> "To me, this is like a Wright brothers moment," de Heer said. "They built a plane that could fly 300 feet through the air. But the skeptics asked why the world would need flight when it already had fast trains and boats. But they persisted, and it was the beginning of a technology that can take people across oceans."
Tangent: I always find comparisons to the Wright brothers kind of awkward, because everyone seems to overlook their subsequent patent war and how much damage that did to the aviation industry in general (tangent: similarly Edison really really stifled early innovation in lightbulb technology with patent trolling. Philips became as big as it is because there was a decade in the 19th century where the Netherlands didn't recognize patent laws, so was free to steal and combine every innovation out there. They also employed highly motivated former rivals of Edison whom the latter had put out of business)
Anyway, with that side-track out of the way: I don't want to sound to negative, I do hope this is the breakthrough it's hyped up to be!
Tangent on your tangent: I always find it awkward that people name the Wright brothers as the inventors of the airplane, and keep forgetting Otto Lilienthal.
The Wright brothers engineered a control system, that’s nice and all, but pretty boring, iterative work. Lilienthal studied birds, wrote the book on how wings work, produced the first airplanes and was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders. In my view these were much more difficult steps and much more important work.
Lilienthals life is super interesting, but even his namesake museum in his hometown of Anklam is rather pitiful.
Same with Edison and "his" lightbulb, he wasn't actually the first to invent it. He wasn't even the first in his company, that would have been Joseph Swan - as determined by the courts at the time. Swan held the patent and Edison lost the case. Afterwards the two merged their businesses into the 'Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company'.
With most great inventions, there usually isn't a single person who came up with them. It's a long process from the first idea to building a working prototype. Lilienthal was definitely one of those great pioneers and it's sad his name isn't as well remembered as that of the Wrights. He was the first in history that we have evidence for to ever fly a glider. The Wright "plane" wasn't anything other than a glider, although they arguably did improve on the concept. Still, it's sad how in the memory of the general public, most of the time there's only a single name for big inventions and it's even the wrong one most of the time.
> The Wright "plane" wasn't anything other than a glider...
Beg pardon? The Wright brothers are specifically recognized for the first powered airplane. They started with gliders, but had an engine on one of the later versions.
That's true but they're not famous for adding the engine or the control system, the general public remembers them for inventing the airplane. Or "flying machine" as they called it back then. But that wasn't invented by them, even the name seems like a translation from German "Flugapparat". Nevertheless the US granted them a patent for the glider. Of course that was before internet and globalization and people didn't get sued for IP violations from across the ocean.
Sounds like you're admitting that you lied for dramatic effect, and are justifying it by the Wrights being famous for something other than their actual, more useful contribution. Please stick to the facts. I'm sure you'd agree these discussions don't need any more BS.
No, I do not agree with your insinuation and accusation. They did improve on the concept, I already mentioned that. Improving on and inventing something are two completely different things though. Lilienthal himself did not come up with the idea either, there were others dreaming of flying machines before him and some were even build, he's just the first person to have flown in one. That's why I said "with most great inventions, there usually isn't a single person who came up with them."
The Wright Brothers' biggest contribution to flight was in terms of aerodynamics and steering the glider. Adding the engine was arguably the easiest part, but you first had to come up with a glider design giving you enough lift. Even today most people wouldn't be able to do that on their own. Saying the Wright Brothers didn't invent the plane does not take away from those contributions. It simply corrects misinformation and puts them back into a long line of scientists and inventors who all worked on creating what we today know as airplanes.
Ok, seeing your point now. I was absolutely not trying to say their motor plane was just a glider. Reading it again that sentence was badly worded. 100% with you there!
The comment was strictly about their first plane, their supposed invention. When they flew their first glider, Lilienthal was already dead. His first flights had been 20 years before those of the Wrights! And yes, the Wrights obviously started with the glider just like him (which I was talking about) and only added the motor in later versions. It's known that they studied documents from Lilienthal and others and designed their flying machine based on that. So the idea that they invented it is ridiculous, that's all I was trying to communicate. Adding the engine does not mean they invented the whole thing, but sadly the general public has no idea about this and thinks they were the sole inventors.
