Black Silicon, a new breakthrough in imaging technology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12stream.html
Intuition + Money: An Aha Moment
IT started with a Harvard physicist acting on a hunch. It ended up producing a new material, called black silicon, that could have a broad impact on technologies ranging from ultrasensitive sensors to photovoltaic cells.
On Monday, Harvard plans to announce that it has licensed patents for black silicon to SiOnyx, a company in Beverly, Mass., that has raised $11 million in venture financing.
This would never have happened if the physicist, Eric Mazur, and his graduate students had stuck to the original purpose of their research. He says their experience offers a lesson in government financing of science and technology, which is becoming so narrow and applied as to make discoveries like theirs much less likely.
A more narrow focus does have its advantages: for one, it can be more likely to produce an immediate payoff.
But in the current research environment, “you are less likely to be open to serendipity,” said Judith L. Estrin, an electrical engineer and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy” (McGraw-Hill, 2008).
Black silicon was discovered because Dr. Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organization to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces.
“I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up,” he said. “I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why.” And even though there wasn’t an immediate practical application, he received the financing.
It was several years before he directed a graduate student to pursue his idea, which involved shining an exceptionally powerful laser light — briefly matching the energy produced by the sun falling on the surface of the entire earth — on a silicon wafer. On a hunch, the researcher also applied sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits.
The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.
At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto, and that is typical of the way many scientific discoveries emerge. Cellophane, Teflon, Scotchgard and aspartame are among the many inventions that have emerged through some form of fortunate accident or intuition.
“In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’” said Michael Hawley, a computer scientist based in Cambridge, Mass., and a board member and investor in SiOnyx.
Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems.
“We have seen a 100 to 500 times increase in sensitivity to light compared to conventional silicon detectors,” said James Carey, a co-founder of SiOnyx who worked on the original experiments as a Harvard graduate student.
Dr. Mazur is an investor in SiOnyx and chairman of its scientific advisory board. As a result of his research, a number of academic and corporate research groups are still exploring the material, which absorbs about twice as much visible light as normal silicon and has the ability to detect infrared light that is invisible to the current generation of silicon detectors.
SiOnyx is already commercializing sensor-based chips as a technology development platform for other companies and for use in next-generation infrared imaging systems.
The new technology has a tremendous cost advantage in that it is compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing plants, according to Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx’s chief executive. It is certain to attract broad attention from a range of industries, including scientific and medical imaging markets.
In the future, the low cost and higher sensitivity of black silicon may also make it a contender in the multibillion-dollar digital camera and video markets, an area currently dominated by silicon and charge-coupled-device sensors.
SiOnyx is continuing to experiment with the photovoltaic properties of black silicon, but Mr. Saylor said the company had no plans to jump into the market to become a solar cell manufacturer. “Our engagement is going to be as a technology provider, not as a producer,” he said.
Instead, he is eager to get a new generation of a supersensitive light detectors into the hands of entrepreneurs and experimenters who will be able to take the technology in unpredictable directions.
AND that is how this technology got to where it is today. To Dr. Mazur, that should be a lesson to technology funding agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon.
“This is a very strong case in point for funding science for the advancement of science,” he said.
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