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World’s smallest, best acoustic amplifier emerges from 50-year-old hypothesis
- imoverclocked 5y agoSomeone in the know: Is this related to sonoluminescence at all?
- mikewarot 5y agono, it is not.
- amelius 5y agoIs it related to phonons then? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon > Phonons can be thought of as quantized sound waves, similar to photons as quantized light waves.
- goldenkey 5y agoThis technology is entirely analog. It has nothing to do with quanta. It simply converts electromagnetic signals of a certain band, into electricity, through an acoustic coupling, and amplifies the signal too, in an all-in-one manner.
- amelius 5y agoBut the quanta can generate shot-noise, just like the quantized electrons can in an electronic design?
- amelius 5y agoHow sensitive is this to other nearby amplifiers? Would two such amplifiers on the same chip interfere?
- ridruejo 5y ago“The Sandia scientist leading that effort happened to share an office with Matt.” There are some serenpidity advantages to being colocated :)
- vinay_ys 5y agoI had a similar reaction to that sentence. A very good reminder that WFH can be disadvantageous to this type of creative cross-polination.
- birdyrooster 5y agoWhich is why we should go back to satellite offices and rub shoulders explicitly with people that aren’t on our team.
- diydsp 5y agoand/or co-working spaces where we can cross-pollinate ideas with people on the fringes of our own experience... or even people with various socioeconomic backgrounds and demographics... there must be a sweet spot between "old school IBM suits" and "coding from soup kitchens"
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoIt's not equivalent, but people create a similar dynamic online. IRC is a great example. Today there's several slacks/discords I idle in that are just friends sharing what's going on throughout their day. Both contexts have advantages and disadvantages imo.
- KMag 5y agoWe just returned to office recently, and a team I hadn't worked with in about 6 years just moved to the next row over. Their second day in their new location, and I overheard them talking about a rare segfault (thousands of processes, hits them about once a month) that had been perplexing them for months. I had a bit of intuition and a good guess, and in a few hours had an ugly proof-of-concept fix they were testing. It took another week for a colleague to clean up, productionize, and properly test a robust solution. It got me thinking about ways to artificially introduce opportunities for such serendipity in a remote work environment, but I haven't come up with anything good yet.
- napier 5y agoAppropriate username for posting a story about recently declassified tech.
- mikewarot 5y agoSurface Acoustic Wave filters are used in RF signal processing. They work by converting an electrical signal to a sound wave on the surface of a piezoelectric material, then using mechanical resonance effects to filter the signal to a very narrow band before converting it back to an electrical signal. In this setup, they have figured out how to amplify the sound waves without having to convert them back to electrical signals first. The first prototype got hot, so they could only run it in pulses... the second device worked continuously, and delivered about a modest amount of power. Eventually this technology will work its way down into all of our communications gear, making it even smaller, and more efficient.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThat's helpful and makes sense for filtering. But do you have a sense for how their setup amplifies?
- mikewarot 5y ago"The gain mechanism, which is analogous to an electromagnetic traveling-wave tube amplifer32, depends on the average interaction of the charge carriers with the piezoelectric electric field. This interaction controls the energy transfer from or to the acoustic wave, resulting in acoustic wave attenuation or amplification, respectively." Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22935-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22935-1 I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't paywalled.
- jlnthws 5y agoTheir device is tiny. I don't understand how it works with low frequency / large wavelength sound wave. Do you?
- jacquesm 5y agoIt doesn't work with low frequencies, it works with very high frequencies but in the acoustic domain. You're looking at wavelengths on the order of micrometers.
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- simonjgreen 5y agoThis article taught be a new term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoNon-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
- chrismorgan 5y agoDigression: why do sites like Wikipedia and Twitter use different URLs for their mobile, given that in the end it’s essentially the same stuff being served?
