Turning Cell Phones Into Projectors

by Elizabeth Corcoran, 05.20.09, 06:00 PM EDT

Forbes Magazine dated June 08, 2009

Put a projector in your pocket.

Infrared light turns into green light at Corning.

Transistors soak up much limelight in the digital world. But the backstage heroes are lasers: Red lasers brought us compact discs and cheap long-distance communications. Blue lasers, which cram even more data into a small spot, became a hit around 1999 and have made possible Blu-ray DVDs.

Now comes the third color needed to create a vibrant picture: green. In early May Corning said it had finally licked production problems in creating "synthetic" green lasers. Tiny video projectors using Corning's components could reach the market by autumn. The goal: packing a brilliantly sharp video projection system into a cell phone.

Existing video projectors are already marching down the well-trod path of miniaturization: In the 1990s projection video displays were clunky. They used liquid crystal display and so-called DLP technology to generate and manipulate the three colors (red, green, blue) that are the palette for many video displays. (The RGB format is dictated not so much by the physics of light waves as by the physiology of the eye.) Advancements in lamps, optics and imager technology reduced size and cost and perked up performance. Using red, green and blue leds as a light source, for instance, let manufacturers squeeze projectors smaller. Projector prices also dropped and are now only a few hundred dollars.

Coloring the dreams of technologists now, however, are exquisitely tiny low-cost projectors, ones small enough to tuck inside a mobile phone or even a pair of glasses. To affordably make projectors on that scale, the industry is pushing technology further--including turning to lasers that will emit green light.

Corning started making lasers in earnest in the late 1990s as an element of its fiber-optic telecom business. The firm scooped up some of the technical talent that had created the optical amplifiers and other components that made long-distance lines cheap: scientists who had previously worked for Bellcore and AT&T Bell Labs during those labs' heyday.

When the telecom boom went bust in 2001, Corning scrambled to find another business that needed semiconductor lasers. "We were looking for an opportunity to create a half-billion-dollar-a-year business," says Mark A. Newhouse, senior vice president for business development at Corning.

Big business tends to blossom around new wavelengths of lasers. Light with a wavelength of 620 to 660 nanometers is red; 450 to 480 is blue. Any company that wanted to make a laser-based projector would need green light with a wavelength near 520nm. A potential customer asked Corning to build a green semiconductor laser for a microprojector. "At the time, we were not convinced about the application," concedes Newhouse. "This was before video iPods, so the spread of video wasn't as obvious." But Corning believed that a new laser color could catalyze big business, so it plunged ahead.

That was in early 2003. That initial customer dropped out of the business, but Corning carried on with its green-laser research. "Nature is fickle and makes certain wavelengths easier than others," Newhouse notes.

Here was the problem: Pump certain compound semiconductors with electrons and they will spit back photons that travel in waves of a certain length. An exotic sandwich of semiconductors--some combination of aluminum, gallium, indium and nitrogen--will emit green light. But so far those designs consume far too many electrons, making them grossly inefficient for commercial devices. By contrast, a commercial red laser has a conversion efficiency between 20% and 40%.

That pushed Corning to make a so-called "synthetic" green laser instead. The trick in this case is to shoot infrared laser light (a wavelength of 1060nm) through a frequency-doubling crystal that takes two photons of infrared light and combines them to create a single photon of green light (with a wavelength of 530nm).

By 2006 Corning scientists were showing off their synthetic green lasers in the lab. Making them viable for commercial products, however, turned out to be a Herculean task. Since tiny lasers would be embedded in mobile devices, Corning had to ensure they would work when jiggled, heated up or chilled.

Another challenge: getting the lasers to turn off and on with exquisite precision. The kinds of projection devices that would use Corning's components switch red-blue-green lasers off and on 100 million times per second (100 megahertz). Telecommunications lasers switch faster--at up to 1 gigahertz. But that light does not travel through a doubling crystal or come out of a device that gets dropped into a purse and left in a hot car.

Corning spent another three years refining its green lasers. The development effort has absorbed tens of millions of dollars, says Newhouse. "Keeping a laser fab is not inexpensive," he says. Competitors are afoot: A few high-end synthetic green lasers exist. Germany's Osram is close to finishing its own version of a synthetic green laser intended for mass production.

