Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/293694
April 2014 • The PCB Design Magazine 11 realtimewith.com CliCk To View Video Interview now nearing retirement from his "day job," but not from PCB design, veteran instructor rick hartley waxes philosophical about the future of design and design education. Hartley on the Future of PCB Design Education by Real Time with... The Design Forum imagine that you are in a meeting with co- workers. You pull out your cell phone to show a presentation or a video on YouTube. But you don't use the tiny screen; your phone projects a bright, clear image onto a wall or a big screen. such a technology may be on its way, thanks to a new light-bending silicon chip developed by researchers at Caltech. The chip was developed by Ali hajimiri, Thomas g. Myers Professor of electrical engineering, and re- searchers in his laboratory. The results were presented at the Optical Fiber Communication conference in san Francisco on March 10. Traditional projectors pass a beam of light through a tiny image, using lenses to map each point of the small picture to corresponding, yet expanded, points on a large screen. The Caltech chip eliminates the need for bulky and expensive lenses and bulbs and instead uses an integrated optical phased array to project the image elec- tronically with only a single laser diode as light source and no mechanically moving parts. hajimiri and his colleagues were able to by- pass traditional optics by manipulating the co- herence of light, a property that allows the re- searchers to "bend" the light waves on the sur- face of the chip without lenses or the use of any mechanical movement. if two waves are co- herent in the direction of prop- agation, the waves combine, resulting in one wave, a beam with twice the amplitude and four times the energy as the ini- tial wave, moving in the direc- tion of the coherent waves. Bending Light with a Tiny Chip