They were still extremely skilled engineers, not to take away from that. They were pioneers in their own right. Their glider was superior to Lilienthal's, but that's partly because it was based on the superior biplane design by Chanute and Herring.
Lilienthal died flying one of his gliders. His wing curvature pressure tables were faulty and the Wright Brothers had to abandon them and build their own wind tunnel to measure and create a set of usable data. That led to their actual success flying.
Lilienthal was certainly important and served as inspiration, but it was the Wright's who really did all the invention and engineering to create what could credibly be called an airplane.
Yeah, I might have highlighted their later patent war antics at the beginning of this thread, but I also recall reading that the research done by the early Wright Brothers was really impressive. IIRC they were more rigorous in their measurements than other people around the same time, which was part of what lead to their success.
'he should be remembered as an important experimenter and inventor, who "probably did as much to bring about the accomplishment of dynamic flight as any other single individual".'
"Unassisted" is a pointless qualifier only used to make Dumont win. There is no reason why something that uses a catapult for takeoff does not qualify to be an aircraft.
Especially when the Wright brothers plane could fly properly and under control, flying 24 miles, including many turns, a year before Dumont could barely manage a few hundred meters in a nearly straight line and ended his flight in an uncontrolled roll.
The Wright flyers had their own engine. They were not gliders. The Wrights were making long, controlled flights powered by engines years before Dumont. First flights in 1903, first complete circle flight in 1904, and flights of over 20 miles and half an hour in 1905. The 1903 flight did not use a catapult, although several of their 1904 and 1905 flights did.
Dumont made a flight of 50 meters in 1906. Dumont's 1906 plane had no ability to do turns, rolls, or banking, useful maneuvers when you take a flight. It was not something that could be considered a usable airplane.
Dumont (and all early flyers) used headwinds to increase effective airspeed at takeoff. Does that disqualify him? The Wrights also of course used headwinds and then added catapults to reduce their dependence on ideal headwinds to enable faster progress in a wider range of conditions.
For decades most orbital rockets took off in an easterly direction, effectively using the earth's rotation as a catapult. Does that disqualify them as successful orbital flights?
You are making it complicated on purpose. It's actually pretty simple.
Did you take the airplane out, start it up, and take off? Like a modern, independent airplane? Or did you shoot it out of device first, because it wasn't able?
And not even particularly important, by the way. The last time this kind of argument was novel to me was in the mid-nineties at Slashdot.
As I said, the Wright's did not use the catapult in 1903. Three years before Dumont's 1906 flight of 60 metres, they flew well over 250 meters without catapult assist at takeoff. In 1904 they also flew over 400 meters without catapult assist. After that flight they started using a weight-powered catapult to simplify takeoffs and speed development.
So yes, it is simple. The Wrights flew without "shooting it out of a device" years before Dumont. The Wright Flyer was also capable of lateral control, like a modern, independent airplane.
With 5nm silicon process, I wonder where this is going to start with retooling and building new machines? I'm guessing they will start with 8bit RISC cpus with maybe the first 128 bytes as a data cache which could also be used as extra registers?
It will be great having a lot of expired patents and 50+ years of silicon work to build on, Machine Learning tools and free operating systems (NetBSD, Linux)
I hope they do it all again, I want to relive the C64, Amiga and 680x0 era again.
This will start with small devices used in power electronics likely. There are faster materials than silicon, but they still aren't used for highly integrated digital logic due to cost.
If starting from scratch with new tooling, I wonder if they'll consider ternary, which is theoretically more efficient than binary (as it's closer to the optimal encoding: e-ary).
It's likely a reference to the radix economy [0], however it's actually very minor for the cases where it works. And in "the best way to count"[1] there compelling arguments as to why the formulation used on Wikipedia is not necessarily correct for arbitrary precision numbers as well as being bad for human notation compared to binary.
That was an interesting read, thanks. I'm not convinced that the "cost" of a b-ary digit is appropriately modelled as exactly b in all circumstances, though it is in the example of minimising the average length of time a caller must wait when using a phone menu system.
