Stanford Engineering Library Blog

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Tuesday, September 25, 10 am & 3 pm
Wednesday, September 25, 10 am & 3 pm
Thursday, September 25, 10 am & 3 pm
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Standards produced by ITU — ITU-T Recommendations — are now available without charge. The announcement follows a highly successful trial conducted from January−October 2007, during which some two million ITU-T Recommendations were downloaded throughout the world.

The experiment’s aim was to “increase the visibility and easy availability of the output of ITU-T”. Offering standards for free is a significant step for the standards community as well as the wider information and communication technologies (ICT) industry. Now, anyone with Internet access will be able to download one of over 3000 ITU-T Recommendations that underpin most of the world’s ICT. The move further demonstrates ITU’s commitment to bridging the digital divide by extending the results of its work to the global community.

Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) Malcolm Johnson, presenting the results of the trial to the 2007 meeting of ITU’s Council, said that not only had the experiment been a success in raising awareness of ITU-T, it would also attract new members. Most importantly, he noted, it had helped efforts to bridge the “standardization gap” between countries with resources to pursue standardization issues and those without. “There has been very positive feedback from developing countries,” said Johnson. “Last year exactly 500 ITU-T Recommendations had been sold to developing countries; this year, after allowing free access, they have downloaded some 300 000.”

ITU-T Recommendations are developed in a unique contribution-driven and consensus-based environment by industry and government members, with industry providing the most significant input. A strong focus of current standards work is providing the foundations for the so-called next-generation network (NGN). Other key areas include IPTV, ICT in vehicles, cybersecurity, quality of service, multimedia, emergency communications and standards for access, such as VDSL 2 — very high speed digital subscriber line 2, the newest and most advanced standard of DSL broadband wireline communications.

You can now track and review your current and past document delivery requests. The SULAIR libraries have implemented ILLIAD, a software program that will let you check the status of your requests. Articles will be delivered electronically.

To streamline processing as much as possible, document and book requests that used to come to the Engineering Library are now going to be handled directly by the Stanford University
Library's Interlibrary Borrowing Unit. We anticipate that turn around time will remain the same. Please contact the Engineering Library if you do experience any delays as we want to make sure that this workflow is running smoothly.

Key URLs:

Interlibrary Services: Document Delivery Request Formshttp://library.stanford.edu/services/interlibrary_services/doc_delivery_forms.html

NEW Interlibrary Borrowing Request Forms (One-Time Registration Required)
https://sulils.stanford.edu/

More Information About Submitting Requests:

Interlibrary Services has implemented a new system to manage your Interlibrary Borrowing requests. We are confident that you will find our new ILLIAD software easy to use for submitting and tracking your borrowing requests. From any web browser, you can use ILLIAD to:

* Submit borrowing requests
* Check the status of requests
* Edit and/or cancel requests
* Request renewals
* Review your borrowing request history (all completed and
cancelled requests)
* Update your patron information

To submit a request using ILLIAD, simply:

1. Go to the Document Delivery Request Forms page and select Interlibrary Borrowing Request Forms.
2. Complete a one time, required registration process.
3. Following registration, simply log in to the ILLIAD Main Menu.
4. From the ILLIAD Main Menu, select one of the appropriate request form type: book, article, map, dissertation/thesis, government document, score, or map.

Interlibrary Services will continue to notify patrons via e-mail when their loaned material is received. Articles will be delivered electronically.

Faculty and graduate students can still use Research Library Cooperative Program (RLCP) to borrow items directly from University of California at Berkeley or University of Texas at Austin. RLCP requests should be submitted using the RLCP links available from the Document Delivery Request Forms webpage.

The future of Moore's famous law—that the number of transistors squeezed onto a computer chip can be doubled about every two years—is widely seen as threatened by the damaging heat generated by the chips themselves as their transistors become more densely packed.

But a new theory of circuit design from Stanford researchers, recently confirmed by experiments in Germany, exploits the celebrated quirkiness of quantum physics to drastically reduce the heat produced by electricity coursing through the tiny veins of semiconductors.

Stanford physics Professor Shoucheng Zhang says a new generation of semiconductors, designed around the phenomenon known as the Quantum Spin Hall Effect, could keep Moore's law in force for decades to come.

Using special semiconductor material made from layers of mercury telluride and cadmium telluride, the experimenters employed quantum tricks to align the spin of electrons like a parade of tops spinning together. Under these extraordinary conditions, the current flows only along the edges of the sheet of semiconductor. Interestingly, electrons with identical spins travel in the same direction together, while electrons with the opposite spin move in the opposite direction. Unlike existing semiconductors, this unusual electric current does not generate destructive heat through dissipation of power or the collision of electrons with impurities in the semiconducting material.

There are other candidates for the next generation of computer chips, including nanotube technology. But Zhang believes that Quantum Spin Hall Effect chips might have the advantage because they can be made from materials already familiar to chip makers. In the long run, so-called "spintronics" could see the spin of electrons becoming more important than their electrical charge: Semiconductors would operate on the basis of spin alone, without electrons moving in their usual form of electrical current.

