BAM! Long-time techno-geek reporter Kevin Maney has the scoop, er, SciScoop, from ringside! Take it away, Kevin….
Thank you, rickyjames. For a decade, scientists in prestigious labs worldwide have sweated over nanotechnology. They’ve worked at the outer edges of human knowledge, employing room-size, multimillion-dollar contraptions to try to create structures one-billionth of a meter across — the size of three or four atoms. And at last they have revealed a major outcome of this research — a product of magnificent importance to worldwide peace and happiness, not to mention the viewing of football games.
That would be: big-screen TVs.
Better: CHEAP big-screen TVs.
The welcome news comes from Motorola. Last week, it announced NED, which stands for Nano Emissive Display. As explained by Motorola scientist Jim Jaskie, NED could be used to make 50-inch-wide, one-inch-deep, flat-screen TVs with the picture quality of high-definition television, but at the cost of 32-inch traditional cathode ray tube TVs.
Today, a 42-inch flat-screen TV would run you about $5,000. A 32-inch CRT model — maybe $700.
“Existing factories could be modified to make this,” Jaskie says. Though Motorola won’t make NED TVs, it will license the technology to consumer-electronics companies that will. “We’re not talking about something that’s three years out. It will be sooner than that,” Jaskie says.
NED TVs are the most tangible result yet of research into carbon nanotubes, which are the early stars of nanotech.
Nanotechnology is about building structures smaller than anything ever made. One nanometer is one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. Nanotech will allow researchers to devise materials and devices never before possible.
A nanotube is an artificially created lattice of graphite wrapped in a tube shape about 1.2 nanometers across. If you imagine Kraft macaroni and cheese for amoebas, that’s the size and shape you’ve got here.
Turns out that these nanotubes are, like tiny cannons, excellent for firing electrons at something — say, for instance, phosphors on a screen, which when excited by electrons can create an image.
But to make a nanotube screen, you’d have to lay down a layer of neat rows of millions of nanotubes in position to fire patterns of electrons at the phosphors. Until now, a factory would have had to practically paste on the nanotubes one at a time, usually at temperatures hot enough to melt whatever materials were in the screen.
Motorola’s breakthrough, Jaskie says, is a way to grow perfect fields of nanotubes right on a screen at low temperatures. It’s like a bald man discovering Rogaine when he thought his only choice was a hair transplant — the former being a much less painful and difficult process. “If you can place a seed where you want the nanotubes, you can grow them,” Jaskie says. “It becomes much easier.”
There’s more, much more, to Kevin’s exciting article, but first this word from your sponsor…