Srsly title should be "MEMS Array Chip the Size of a Grain of Sand Can Project Video"
not
"MEMS Array Chip Can Project Video the Size of a Grain of Sand"
Huygens Optics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0Z2Y5vaAQ
Sam Zeloof:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxz_ENnmgtI
In general, getting vanity silicon made is usually much less expensive than trying to bootstrap a fab line. =3
But the "projection" is only to the end of the waveguide, which makes a real image, which could then be protected onto a real surface. It would be as misleading as saying a CRT screen projects an image. Well, not really. A CRT screen uses electron beam projection in the image generation. After that image is generated, it can then be projected.
A scanning beam laser projector can, by all definitions (including that pesky dictionary), project an image as part of the generation. An LCD, a CRT, and this, cannot project an image without additional projection optics attached to it to throw that generated real image.
I understand what they did (very neat), I'm just complaining about the press release wording. And then there's this shoved at the bottom "Because the chip can project so many more spots in any given time interval than any previous beam scanners, it could also be used to control many more qubits in quantum computers". Might as well throw "AI" in there. Or, maybe I'm just confused about it all because I stupidly read a university backed press release.
I meant "drawing" on a photoresist layer with a SEM and then wet-etching it. Also all silicon in a photodiode is doped, so the etched parts would be of little use, I believe.
Definitely hard for a home fab but how about a community fab? Not necessarily a geographic community.
Oh, even worse they are repeating it in different threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743276
But then again, we get anti Islam posts by prominent HN'ers as well so I guess that evens things out.
Why would criticising people for their religious-adjacent views be worse than criticising people for their political views?
I’m sure you’d find your own comment reprehensible if you replaced “MAGA” with “Jewish”. But why? Both are just groups of people who choose to believe in certain things.
You can be critical of Israel and I'm fine with that - and I'm plenty critical of Israel myself. But to say 'Most Jews are lunatics' is absolutely beyond the pale.
You could say this in more general terms about all people that are religious but you didn't do that and FYI Jews don't generally have a choice about their Jewishness, just like you don't have any choice about which family you were born into.
You could even make the case that most religious people had no choice in their adoption of that religion, but most people have the theoretical option of letting go of their religion if they so desire, but you can not stop being a Jew. This little detail was baked into the religion and it is a serious problem for those that are Jewish and that wish to get away from it - and these people really do exist -, but they can not change their identity to a degree that they themselves would recognize as sufficient, besides, their environment usually also does not recognize it.
In the interest of furthering your knowledge about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_the_derech
and
https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004331471/BP000006...
I get all this is complicated, and maybe you really can't follow this in which case my apologies but there is a significant choice between who you work for (say, Palantir, Facebook, OpenAI or Twitter) vs what family you are born into.
As for political beliefs: yes, I'm critical of those that carry water for Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and their cronies, they're out to destroy the world as we know it and if you help enable that you are imnsho part of the problem.
The misquote here does not feel accidental.
I said:
> We’re not allowed to criticise Israel because most jews are lunatics that consider such criticism an antisemitic attack on their person
If “Most Jews consider criticism of Israel to be an attack on their person” is true, then it certainly follows that “Most Jews are lunatics”.
> You could even make the case that most religious people had no choice in their adoption of that religion, but most people have the theoretical option of letting go of their religion if they so desire, but you can not stop being a Jew
Yes, I am aware that some people choose to believe this. However, outside of a specific religious community people will generally not consider you to be a Jew unless you identify as such.
I personally am not religious and therefore don’t subscribe to the belief that people can’t stop being Jews.
By many estimates, quantum computers will need millions of qubits to realize their potential applications in cybersecurity, drug development, and other industries. The problem is, anyone who has wanted to simultaneously control millions of a certain kind of qubits has run into the problem of trying to control millions of laser beams.