Meanwhile, with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a handful of researchers are trying to build "native" semiconductor lasers that will spit out green light without the help of a doubling crystal. "Over the long term I believe green lasers will be possible to make. The question is how soon they will reach high enough powers for this kind of application," says Newhouse. Corning can make a 1-milliwatt native green laser, he says. (Its synthetic green laser pumps out 60 milliwatts of light.) Industry would like 100-milliwatt devices.

Demand for these devices is expected to be voracious. Market research company Insight Media predicts sales of embedded tiny projectors (i.e., small enough for a cell phone) could be $1.1 billion by 2012. Stand-alone "pico projectors" that plug into a laptop may hit $2.5 billion, notes Insight President Christopher Chinnock. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January a half-dozen companies, including cell phone and laptop makers, showed off gadgets with embedded projectors. In April Samsung said it was shipping a mobile phone with an embedded projector to customers in Korea. (That phone uses ti's DLP projection technique.) Nokia and Motorola have designs in the works, too.

Microvision in Redmond, Wash. is putting Corning's green laser into its microprojector "display engine," which it aims to sell for a few hundred dollars to gadgetmakers.

"How many times are you looking at the information on your cell phone and you say, 'If I could have a larger screen this would be so much more enjoyable'?" asks Microvision Chief Alexander Tokman.

Tokman rattles off the specs of Microvision's widget, which he says will be shipping by late summer. It will measure 5 cubic centimeters, the volume of a teaspoon. Its power draw is modest, making it possible for a device the size of a smart phone to project a 90-minute movie on one battery charge. The picture it displays is bright and clear, casting a crisp 1-foot-diameter image on a wall 1 foot away and an equally sharp 6-foot-diameter image on a wall 6 feet away. Once Microvision is making large volumes of its component, Tokman believes, the devices will cost equipment makers $100 apiece. Carriers might even choose to subsidize that expense to spur consumers to spend more on movies and photos, he says.

Microvision, which went public in 1996, has had a roller-coaster history of promising sci-fi-like devices--such as head-mounted displays--that it has had trouble delivering. Still, the number of companies scrambling to hit the green button suggests that this trend has a bright future.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0608/038-innovation-lasers-breakthroughs-cell-phones-into-projectors.html

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Confidence Game

Elizabeth Corcoran, 05.06.09, 06:00 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated May 25, 2009

George Akerlof believes consumers' confidence plays a tricky role in moving the economy.

American consumers, it seems, began feeling more confident about the economy in early April. That raises a multibillion-dollar question: If our confidence in the economy continues to grow, do we need the federal government to stimulate us with $787 billion? Won't the market heal itself?

Ignoring the economic role of fickle consumer confidence helped get us into our economic mess, contend economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. And so if we are to get out of it, we need to take the economic models out of the exclusive realm of economists and add a healthy dose of psychology.

"You have to have the right structure, and you have to have modeled the markets right," notes Akerlof, who coauthored with Shiller the recently published book Animal Spirits. "If you leave something out [of the model] that's important, then there will be errors."

Mainstream economic models assume that consumers are "rational" actors. That's not good enough, retort Akerlof and Shiller. Irrational choices frequently rule: Confidence, outright lies and the stories we tell about past decisions all play big roles in the choices we make.

Putting psychological components into economic models, however, amounts to an insurrection in the ranks of the dismal scientists. Akerlof, 68, is an unlikely rabble-rouser. He is soft-spoken, with a spare frame--a legacy of a sickly childhood--and a distractingly cluttered office. Even so, his shadow looms big among economists. Akerlof was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2001 and has served as president of the American Economics Association. His wife of 30 years is Janet Yellen, formerly head of the Council of Economic Advisors and now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. (The two share common economic perspectives and have collaborated on papers. That means Akerlof shies away from questions on government policy.)

Last autumn, as the financial markets began to melt, Akerlof and Shiller rushed to finish Animal Spirits, which they had decided to write in 2003. For 15 years the pair have been running workshops on "behavioral" macroeconomics. "Science has to proceed from observation," notes Shiller, a Yale professor. Such choices weren't exceptions to the rule but fundamental patterns.

John Maynard Keynes coined the term "animal spirits" to describe irrational choices in his now canonical General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. That part of his work got short shrift, however, as economists employed exotic mathematics to add a whiff of scientific rigor to their work. By the 1970s it was accepted wisdom that computers could model the economy and governments could fine-tune demand.

