[Rant] Bad Reporting, Bad Science

In what was an interesting article by Michael Malone, prinicpally about TJ Rodgers. Rodgers is an iconoclastic figure in the silicon enclaves of Calif. But the article has a fundamental flaw. In fact so fundamental as to call into question the authors understanding of things irregardless of his reputation. So what’s your beef Dog? Here –

A decade later, one of the scientists who worked with Noyce and Hoerni, Gordon Moore, by then co-founder of Intel, realized that this miniaturization/mass-production technique was advancing at a rate never seen before in human endeavor. This formulation was the famous Moore’s Law, which defines the modern world.

Most of us now understand, and appreciate, Moore’s Law, but in the semiconductor industry they live it every day. And T.J. is one of the best of them. And what he saw in SunPower was the impending arrival of Moore’s Law to the alternative power world … and more than anyone, he knew what that meant.

Even the nontechnical folks have probably heard of Moore’s Law. But what is it ? Here it is from the first reference ever offered by Moore — “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.” Moore later modifed the rule to a doubling of transitor density every 2 years.

Mr. Malone’s expertise as offered in the ABC article.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine,

So what’s the disconnect? In a nut shell applicability. Moore’s law applied to the rate that which engineers could place transistors onto a silicon substrate. Initially the assumption that Moore made was that the rate was sustainable for at least 10 years. Later it was found that the limiting factor is in quantum physics. There is a physical limit to how small the electrical paths may become before electrons start jumping paths.

But that is a far cry from the limitations of solar power. The limitation is not under control of the engineers in this case but for lack of anyone else — God. That limitation is the power density of sunlight falling on the earth’s surface. Depending on who you quote its somewhere around 1.4Kw/m2 maximum. So that is your physical cap right off the bat. The second is the nature of sunlight and its effects on materials. You don’t get 100% efficient conversion, there is loss for conversion to heat.

Is there any part of this article that is applicable? Yes. Conversion efficiency and improvements in production cost. Applying IC fabrication techniques can improve the materials that should improve the conversion factor. Applying those same technologies to fabrication will reduce costs, which NanoSolar is actually doing. But you will not get a doubling in conversion efficiency every 2 years. The fundamentals are different.

But the base fact is one may not simply take Moore’s law and its near exponential growth in transistor density and make an inference that the same will be made in solar power production is erroneous and bad reporting if not bad science.

ABC article.
Solar density.