sunshine dining with an interesting group of people, including LEDs 2008 speaker Hank Zabawski, Director of LED Technology for Heatron Inc, and Nuventix newcomer Gary Gay, Vice President of Worldwide Sales (who in fact has only been with the company for one week.)
The conference has covered a good mix of topics including sessions on the market and industry, LED technology advancements and integration engineering: materials, devices and optics. Tomorrow’s conference line up, the last day for LEDs 2008, also promises to be as relevant for the industry.
To end the day, we made our way to the Grand Evening Reception, sponsored by Osram, where we met with speakers, panelists and fellow attendees over cocktails and sushi: another great opportunity for networking. We bumped into Tim Bushnell from Oxley Developments and Patrick Le Houillier from Optical Research Associates.
In tomorrow’s post, we’ll try to give as much insider information as possible….in addition to details of our evening out on the town. Goodnight from San Diego!
September 30, 2008
26 hours to San Diego: was it worth it?
By Matthew Hidderley and Eve Gaut, Aston Science Park
Eve at LEDs 2008 - made it to San Diego!
Hearing the alarm clock ringing at 4am? Setting the alarms off at Aston Science Park en-route to the airport? Flying to New York only to wait around for 8 hours for a connecting flight? Sitting on a cramped internal US flight with no edible food? A total travel time of 26 hours from home to San Diego - and what for? All in aid of visiting LEDs 2008, which promises to offer a comprehensive overview of the LEDs market.
We lost track of the number of times we asked ourselves “is it really going to be worth it” during our grueling journey over here. But we can safely say after our first full day here in San Diego - yes it certainly is!
We kicked off the day with a visit to the world-renowned San Diego zoo whilst waiting for the conference to begin. We got to see plenty of rare and endangered species, including polar bears and giant pandas. We certainly recommend it if you are ever in the area with a few hours to spare.
Giant pandas at San Diego zoo
After visiting the zoo, we made our way back to base at the Sheraton Hotel on the marina, which is also the venue for LEDs 2008. An excellent cheese and wine reception gave us the perfect opportunity to meet up with old friends, such as Chris Jolly from Diodes Incorporated, formerly Zetex Semiconductors, and also network with many others.
We are now looking forward to a very busy and exciting day tomorrow as the fun really begins at LEDs 2008. We will be joining the breakfast sponsored by Dow Corning at 7am, followed by the welcome from the Advisory Committee. As for the rest of the day - you will just have to wait until tomorrow’s blog to find out.
September 29, 2008
LED community gathers in San Diego
Matthew Hidderley (left) and Eve Gaut will be blogging from LEDs 2008 in San Diego
San Diego, US, will be the temporary home of many major players in the solid-state lighting industry this week as two conferences and exhibitions roll into town.
For Matthew Hidderley and Eve Gaut of Aston Science Park’s marketing and communications team, it’s the perfect opportunity to gauge the market and see how UK businesses can exploit any emerging trends and commercial opportunities.
First, over 500 delegates and 80 exhibitors are expected at LEDs 2008 which is billed as the “world’s most compelling business meeting and exhibition dedicated exclusively to the high-brightness LED industry”. The event runs from September 29 through to October 1 and will bring together players at every level in the food chain to discuss technology developments and emerging revenue streams.
Hot on the heels of this event comes LEDs Measurement and Standards 2008, which will deal with controversial questions such as a common way of measuring quantities such as lifetime and efficiency. No doubt there will be a lot of discussion on October 2 and October 3 as to the best way forward for the industry. Everyone knows that standards are essential to promote wider adoption of LEDs, but finding the common ground isn’t easy.
Matthew and Eve will be attending both of these events and sharing their findings on the optics.org blog. It will be a busy and fascinating week but the long-haul flight from the UK will be worth it to hear about new markets, short and long-term opportunities and technical breakthroughs.
September 26, 2008
Kodak frame uses OLEDs
By Jacqueline Hewett
Kodak’s wireless OLED picture frame
Photokina, billed as the world’s largest photo and imaging trade fair, rolled into Cologne, Germany, this week bringing with it a barrage of press releases detailing new innovations.
For me, one of the highlights was Kodak’s new wireless picture frame which uses organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. OLEDs are just beginning to break into the mainstream (one of the biggest announcements to date is Sony’s XEL-1 OLED TV) so Kodak’s news is another positive step along the path to making OLEDs not only commercially available but also commercially viable.
The frame has a 7.6-inch diagonal panel which does not require a backlight, making it exceptionally thin. Kodak also says that the product has a 180 degree viewing angle and an ambient light sensor that adjusts the brightness based on the surrounding light. Other specifications include a contrast white-to-black ratio in excess of 30,000:1, an aspect ratio of 16:9 and a resolution of 800 x 480.
The built-in wireless technology means that the frame can access videos and music stored on a home computer. Kodak even goes as far as saying that the wireless feature “enables connectivity to online photo and video sharing sites and Internet content portals for news, weather, sports and more. In addition to spectacular image quality, the new frame’s Wi-Fi connectivity delivers a richer experience to the consumer, enabling them to connect to their favourite social sites and view their personalized content online.”
The Kodak OLED Wireless Frame will retail for US $999 (MSRP) and will be available at kodak.com from November 2008, with additional online and retail distribution to be announced later in the year.
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