Charles M. Brown wrote:
The diode array is progressing. A backer is willing to invest in nanoprototyping. There is some difficulty in that electron beam lithography is slow at ~ 1 / 3 second per 50 nm spot so the prototype will be microscopic with ~ 10,000 diodes. In the future, a stamp pad of millions of electron emitters will make many diode spots quickly. I found conference calls to be a powerful way to persuade people that we mean serious business. InSb can be electroplated as either small crystals or a organized deposition of alternate In and Sb layers. Fabricators can now make 4" InSb wafers but they are unnecessarily thick at ~900 um. However, they are expensive at hundreds of times the cost of Si.
I'm glad to see you're going to use InSb over InAs. Although I have no idea what your design is, you'll find that a direct band gap InSb 0.17 eV will generate significantly more thermal noise voltage than InAs. There are far better materials than even InSb I've detailed here at Vo, but they're extremely expensive.
I think that diode arrays will produce cheap electricity while absorbing ambient heat. Elctricity tends to return as heat when used so an industrialized cave using diode arrays would not heat up or cool down.
Indeed, it's called energy *flow*. For most applications energy would merely flow from immediate environment to device to appliance and back to immediate environment. No energy is added to environment-- closed loop energy flow.
One great option of such technology is the ability to move vast amounts of energy away from Earth by capturing ambient energy and then radiating such energy to space by means of electromagnetic radiation.
Regards, Paul Lowrance
