Portfolio 5

As time has passed, technology has been grown. Technology had developed to a certain stage like read and mapping the brain. In “A computer that can ‘read’ your mind” and “Ethics and mapping the brain” has described the positive and negative effects on society. To minimize the potential unethical abuses of a technology like cloning, there are two ways to do so.

Cloning is a new technology which brought recently on duplicating organisms. This is a great approached in this medical field as this technology tends to solve the problem of organ transplant. However, someone will misuse and abuse this technology by cloning his own self to commit crime. To minimize the potential unethical abuses of this, precaution with more details need to be done on cloning. Since cloning is using the embryo or cell in the body, it should be dispose after using. This is to ensure no one can reuse or misuse for his own benefit.

Besides solving the problem of organ transplant, it is also a way to stop some endanger species of animal for getting extinct. With is technology, animal like tiger won’t need a mate to produce next generation. However, if all animals are depending cloning from getting extinct, then female and even male animal will lose its nature ability to reproduce next generation. To avoid this happen, control of cloning animal is needed. Planning and strategized cloning on animals which are going to extinct is needed so that those animals are still remaining their own abilities.

In conclusion, where there is a new technology has developed, it definite brings benefits to the human as it is design to make our life better however in the same time is also will bring us problem as we are altering the nature.

Portfolio 4

Being able to speak doesn’t mean that being able to write well in academic writing. Academic writing is totally different with essays we always write in our high school. The way we need to present, the points of view which we pointed out, and the choice to word or vocabulary is really makes is the entire essential for an academic writing. When comes to academic writing, there are 3 difficulties I faced.
First of all, I still have really master the way of presenting an academic writing. As I still get use to the previous mattered I always do in my high school, I find I quite difficult to produce an academic writing. It isn’t easy as I have to write views which are really a fact and needed references to support my views.
Second of all, lack of vocabulary is one of the difficulties I am having too. As English isn’t my mother tongue, I find it difficult express my opinion or idea in English. Sometimes, I might also afraid that I will write a sentence that directly translated from my mother tongue. In order to avoid that, I tend to use simply English to express which can’t really accentuate my point of view.
Third of all, when a writing question is shown up to me, I might not enough points to support the writing question. As lack of reading material and information regarding engineering development during my previous school time, I find academic writing on writing 500 words and above is quite difficult. Although through searching internet to get more information regarding the writing question is very convenient, I can’t do that during the exam.
To resolve and continue to improve the difficulties I faced, one and only way is to read more. Only read more can increase my vocabulary. Once I have more vocabulary, I will find it easier to express my view. Beside, read more also let me expose me on information regarding the technology and know more about the is the world is going on.

Portfolio 3

Engineers Develop Smallest Device To Control Light, Advance Silicon Technology

ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2006) — An electrical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin has made a laser light blink while passing through a miniaturized silicon chip, a major step toward developing commercially viable optical interconnects for high performance computers and other devices.

Researchers for decades have sought to harness light as a messenger on silicon chips because light can move thousands of times faster through solid materials than electrons and can carry more information at once, while requiring less energy.

Ray Chen, a professor of electrical engineering, and graduate students Wei Jiang, YongQiang Jiang and Lanlan Gu created a chip made of silicon “photonic crystals” whose complex internal structure slowed light traveling through the chip. The laser light slowed down enough that a small electric current could alter, or modulate, the pattern of light transmission.

“We were able to get our new silicon modulator to control the transmission of laser light, while using 10 times less power than normally needed for silicon modulators,” said Chen, who holds the Temple Foundation Endowed Faculty Fellowship No. 4.

He will give an invited talk about the latest update on the miniaturized device on Jan. 25, at the Optoelectronics 2006 Symposia of the SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Jose, Calif.

For light to encode meaningful information, its intensity or other characteristics need to be modulated, just as air that passes through a person’s vocal cords is modulated to produce speech sounds by actions that include moving the lips and tongue. Because Chen was able to modify light using electric current, which itself is modifiable, he expects to be able to modulate the light to blink on and off at different rates, or to change in intensity.

Once such silicon modulators are combined with lasers on a silicon platform, these optical chips could become a mainstay of consumer electronic devices, telecommunication systems, biosensors and other devices. In computers, the light-modulating chips would primarily serve to send information between a computer’s microprocessors and its memory, a process called interconnection.

“In a Pentium 4, over 50 percent of the computer’s power is consumed by interconnection,” Chen said.

Other advantages of optical chips based on silicon photonic crystals would include their reduced risk of overheating due to lower power needs, the ability to fabricate optical chips primarily with traditional mass-production practices in a silicon foundry and the expected smaller size of optical modulators and other optical silicon elements of the future.

Chen initially published findings on the silicon modulator in the Nov. 28, 2005, issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. That article described how less than 3 milliwatts of power was needed for light modulation. The length of the special silicon chip the light needed to travel before being modifiable was 80 micrometers (.08 millimeters). That is about 10 times shorter than the best conventional silicon optical modulators. Smaller components help drive manufacturing costs down,and also transmit signals faster.

The shortened length was possible because Chen’s laboratory designed the silicon photonic crystals that are the key component of the modulator to have large regions of regularly spaced, nanosize holes that light would have to traverse. Navigating the Swiss cheese-like regions of the crystals, called line defects, slowed the light’s passage considerably.

Since the November publication, Chen’s laboratory has continued evaluating the specialized silicon chips and learning how to change the blinking rate of laser light traversing their silicon modulator.

This research is supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Jiang is now a research scientist at Omega Optics Inc. in Austin, Texas.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin.

Summary

Technology has been continuously progressing as time passed. Now, and electrical engineer had invented smallest device to control light (Advance silicon technology). As light can move faster and required less energy than electron through solid materials, it has been a messenger on silicon chips.Ray Chen, a professor of electrical engineering, and graduate students Wei Jiang, YongQiang Jiang and Lanlan Gu created a chip made of silicon “photonic crystals” whose complex internal structure slowed light traveling through the chip. The laser light slowed down enough that a small electric current could alter the pattern of light transmission. Once such silicon modulators are combined with lasers on a silicon platform, these optical chips could become a mainstay of consumer electronic devices, telecommunication systems, biosensors and other devices. In computers, the light-modulating chips would primarily serve to send information between a computer’s microprocessors and its memory, a process called interconnection. The advantages of optical chips based on silicon photonic is to reduce the risk of overheating due to lower power needs, the ability to fabricate optical chips primarily with traditional mass-production practices in a silicon foundry and the expected smaller size of optical modulators and other optical silicon elements of the future. Smaller components help drive manufacturing costs down, and also transmit signals faster. The silicon photonic crystals that are the key component of the modulator to have large regions of regularly spaced, nanosize holes that light would have to traverse. Chen’s laboratory has continued evaluating the specialized silicon chips and learning how to change the blinking rate of laser light traversing their silicon modulator.