An independent article on biomimetics
August 2003
Jellyfish on the Desktop
Warnings about the future, by writers like George Orwell and Alvin Toffler, are now an accepted part of our every day routine. We casually put our ‘number’ on every transaction we make without considering the cross-referenced pathways that take an image of us, piece by piece, and restores it somewhere we never care to think about; the battle to continually adjust and re-adjust to the latest way to do just about everything is no longer fought, we just do it; but are we ready for jellyfish on the desktop?
It was a recent treat to see Gartner’s Senior Vice President Asia Pacific, Bob Hayward, give a presentation on ‘future trends in technology’, in Adelaide. Always an entertaining and insightful speaker, this session was a great investment of two hours of my time.
I learned that we are in the Knowledge Age, moving from physical connectivity to logical connectivity with embedded connectivity touted as the norm by 2010, as we ride the hump of the bell curve of the Silicon Age. Between 1900 and the year 2000, processing power moved through the electromechanical era, to relay, vacuum tube, then transistor and onto integrated circuit. As the calculations per second grew exponentially upward, the cost per calculation did the same thing downward and our reliance upon smaller, faster technology permeated just about everything as we embraced 2001 celebrations.
Today our hand held PDAs have more computing power than the original space shuttle that landed on the moon in 1969 – so how much is enough, and what on earth does it have to do with jellyfish? Well, already the computers in our homes are more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer ten years ago and, as the drive to increase power and decrease size continues, a major drawback continues to be power supply capacity. In the search for self-sustaining energy sources, in the vein of the movie The Matrix, science is looking to bio-materials for the answer. The pre-eminent Mr Hayward talked about using jellyfish to power the visual output of our future technology without batting an eyelid
If you thought techno-speak was just a never-ending vocabulary of acronyms, think again. Coyly called “life sciences” (including biotechnology, genomics and proteomics; nanotechnology; materials technology (biomimetics); energy technology; and microelectromechanical systems), this new vocabulary is attracting the attention of venture capitalists and investors who are traditionally only a short step ahead of mainstream availability.
Who would guess that jellyfish, and other bioluminescent creatures, could
contribute to the future of flat-screen technology? Well electrical engineering
professors Stephen Forrest and Marc Baldo at Princeton University did just
that. They have discovered that by combining commonplace fluorescent material
with phosphorescent molecules harvested from luminescent animals, it is possible
to emit the same amount of light with less energy input, paving the way for
various high-tech developments.
Equipment that uses phosphorescent light-producing material in addition to
fluorescent material is more efficient, and potentially doubles the life span of
batteries in portable electronic devices. That which we have long know as an
LED screen (light emitting diode) has become an OLED (organic light emitting
diode); a combination of fluorescence and phosphorescence that has quadrupled
the efficiency of the diodes and will accelerate the development of flat-panel
television and computer screens. These displays are very thin, usually less than
500 nm (0.5 thousandths of a millimeter) and require very little power, only
2-10 volts.
Panasonic made the first product with this technology, a car radio display used in Japan in 2001. OLEDs are robust and tough enough to use in portable devices and are already found in car audio components manufactured by Pioneer and cellular phones marketed by Motorola and Sanyo. The applications for OLEDs continue to expand, making it clearly the display technology of the future.
DuPont, Sarnoff and Bell Labs signed a collaboration agreement, in October 2002, to develop OLEDs. The flat-panel display market is estimated to grow from a current $30 billion to $57 billion by 2006. OLEDs are expected to successfully penetrate key applications including cellular phones, PDAs, Internet access appliances, industrial and consumer electronics and any other applications where bright, colourful, high contrast, thin, video capable displays are required.
If the
thought of jellyfish on the desktop is daunting, consider Mark Baldo’s ultimate
objective, "To make televisions the size of buildings because OLED technology
can be applied to an area of any size”. Maybe bigger is the new trend in
technology or, maybe, Mark just has an edifice complex.