MAR 21, 2000, M2 Communications - MINNEAPOLIS -- Physicists at Bell Labs, the
research and development arm of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU), have designed
novel organic semiconductors and built innovative electronic circuits that could
have far-reaching consequences for the communications industry.
They will present the results of this visionary research at the annual meeting
of American Physical Society (APS), the largest worldwide gathering of
physicists every year, taking place here this week.
Bell Labs physicists will give invited talks on subjects as diverse as organic
transistors, silicon micromachines, frustrated magnets, high-temperature
superconductors, and high-speed indium phosphide communications circuits. The
breadth and scope of the talks will be a tribute to the immense scientific
contributions made by Bell Labs, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this
year.
At the APS meeting, Bell Labs physicists will also get two major awards for
their leadership in physics. Bertram Batlogg, head of the materials physics
department at Bell Labs, is being honored by the APS with the prestigious David
Adler lectureship award for his many contributions to materials science. This
year's Oliver Buckley Prize in condensed-matter physics is being awarded by the
APS to two former Bell Labs researchers, Theodore Fulton and Gerald Dolan, for
their research on single-electron physics at low temperatures.
Fulton and Dolan invented the single-electron transistor, which could result in
high-density computer memories. They are sharing the prize with a third
recipient, Marc Kastner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fulton
retired from Bell Labs in 1996 but continues to work as a consultant. Dolan, who
worked at Bell Labs from 1976 to 1987, is now a private consultant.
Organic semiconductors In a development that could herald an entirely new sort
of electronics, Batlogg and his Bell Labs colleagues have devised organic
transistors that could one day be as common as today's solid-state transistors.
In his Adler lecture, Batlogg will talk about making organic transistors with
pentacene, a simple molecule made out of five connected benzene rings that forms
good crystals and possesses electrical properties that makes it a desirable
semiconductor.
"Pentacene is the cleanest organic semiconductor that we know today," Batlogg
said. "It is opening up exciting research directions." He and his colleagues
used single crystals of pentacene to build organic field-effect transistors that
have good performances.
Field-effect transistors - transistors where the fields associated with the
voltages applied to gate electrodes create or destroy or modify conducting
channels between the source and drain electrodes - are among the most widely
used solid state devices and are found in stereo amplifiers, television sets and
car radios.
Brian Crone, a post-doctoral researcher who is giving an invited talk at the APS
meeting, and Ananth Dodabalapur of the optical physics research department at
Bell Labs have complemented Batlogg's work by building large-scale integrated
circuits based on organic transistors. They were able to use 864 organic
transistors to build a 48-stage CMOS shift register and a 10 kiloHertz ring
oscillator.
"This is roughly three times the previous record of 326 transistors," said
Dodabalapur. "It shows that it is possible to build complicated electronics
using organic semiconductors." While organic transistors are still at a research
stage and are not a competitor of the silicon variety, they would be cheap to
manufacture and would be particularly useful in certain high-volume
applications. Potential uses include roll-up computer screens, smart cards,
luggage tags that help airport personnel locate lost suitcases, and tags on
groceries that verify whether they were transported under the right conditions
to the supermarket.
High-speed communications circuits Young-Kai Chen, head of the high-speed
electronics research department at Bell Labs, will talk about high-speed
integrated circuits for optical networks. Materials scientists nowadays are able
to tailor semiconductors to demand, and custom-designed indium phosphide-based
integrated circuits offer great advantages in speed.
Chen will speak about optoelectronic devices that can have operational speeds
over 100 GigaHertz.
Mecca of science
At the APS meeting, Bell Labs scientists will get together with former
colleagues to celebrate the 75th anniversary of this extraordinary scientific
powerhouse. One of the most innovative R&D entities in the world, Bell Labs has
generated some 27,000 patents since 1925. It has played a pivotal role in
inventing and perfecting key communications technologies for most of the 20th
century, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers
and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular
telephony, electronic switching of calls, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Today,
Bell Labs continues to be a haven for some of the best scientific minds. With
more than 30,000 employees located in 25 countries, it is the largest R&D
organization in the world dedicated to communications and the world's leading
source of new communications technologies. In a recent report, Technology Review
magazine said Bell Labs patents had the greatest impact on telecommunications
for 1999.
"Bell Laboratories has done more basic science and has contributed more to the
economic and scientific well being of this country than any of the National
Laboratories," said Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics at Stanford
University and co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Osheroff said Bell Labs is "a place where great ideas are nurtured and allowed
to grow." "Bell Labs has thrived on physicists' contributions for all of its
seventy five years of existence. They have not only contributed as physicists
but have gone into various areas of software and systems," said William
Brinkman, vice president of research, Bell Labs, who is also currently APS vice
president and president-elect for the term beginning in 2002.
"Bell Labs has a unique place in the history of twentieth century physics," said
Nobel laureate Philip Anderson of Princeton University. "Not only has it been
the source of the physics-based devices on which the modern information economy
is run, it has also contributed substantially to fundamental physics. The Labs
is the perfect illustration of the fact that technology and fundamental science
are mutually reinforcing and supportive of each other, as opposed to the
'linear' model that technology follows from science but not vice versa." Lucent
Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., U.S.A., designs and delivers
the systems, software, silicon and services for next-generation communications
networks for service providers and enterprises. Backed by the research and
development of Bell Labs, Lucent focuses on high-growth areas such as optical
and wireless networks; Internet infrastructure; communications software;
communications semiconductors and optoelectronics; Web-based enterprise
solutions that link private and public networks; and professional network design
and consulting services. For more information on Lucent Technologies and Bell
Labs, visit the company's Web site at lucent.com or the Bell Labs Web
site at bell-labs.com. |