That’s exactly the challenge that was faced by scientists working on the MITRE Quantum Moonshot project, which brought together scientists from MITRE, MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Sandia National Laboratories. The solution they developed came in the form of an image projection technology that they realized could also be the fix for a host of other challenges in augmented reality, biomedical imaging, and elsewhere. The device is a one-square-millimeter photonic chip capable of projecting the Mona Lisa onto an area smaller than the size of two human egg cells.
“When we started, we certainly never would have anticipated that we would be making a technology that might revolutionize imaging,” says Matt Eichenfield, one of the leaders of the Quantum Moonshot project, a collaborative research effort focused on developing a scalable diamond-based quantum computer, and a professor of quantum engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Each second, their chip is capable of projecting 68.6 million individual spots of light—called scannable pixels to differentiate them from physical pixels. That’s more than fifty times the capability of previous technology, such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) micromirror arrays.
“We have now made a scannable pixel that is at the absolute limit of what diffraction allows,” says Henry Wen, a visiting researcher at MIT and a photonics engineer at QuEra Computing.
The chip’s distinguishing feature is an array of tiny micro-scale cantilevers, which curve away from the plane of the chip in response to voltage and act as miniature “ski-jumps” for light. Light is channeled along the length of each cantilever via a waveguide, and exits at its tip. The cantilevers contain a thin layer of aluminum nitride, a piezoelectric which expands or contracts under voltage, thus moving the micromachine up and down and enabling the array to scan beams of light over a two-dimensional area.
Despite the magnitude of the team’s achievement, Eichenfield says that the process of engineering the cantilevers was “pretty smooth.” Each cantilever is composed of a stack of several submicrometer layers of material and curls approximately 90 degrees out of the plane at rest. To achieve such a high curvature, the team took advantage of differences in the contraction and expansion of individual layers caused by physical stresses in the material resulting from the fabrication process. The materials are first deposited flat onto the chip. Then, a layer in the chip below the cantilever is removed, allowing the material stresses to take effect, releasing the cantilever from the chip and allowing it to curl out. The top layer of each cantilever also features a series of silicon dioxide bars running perpendicular to the waveguide, which keep the cantilever from curling along its width while also improving its length-wise curvature.
A micro-cantilever wiggles and waggles to project light in the right place.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.
What was more of a challenge than engineering the chip itself was figuring out the details of actually making the chip project images and videos. Working out the process of synchronizing and timing the cantilevers’ motion and light beams to generate the right colors at the right time was a substantial effort, according to Andy Greenspon, a researcher at MITRE who also worked on the project. Now, the team has successfully projected a variety of videos from a single cantilever, including clips from the movie A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The chip projected a roughly 125-micrometer image of the Mona Lisa.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.
Because the chip can project so many more spots in any given time interval than any previous beam scanners, it could also be used to control many more qubits in quantum computers. The Quantum Moonshot program’s mission is to build a quantum computer that can be scaled to millions of qubits. So clearly, it needs a scalable way of controlling each one, explains Wen. Instead of using one laser per qubit, the team realized that not every qubit needed to be controlled at every given moment. The chip’s ability to move light beams over a two-dimensional area, would allow them to control all of the qubits with many fewer lasers.
Another process that Wen thinks the chip could improve is scanning objects for 3D printing. Today, that typically involves using a single laser to scan over the entire surface of an object. The new chip, however, could potentially employ thousands of laser beams. “I think now you can take a process that would have taken hours and maybe bring it down to minutes,” says Wen.
Wen is also excited to explore the potential of different cantilever shapes. By changing the orientations of the bars perpendicular to the waveguide, the team has been able to make the cantilevers curl into helixes. Wen says that such unusual shapes could be useful in making a lab-on-a-chip for cell biology or drug development. “A lot of this stuff is imaging, scanning a laser across something, either to image it or to stimulate some response. And so we could have one of these ski jumps curl not just up, but actually curl back around, and then move around and scan over a sample,” Wen explains. “If you can imagine a structure that will be useful for you, we should try it.”