President's Council Wants a Few More Things from the National Nanotechnology Initiative

President's Council of Advisors sees NNI moving in the right direction in nanotech's commercialization and environmental issues

2 min read
President's Council Wants a Few More Things from the National Nanotechnology Initiative

Just four months after the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) responded to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s (PCAST) 2010 report on the status of nanotechnology, PCAST has offered up a new assessment.

While the PCAST report on the NNI in 2010 wanted to see greater efforts towards commercialization and some attempt to address environmental, health and safety (EHS) concerns, this time they just wanted to see how well the NNI had done in meeting their previous recommendations.

In the Whitehouse.gov blog covering the announcement it seems PCAST are satisfied:

“PCAST found that the Federal agencies in the NNI have made substantial progress in addressing many of the 2010 recommendations that were aimed at maintaining U.S. leadership in nanotechnology… The PCAST assessment particularly commends the expanded efforts of the NNCO in the area of commercialization and coordination with industry, and the NNCO’s release of a focused research strategy for addressing environmental, health, and safety (EHS) implications of nanotechnology.”

Okay, pat on the back, job well done…uh, wait, there are still some new recommendations that PCAST would like to see addressed.  You can find them in the PDF of the full report on page vii. They fall into the areas of strategic planning, program management, metrics for assessing nanotechnology’s commercial and societal impacts, and…wait for it…increased support for EHS research.

Additional support for EHS research might be a required element for every PCAST report in the future. More interesting to me, however, is this continued emphasis on improved “metrics for assessing nanotechnology’s commercial and societal impacts.”

It seems to me that this is an area in which everyone from governments to corporations wants a formula that will churn out a sense of what kind of impact nanotechnology is really having. While nobody is satisfied with the metrics that we have,  I would suggest that there are few number-counting options that will really be able to sort out the full impact of nanotechnology. But again, it should be interesting to see what they come up with.

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Two Startups Are Bringing Fiber to the Processor

Avicena’s blue microLEDs are the dark horse in a race with Ayar Labs’ laser-based system

5 min read
Diffuse blue light shines from a patterned surface through a ring. A blue cable leads away from it.

Avicena’s microLED chiplets could one day link all the CPUs in a computer cluster together.

Avicena

If a CPU in Seoul sends a byte of data to a processor in Prague, the information covers most of the distance as light, zipping along with no resistance. But put both those processors on the same motherboard, and they’ll need to communicate over energy-sapping copper, which slow the communication speeds possible within computers. Two Silicon Valley startups, Avicena and Ayar Labs, are doing something about that longstanding limit. If they succeed in their attempts to finally bring optical fiber all the way to the processor, it might not just accelerate computing—it might also remake it.

Both companies are developing fiber-connected chiplets, small chips meant to share a high-bandwidth connection with CPUs and other data-hungry silicon in a shared package. They are each ramping up production in 2023, though it may be a couple of years before we see a computer on the market with either product.

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