Probably the most exciting thing about this is that it shows the hard work of labs to discover the tacit knowledge necessary to produce single layer graphene is bearing fruit. Developing the real world industrial processes for putting theory into practice is always the hardest part of creating new technology especially when doing so on atomic scales. It seems slow and underwhelming compared to whizbang announcements about wonder materials but this is the type of gradual progress that the future is based on.
sorry for my being 8 year old, but, does this better current capacity mean it can go faster? and the less heat problems mean it can do so without being cooled riduculously? (i.e. faster consumer products??)
Computing with graphene is still sci-fi territory, making a semiconductor only allows you to make transistors, not to necessarily make billions of transistors at nano-scales.
On the larger physical scale, transistors are used for stuff like mosfets and switching power supplies.
You might have noticed the new generation of Gallium Nitride (another semiconductor) USB chargers. They improve over silicon in every important dimension, I think, with a higher breakdown voltage, lower on resistance, higher electron mobility (which is what limits the speed it can cycle).
The gallium nitride chargers (when well engineered) waste less power, meaning they don't get as hot, and can be built much smaller for a given output.
I am not an engineer or a materials scientist, but I think graphene is better in thermal conductivity and electron mobility than GaN, but a semiconductor would probably have a smaller bandgap, because graphene naturally doesn't have much of one at all, meaning it'd have a smaller operating range in temperature and voltage.
A major problem with current ICs, which gets much worse in 3D (stacked etc) designs, is keeping the transistors cool.
The transistor has a maximum operating junction temperature[1] which is limited by material and process.
Higher density chips make it difficult to extract the generated heat, in order to keep those junctions cool.
The heat is generated when the transistors switch from either on to off or vice versa, due to all normal conductors having some resistance, and switching a transistor involves sending or draining a small amount of current to its control element called the gate. Thus switching faster means more heat. More transistors in the same area all switching means more heat.
So either by making it easier to wick away the heat, or by tolerating higher junction temperatures, a different material to silicon might allow for higher density or faster switching before heat becomes an issue.
Of course there are other obstacles to increasing density and frequency, so just because a material has better thermal properties doesn't imply it'll allow for higher density or frequency.
After this advancement, it is very likely that this claim has become false.
I used to think like this, because the previous methods of producing graphene were completely impractical for making integrated circuits.
This new method developed by a team at Georgia Tech together with a Chinese team, works in a completely different way.
Starting from a silicon carbide wafer suitable for integrated circuits, a superficial layer of carbon is made by evaporating the silicon atoms that are close to the surface. Then the carbon layer is crystallized into graphene.
This process makes high-quality semiconducting monocrystalline graphene suitable for making semiconductor devices.
The main challenge that remains is to find a way to make high-quality metallic ohmic contacts to the graphene, because the metallic contacts with chromium that have been used now have a high Shottky barrier voltage, and also to make high-quality lightly doped regions of both p and n polarities, because only one high-quality polarity has been demonstrated yet.
There is a high probability that these problems can be solved now, when a good substrate has become available, which was the hardest problem that prevented the use of graphene.
The lilies sprouted from a stadium-sized cut-crystal vase, the Diamond Palace, which was open to the public. Tourists, aerobicizing pensioners, and ranks of uniformed schoolchildren marched through it year in and year out, peering through walls of glass (actually solid diamond, which was cheaper) at various phases of the molecular disassembly line that was Source Victoria.
Tangent: I always find comparisons to the Wright brothers kind of awkward, because everyone seems to overlook their subsequent patent war and how much damage that did to the aviation industry in general (tangent: similarly Edison really really stifled early innovation in lightbulb technology with patent trolling. Philips became as big as it is because there was a decade in the 19th century where the Netherlands didn't recognize patent laws, so was free to steal and combine every innovation out there. They also employed highly motivated former rivals of Edison whom the latter had put out of business)
Anyway, with that side-track out of the way: I don't want to sound to negative, I do hope this is the breakthrough it's hyped up to be!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war