I SPIE

After a couple days at the San Francisco Money Show, where I did a Webcast event on nanotech investing, including my favorite hot stocks, I’m in lovely San Diego for the next few days attending a SPIE Photonic and Optics Conference. Sunday was the first day and here are my initial impressions. I’ll be blogging on At These Levels while I’m here if you want to read the day-to-day goings on.

But first, if you wonder who SPIE is--as I did--this is what Wikipedia has to say:

 On July 1, 1955 SPIE was founded as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers in California to specialize in the application of photographic instrumentation. In 1964, the society formally changed its name to the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. In 1977 SPIE moved its headquarters to Bellingham, Washington, and in 1981, to reflect a changing Membership, the Society began doing business as SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. SPIE publishes six scientific journals and a Digital Library containing over 235,000 online papers with over 17,000 papers added annually, and is affiliated with over 140 meetings and events globally each year. The society's international membership exceeds 17,500 with over 500 fellows and 100 Student Chapters around the world. In 2007, the society ended its DBA, and is referred to simply as SPIE (http://spie.org).

The mission of SPIE is to serve scientists and engineers in industry, academia, and government, as well as companies producing leading-edge products. SPIE constituents work in a wide variety of fields that utilize some aspect of optics and photonics, which is the science and application of light. More specifically, optics is a branch of physics that examines the behavior and properties of light and the interaction of light with matter. Photonics is the science and technology of generating, controlling, and detecting photons, which are particles of light. Individuals involved with SPIE conduct research and apply new techniques to the design and development of technologies such as semiconductor manufacturing, robotics, medical imaging, next-generation displays, battlefield technologies, entertainment, biometric security, image processing, communications, astronomy, and much more. SPIE attracts Members from around the world, including North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and supports them from offices in North America and Europe.

Better me than you, right?

I talk to my wife and she asks me if I’ve done anything fun, expecting me to tell her about some Tequila bar I found, how I went to the beach or a ball game. I tell her I saw a guy from University of Queensland present his paper, “The Effect of Structures on Dendrimer Light-Emitting Diodes.” She groans.

But you get it, right? You perked up when you heard the magic word “dendrimers,” yes? You thought, "Aren’t dendrimers what that cool Australian company Starpharma (NSDQ: SPHRY) makes? And now there’s dendrimer work going on beyond health applications. That’s so cool."

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How right you are. The dendrimer work they’re doing is attempting to get to dark blue phosphoresence. Right now, organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) can only be built to about light blue on the spectrum, which doesn’t make them very useful for lighting or screen technologies. Once you get to dark blue with a simple reproducible process, you have opened up OLEDs as a mass-market technology. All thanks to nanotech.

From Starpharma’s perspective, it’s an entirely new business line they can exploit that doesn’t have to go through drug trials.

There’s days of presentations about nanotech, spintronics and solar. There’s other really cool stuff too, but I’d miss some of the necessary stuff to see it: hours devoted to Microbial Extremophiles and Chemical and Morphological Biomarkers in Ancient Rocks and Astromaterials.

A presentation on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) was explaining how they’re using CNTs as vias in integrated circuits, replacing copper and enabling further miniturization with less energy loss. Another on CNTs was talking about how strides in chemical vapor deposition technologies are making it easier to manufacture single walled CNTs, which are the Maybachs of CNTs.

Once again, I’m sure you’re with me; you were thinking about that little company I mentioned in Nanotech Investor News a few issues back, CVD Equipment (NSDQ: CVV). The company name is the acronym for “chemical vapor deposition,” and it has a division dedicated to this kind of work.

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Well, the solar plenary session is tomorrow, so I better get my rest. It’s going to be all about thin films, direct conversion of solar energy to hydrogen, the works.

Check in at At These Levels during the next couple days for more.