That doesn't mean that Akerlof wants to lessen economists' reliance on math. Quite the contrary: He complains that the math most economists wield is not particularly sophisticated. When he and Shiller wrote Animal Spirits, however, they left out the math in hopes of wooing as broad a readership as possible. Lurking behind the embrace of more sociology is a twist on one of the backbone formulas of macroeconomics: the demand function that describes what goes into determining how much of a good people want (starting with the price).

As a graduate student at MIT in the early 1960s, Akerlof saw Robert Solow galvanize economics by adding a role for technological change to a different equation, the one that explains growth. (Solow would get a Nobel for that work in 1987.) In 2001 Akerlof won his own piece of a Nobel for describing asymmetric markets, those whose players do not have the same information. What fascinated him most, however, was involuntary unemployment, or why the market fails to provide a job for everyone who wants one and who is willing to cut his wage low enough.

In the mid-1990s Akerlof and Shiller began running workshops to ask such fundamental questions as why unemployment exists and what causes economic depressions. The pair suspected that the most widely used models omitted factors as critical as Solow's technological change. Eventually they distilled a halfdozen contributing factors to what they, like Keynes, called animal spirits. These include consumers' confidence, fraud, fairness, delusions about the value of money and the stories that people tell about how the economy works.

Of these, "confidence" is both the most fundamental and the trickiest to evaluate. Economists have only partially captured what's meant by confidence, or trust, says Akerlof. A classical economist, for instance, would suggest that confidence is rational--a reflection of the idea that people use the information at hand to make a prediction about what will happen.

Instead, Akerlof and Shiller argued that high levels of confidence warp judgment: When consumers feel supremely confident, they suspend disbelief and invest with gusto. They believe stocks are sure to provide outsize returns over time, that houses will become more valuable every year and that some magical investors can make double-digit returns year after year. There's a multiplicative factor, too: More trust begets more economic activity. A strongly confident atmosphere also brings out the scam artists. The success of fraudsters like Madoff is a symptom of consumers' overconfidence, Akerlof says.

A big slide in confidence, on the other hand, has a disproportionately powerful negative affect. Diminished trust freezes markets. It can consequently dilute the effectiveness of classic stimulus tools that the government uses to spur spending.

The monthly Reuters/University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment, the best-known measure of "confidence," rose to 61.9 in April from 56.3 in February. That rise suggests confidence is building--but Akerlof isn't expecting a torrent of investing anytime soon. People's sense of history--the stories that they tell about past economic events--also strongly influences the decisions they make. "A major crisis will damage confidence, and the effects can persist for decades," suggests Shiller. Behind the rhetoric of Animal Spirits, consequently, is the skeleton of a mathematical model that includes distinct elements such as confidence. Accurately calculating those elements, however, is tricky.

Economists who neglected to include the confounding influence of confidence and scam artists and such in their models were caught off guard by the self-destructiveness of the markets. Alan Greenspan wrongly figured that the markets would police themselves. There's no way they will do that, says Akerlof. A capitalist economy doesn't just produce what people want (subject to firms making a profit), he says; such an economy produces "what people think they want." If people want magic fix-it pills, some entrepreneur will whip them up--unless regulators step in and spot the fraud.

The generic prescription for an overconfident era that Akerlof and Shiller offer includes a big role for someone--likely the government--to rope in overzealous economic actors and cheats. "When we're overconfident, we're prone to buying snake oil," Akerlof says. "And so you need consumer protection."

Akerlof parries questions about whether government regulators can be smart enough, diligent enough and honest enough to watch consumers' backs. Although increased regulation has a cost, so too does fraud, he says. Much of our life is regulated. "Capitalism works because within the market there are all kinds of regulations," Akerlof says.

Can the Internet play a role here? After all, the watchword among many technologists is "transparency." Entrepreneurs boast that they can build organizations that show consumers exactly how decisions are made--and so give consumers ways to monitor activities far more closely than ever before.

Case in point: a fledgling online trading site called Kaching, whose backers include Silicon Valley heavyweights Andrew Rachleff of Benchmark Capital and Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape Communications. In Kaching, stock investors agree to publish online all their trades and the research behind their decisions. Fans can sign up to ape the trades of investors who impress them.

Akerlof and Shiller aren't ready to let the Internet provide all the checks on the system. "My whole life I've worked on the economics of how people should be able to get a job," Akerlof says. "Having a job is often the chief difference between being happy and not being happy. So getting the macroeconomic model right is really important."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0525/020-opinions-economy-akerlof-ideas-opinions.html

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