SPIE Professional, October 2008 Issue

The October issue of SPIE Professional magazineis now available online.

SPIE Professional magazine

This issue of SPIE Professionalmagazine includes articles about several SPIE conferences that advance green technologies, including the upcoming Innovation Summit; articles about the state of the photo-lithography business; and two pieces on what SPIE constituents are doing to train future optical engineers.

The cover article is about the entrepreneurial climate in Europe and was written by Jose Salcedo, CEO of Multiwave Photonics in Portugal.

The full text of articles in the SPIE member quarterly is available only through an SPIE member login. However, one article in each issue is designated as open access. This issue’s open access article is by ASML chief scientist Bill Arnold who writes about his optimism about the future of semiconductor manufacturing. Arnold believes that lithography has adapted itself to scaling requirements over the years and that future fabs will remain “litho friendly. New technologies won’t easily displace optical lithography as a driver for Moore’s Law, he says.

The magazine also has articles about virtual autopsy, remote sensing, telecom, the Photonics Academy in Wales, new photonics societies in Poland and Hong Kong, and SPIE members in the news.

Green Tools

The April 2008 issue of SPIE Professional and a May 26 article in The Washington Post describe some high-tech ways that people can conserve energy.

Beth Kelley’s article in SPIE Professional puts the spotlight on a number of products and devices that use optical technologies to help the environmentally and tech-savvy consumer monitor and save energy. These green tools include the Ambient Orb, Ewgeco and Wattson to monitor how much electricity you are using, electrochromic windows, and hybrid solar chargers for small electronic devices.

The Washington Post story, which was picked up by a number of other newspapers, talks about some of these devices as well as the “Prius effect,” a trend among owners of Toyota’s hybrid car to have friendly rivalries and competitions for better mileage. The elaborate monitors on the Prius dashboard seem to be making Prius drivers more conscious about energy conservation and changing their driving habits in surprising ways.