Good job Dan... Nicely done... You know the old saying "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Rossi Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 8:02 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Electronics Spiro, I can't even begin to tell you how they can make a transistor so tiny, I don't have that kind of background. I do know some buzz words like PNP and NPN transistors, but that doesn't help either of us. I do know that the basic production method of a chip is with etching. They take a base material, like silicon and dope the surface with a conductive, or semi conductive material. Then a circuit is etched onto the surface. Basically, by leaving different widths and thicknesses of the semiconductor in some places, and completely removing it in other places, you create a circuit with different properties based on where the connections between the semiconductors remain and where it has been etched away. Here is an example I saw in a class a long time ago. The instructor had drawn a picture of a circuit on a piece of paper with a lead pencil. Some sections had wider lines than other sections. He had a battery and a light bulb taped to the piece of paper with wires taped onto the drawing. He went through a bunch of calculations showing what the resistance of a line so and so thick and so and so wide, would be. Blah blah blah. Finally, at the end of the class, he took his pencil and drew a line closing the open circuit and the light bulb lit up. One thing that chip manufacturers are talking about is that they are approaching a minimum size for circuit elements on a chip. The lines connecting elements on the chip surface can't get smaller than a single atom of the semiconductor material. When they finally reach that scale, there will have to be a change in the basic concept of an integrated circuit chip, IE, going to an optical system instead of electric. At which point, the limiting factor will eventually become a single wave length of the light they use. OK, I'm done talking out of my ass, for now. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081 To listen to the show archives go to link http://acbradio.org/handyman.html or ftp://ftp.acbradio.org/acbradio-archives/handyman/ The Pod Cast address for the Blind Handy Man Show is. http://www.acbradio.org/news/xml/podcast.php?pgm=saturday Visit The Blind Handy Man Files Page To Review Contributions >From Various List Members At The Following address: http://www.jaws-users.com/handyman/ Visit the archives page at the following address http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ If you would like to join the Blind Computing list, then visit the following address for more information: http://jaws-users.com/mailman/listinfo/blind-computing_jaws- users.com For a complete list of email commands pertaining to the Blind Handy Man list just send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links -- BEGIN-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS ------------------------------------------------------ Teach InfoWest Spam Trap if this mail (ID 119817798) is spam: Spam: https://spamtrap.infowest.com/canit/b.php?i=119817798&m=f2ae 4341c1f0&c=s Not spam: https://spamtrap.infowest.com/canit/b.php?i=119817798&m=f2ae 4341c1f0&c=n Forget vote: https://spamtrap.infowest.com/canit/b.php?i=119817798&m=f2ae 4341c1f0&c=f ------------------------------------------------------ END-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS
