Power Crisis in 'ADVANTAGE KARNATAKA'

Living in the so-called Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore, and watching the proceedings in the past few weeks, its hard not to react. The lack of statistical data may make this post look like an outburst but its the reality. There are two events happening here, in tandem. The first one is supposed to be a big event, or a campaign which is expected to lead to series of events. The government of Karnataka is driving it and is called "Advantage Karnataka". This seems to be a borrowed idea, earlier executed by another BJP stronghold, industrial state of Gujarat, which was then called "Vibrant Gujarat". This basically tries to project Karnataka as an investment destination.

The second event is the power crisis in the state, which is covered up totally in the campaign, as any campaign would be. Most parts of Bangalore is experiencing around 4 hours of power shutdown everyday and sometimes more. Mostly, during daytime - thanks to them as a householder, we get some sleep after all. But industries, who are under real stress, would be cursing them due to the extra operational cost. Most IT companies, which renders the tag of "Silicon Valley" to Bangalore are running with Diesel Generators, which is a huge and unnecessary burden for them. There are so many other sectors which gets affected due to this lack of power supply like agriculture, manufacturing and education, which I did not mention due to lack of information.

It looks funny to me to see this campaign, which boasts of many things, one of which being "Good infrastructure". Does lack of power still be termed as "Good infrastructure"? With whatever basic understanding I have, with which I can not make any administrative decisions at such high level, I guess electricity is one of the basic needs to run an industry. I am sure that some or the other investor, would raise this issue in each of these meetings and I am more than sure that the government (politicians here) has convincing and pre-planned answers prepared by the Administrative Babus and Execution Engineers. More than those answers, they would be satisfied with false promises and subsidies.

Criticism about the government and its functioning never ends and the government never bothers it, as well. Leaving criticism, on the constructive side, I wonder, how such an enormous power demand is being met by the US and other European nations. These countries' power demand is multi-fold higher than what Karnataka (or India as a whole) is facing. What I am given to know, even in the US, most of the demand is satisfied by thermal power generation, which is same in Karnataka, equally backed up with hydel power generation. Why don't the government take these nation's power generation as a model to work on, as it tries to make Vibrant Gujarat its model for it Advantage Karnataka campaign. Just by these campaigns, it can not be successful in bringing in the real investment. It might succeed with a few initial investments, by hiding or manipulating the facts. But the truth will surface out soon which will trigger unhappiness among the investors, who in turn will campaign not to invest in the state. Real investment is a continuous process, which will not happen with this infrastructure.

I think the government was too busy in imitating Gujarat's campaign, that it forgot to investigate more on power demand and supply scenario in that industrialised state. I had hardly come across power shortages and power cuts in Gujarat when I lived there and it is still being agreed as a fact by my friends who live there.

Note: I tried to find some statistical data, with not too many success. One of the informative web pages I came across during this process is quoted below. Please take time to read that for a little better numerical data, though not from any validated sources.

http://www.praja.in/en/blog/bhamyshenoy/2010/02/08/karnataka-power-crisis-need-new-thinking

Feynman's Nano, Now -2

This is an excerpt from the same Feynman's famous lecture mentioned in the earlier posts. This is about the how part of capturing all the volumes of the encyclopedia on a pin head.

"The next question is: How do we write it? We have no standard technique to do this now. But let me argue that it is not as difficult as it first appears to be. We can reverse the lenses of the electron microscope in order to demagnify as well as magnify. A source of ions, sent through the microscope lenses in reverse, could be focused to a very small spot. We could write with that spot like we write in a TV cathode ray oscilloscope, by going across in lines, and having an adjustment which determines the amount of material which is going to be deposited as we scan in lines.


This method might be very slow because of space charge limitations. There will be more rapid methods. We could first make, perhaps by some photo process, a screen which has holes in it in the form of the letters. Then we would strike an arc behind the holes and draw metallic ions through the holes; then we could again use our system of lenses and make a small image in the form of ions, which would deposit the metal on the pin.

A simpler way might be this (though I am not sure it would work): We take light and, through an optical microscope running backwards, we focus it onto a very small photoelectric screen. Then electrons come away from the screen where the light is shining. These electrons are focused down in size by the electron microscope lenses to impinge directly upon the surface of the metal. Will such a beam etch away the metal if it is run long enough? I don't know. If it doesn't work for a metal surface, it must be possible to find some surface with which to coat the original pin so that, where the electrons bombard, a change is made which we could recognize later."

Forgive me, for capturing such a big excerpt, which makes you comment whether it is a full article itself. But without this entire excerpt, the following post would not be meaningful.

Before stating this, Feynman tries to bring about some analogical printing methods like plastic molding, embossing etc.,. which were known in those days and used for classical printing. But this excerpt, especially, is very important to be reviewed, beacuse it is amazing to know that someone could explain, five decades back, what is called photolithography today, in such a lucid manner. Just that, the electron beam is replaced by UV light and the possibile surface is replaced with positive or negative photoresist material. Know more about photolitugraphy, here. Though this photolithography technique is not used for printing books on a nanoscale, it is still a possibility. Currently, this technique is used in Integrated Circuits or chip fabrication. All that comments above are my first thoguhts about the excerpt, before I could think a little more.