- 41b696ef1113 5y agoFor Wikipedia, I imagine they have interests in making the content most accessible on the maximum number of devices. Which means pages crafted to be lightweight and minimal Javascript. Yes, you could do that all in one page, at the altar of developer velocity, but I think the strict isolation is user forward. A quick test from Firefox dev tools for initial page load: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon 1.04MB, Finish 619 ms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon 1.94MB, Finish 1500 ms
- ajot 5y agoIs there any other part in a cellphone that requires 36 V to operate? It seems quite high for being stuffed into a portable electronics device.
- wtallis 5y agoFlash memory requires relatively high voltage for block erase operations, but this is at least twice the voltage that flash uses. It's likely to adopt the same strategy of including charge pumps on board to generate the required high voltage from one of the lower voltages available from the system.
- kube-system 5y agoI'm sure some parts of power conversion circuits might momentarily reach some voltages like that, particularly when you've got inductors behind switching circuits. The wiki page for Qi says that transmitters circuits can reach 50v, and I believe a few phones can serve as Qi chargers.
- peter_d_sherman 5y ago>"While most radio components, including amplifiers, are electronic, they can potentially be made smaller and better as acoustic devices. This means they would use sound waves instead of electrons to process radio signals. “Acoustic wave devices are inherently compact because the wavelengths of sound at these frequencies are so small — smaller than the diameter of human hair,” Sandia scientist Lisa Hackett said. But until now, using sound waves has been impossible for many of these components." [...] >"Previous researchers hit a dead end trying to enhance acoustic devices, which are not capable of amplification or circulation on their own, by using layers of semiconductor materials. For their concept to work well, the added material must be very thin and very high quality, but scientists only had techniques to make one or the other. Decades later, Sandia developed techniques to do both in order to improve photovoltaic cells by adding a series of thin layers of semiconducting materials." [...] >"Fusing an ultrathin semiconducting layer onto a dissimilar acoustic device took an intricate process of growing crystals on top of other crystals, bonding them to yet other crystals and then chemically removing 99.99% of the materials to produce a perfectly smooth contact surface. Nanofabrication methods like this are collectively called heterogeneous integration..." PDS: Let's revisit this quote: "This means they would use sound waves instead of electrons to process radio signals." So, I'm going to go for "full crackpot" here... How do we know that electrons aren't sound waves -- and/or radio-wave-like -- in nature? ? If <thing A> in the universe can be converted into <thing B> via a transducer, then that shows us that <thing A> and <thing B> share a relationship which might not be completely understood according to the scientific reasoning of the day... Compare to the concept of "identities" in Mathematics. Once you have a mathematical identity for some term in a math equation, then you can reason about that equation in different ways that you couldn't before -- with the guarantee that because the mathematical identity has previously been proven, the reasoning about the equation, substituting a term with one of its proven identites -- will be correct... In other words, can we reason about electrons as sound waves, and/or as radio waves, and will the results of that reasoning be correct? ?
- wizzwizz4 5y ago> In other words, can we reason about electrons as sound waves, and/or as radio waves, and will the results of that reasoning be correct? The movement of electrons is a bit like the movement of air; that's why they share the relationships. This doesn't tell you much about the nature of air molecules or electrons. (It's actually using a solid, not air, as the acoustic medium, but my point still stands.) It works the other way around, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon
- imoverclocked 5y agoI wonder if these will be small and cheap enough to create a 2x2 array of pixels so one could eventually make a focused image.
- dasl 5y agoInstead of having RF interference, if we have acoustic transmitters, would you have trouble getting a signal at a loud concert for instance (acoustic interference)?
- ComputerGuru 5y agoThese are operating on EM/sound at frequencies magnitudes higher than anything in the audible range; there's basically no chance anything you can hear (no matter how loud) could interfere with this.
- derefr 5y agoBut are there things that produce “loud” acoustic waves at these ultrasonic frequencies out in the natural or manmade world, that we mostly just ignore because we can’t sense them? (in about the same way that we ignore e.g. the massive amount of radio interference that switching power supplies create, because we don’t use those bands for anything)
- xavriley 5y agoI’m not 100% sure, but this tech sounds like a nano scale version of “The Thing” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) (a passive radio transmitter invented by Leon Theremin)