Blog topic: Engineering

It only makes sense that if you were making solar cells or computer chips that you would choose the best materials for those tasks. It's a no-brainer, right? The problem is that the best materials might be very expensive to use. 

Such has been the case with gallium arsenide, but this may be changing.

Bruce Clemens and Garrett Hayes have developed a new way of making chips from gallium arsenide that brings down the cost considerably. They created a video that describes a new manufacturing process, and they have preserved that video in the Stanford Digital Repository for you to download and watch!

Imagine being able to search for video content not by keyword, but by using other visual information, like a still image, a screenshot or a single frame from another video. As the ubiquity of images and video in our culture increases, it is not surprising how useful this kind of functionality could be. 

Every year Brian Sedar, Faculty Coach, and Darryl Goodson, Industry Coach, borrow the set of the current RSMeans Construction Cost Estimation Books from the Terman Engineering Library for several long weekends during winter quarter.  We wondered about the intense interest in these reference volumes and found out that the books are taking a winter vacation in Nevada with a student team from the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.