Wonder what? There is a photomask involved in photolithography, which contains the pattern to be etched in the photoresist layer. This is what confines the UV rays to a specific nano dimension on to the photoresist. Without this, UV rays can not be used to etch small dimensions as in microelectronic circuits. So, there should be more better method available currently, which could be used to manufacture this mask, without using a smaller mask. This thought and a few search in the world wide web guided me to such a method. That is called as "Electron beam lithography".

When I studied more and more, it was amazing to know that the actual process is almost same as Feynman's imagination and the limitations too, were. Here is the Wiki link to know more about the process. For those, who could not spend enough time to go through the link completely, here are the excerpts,

What?
"Electron beam lithography is the practice of scanning a beam of electrons in a patterned fashion across a surface covered with a film and of selectively removing either exposed or non-exposed regions of the resist"

How?
"Electron beam lithography systems used in commercial applications are dedicated e-beam writing systems that are very expensive (>4M USD). For research applications, it is very common to convert an electron microscope into an electron beam lithography system using a relatively low cost accessory (<100K USD)."

"Lower resolution systems can use thermionic sources, which are usually formed from LaB6. However, systems with higher resolution requirements need to use field electron emission sources, such as heated W/ZrO2 for lower energy spread and enhanced brightness."

Advantage:
"The primary advantage of electron beam lithography is that it is one of the ways to beat the diffraction limit of light and make features in the nanometer regime."

Limitations:
"The key limitation of electron beam lithography is throughput, i.e., the very long time it takes to expose an entire silicon wafer or glass substrate. A long exposure time leaves the user vulnerable to beam drift or instability which may occur during the exposure."

"With today's electron optics, electron beam widths can routinely go down to a few nm. This is limited mainly by aberrations and space charge."


Is it not the same as Feynman imagined?
After so much study, I feel that feynman's imagination had, in someway, driven the research and technology in this front.

Please don't empty your amazement with this post, as there are some more to come and strike you...

Feynman's Nano, Now - 1

    In this series of post, I try to think and analyze from where 'we' stand today and explain the points delivered by Dr. Feynman in his famous lecture of 1959, . I am not one among the Nanotechnology or Nanoscience research community. I am a common man having a little bit of interest and very little understanding of science. I am explaining this, because readers should not misunderstand the meaning of 'we' in 'where we stand today'. This 'we' refers to the entire human community. That is where, I can be considered one among those who a pushing the limits down that smaller world foreseen by Feynman and that is how I can feel proud and happy.

    Remember the year as the series continues. Excerpt and his thoughts are 50 years ahead from now.

Feynman's Nano, Now - 1
    Excerpt from Feynman's lecture below,

    "They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.

    Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britanica on the head of a pin?"

    I do not know if anybody really wondered that way. Rather, people should have thanked Feynman for being someone who at least thought of such possibility in 1960. Otherwise, we would not be approaching this smaller world so fast and still be running between rooms to operate a computer. I think Feynman had estimated every one and everything would work the way he was and was quite optimistic while mentioning the year 2000. Ten years from then, we have not written any encyclopedia on the head of a pin. But the growth we have had so far, certainly make us think that this is not a mere fantasy.

    There had been a lot of development until now, in the small scale (Nano) biological world like Human genome project, work on DNA sequencing and lot of pharmaceutical developments. Though biological science is pushing the limits faster, other fields are not just spectators. Like in electrical sciences, the limits of the circuits are already getting pushed below 32nm with lot of challenges. In material sciences, carbon nanotubes are openings up lot of possibilities.

    As an end note of the post, last week, while I was spending my Christmas vacation in a very calm and quiet place far from the buzzling metro I live in, I received a mail from one of my friends, whose team, though not encyclopedia, had put a world map on to an optical chip. Please note 'optical chip'. This is not the same integrated circuits we had been working and talking for the past 40 to 50 years. It's quite different, again approaching the nano scale. You can read more here.

50 Years of Feynman's Famous Lecture

Last week, I was reading a newspaper article about nanotechnology which cited the famous lecture presented by Dr. Feynman. It triggered the curiosity in me to know more about that lecture. For those, who do not know who this person is, Richard Feynman was a famous theoretical physicist of this era, who is well known for his work on Quantum Mechanics and his simple explanation of complicated aspects of physics.

This title of this lecture was "There's plenty of room at the bottom". It was delivered by him in 1959 at California Institute of Technology. Fortunately, the development in networking world has reduced the space-time distance (Is it also some sort of special or general relativity!?). Now it is available online, here. Thanks to Ralph Merkle and Zyvex.

Place take time to read his lecture and you will know why I mentioned about his "simple" explanation style, earlier in the post.
More to come in future posts...