Zhang's theoretical work was aided by graduate student Taylor Hughes and former graduate student Andrei Bernevig. The U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation funded their work.

Library Resources on this topic:

Oct. 4 discussion to celebrate company that pioneered the processes behind microchips; event open to public

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor, the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives and Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West will co-sponsor a panel discussion from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Oct. 4 in Cubberley Auditorium.

Fairchild, the company that pioneered the processes behind microchips—processes that are still in use today—was launched on the morning of Sept. 19, 1957. On that day, a group of eight young scientists and engineers, along with two venture capitalists and representatives of an established East Coast company, signed the papers to form the first successful semiconductor company in the place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley. In a decade, it grew from its core of eight employees to 11,000, with $12 million in profits.

Panelists will include three Fairchild Semiconductor founders and the venture capitalist who backed them: Gordon Moore, who went on to found Intel in 1968; Jay Last, who became co-founder of Amelco Semiconductor in 1961 and vice president for technology at Teledyne, the company that acquired Amelco; Julius Blank, who in 1978 founded Xicor, a manufacturer of nonvolatile memory devices; and Arthur Rock, now principal of Arthur Rock & Co., a venture capital firm.

Stanford President John Hennessy will introduce the panel, which will be moderated by Leslie Berlin of the Silicon Valley Archives. Housed in the Special Collections of Stanford University Libraries, the archives include a range of primary source materials on the development of Silicon Valley science and technology, such as unpublished professional correspondence, research notes, diaries, journals, project files, technical reports, organization charts and other corporate records, patent applications, blueprints, company brochures, product documentation, photographs, and transcripts or recordings of speeches and interviews.

The Fairchild founding team was remarkable. All eight founders were under 32 years old. Moore and Robert Noyce would eventually start microchip giant Intel. Eugene Kleiner would later establish one of the most successful venture capital firms in the world, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Arthur Rock went on to back Intel and Apple, among other companies.

The event is free and open to the public. Information on the event and the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives is online at http://svarchive.stanford.edu/newsandevents.html.

Story appeared in the Stanford Report

David Kaneda's San Jose office building will use zero electricity, produce zero carbon dioxide, and still be a comfortable workplace

It may be a first: an office building with a net electricity use of zero or less, that burns no fossil fuels for heating and produces no greenhouse gas, and that makes the people working there at least as comfortable as those in conventionally heated and cooled buildings. The building, in San Jose, Calif., opens in October, and if all goes according to plan, it will raise the bar for designers of energy-efficient buildings worldwide. Though other so-called z-squared buildings exist, they are highway rest stops, nature centers, and event locations, not office structures with computers and printers and cubicles full of employees.

“We’ve hoisted the flag and said we’re the first,” says David Kaneda. “No one yet has stepped forward to question that.” He owns the San Jose building, and his Santa Clara, Calif.–based firm, Integrated Design Associates (IDeAs), did the electrical and lighting design and will occupy the ground floor.

Kaneda embarked on the project of renovating the old bank in September 2005, with the goal of creating an environmentally friendly building that could earn a Platinum rating—the highest—from the U.S. Green Building Council, an association of builders in Washington, D.C. At that time, global climate change was not in the forefront of public consciousness, and the council’s standards were not much in the public eye. So Kaneda thought he was being very forward-thinking when he proposed to renovate the bank to meet the council’s specifications for building materials, water use, indoor air quality, and—most important—energy use.

But when Kaneda hired architect Scott Shell, from EHDD Architecture, in San Francisco, to work on the project, Shell went even further, suggesting they design a building with no net electricity usage and no carbon dioxide emissions.

“It was a shock to me when he said that,” Kaneda recalls. He didn’t know of any commercial buildings that had gone that far.

The idea appealed to Kaneda, and the two decided they would disconnect the natural gas pipes running to the building and find heating alternatives. They would stay on the electric grid but install enough photoelectric panels to cover the entire energy load—about 30 kilowatts, generating more electricity than the building uses during the day but pulling a small amount off the grid at night. Since they’d be limited by the size of the roof, they’d have to be clever about energy use.

“To cut down on energy use, you’ve got three areas to address,” Kaneda says, “lighting, heating and cooling, and plug load—that is, the computers, printers, microwave ovens, and other things you plug into the wall.”

To reduce the amount of energy used for lighting, Kaneda’s builders sawed through the concrete perimeter of the building to install windows and skylights. Special window glass lets visible light through but blocks infrared and ultraviolet light, keeping the office cool. An overhang on the south side shades the windows from direct sun; on the east side, electro­chromic glass controlled by a sensor darkens the windows when sun hits them directly and makes them transparent the rest of the day. Because the ceilings are high, the skylights bathe much of the office space in a diffuse light; in areas where the skylight illumination is too strong, Kaneda is experimenting with different types of diffusers.

Full Story from IEEE Spectrum