Solid-state lighting is currently based on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and phosphors. Solid-state lighting based on lasers would offer significant advantages including high potential efficiencies at high current densities. Light emitted from lasers, however, has a much narrower spectral linewidth than light emitted from LEDs or phosphors. Therefore it is a common belief that white light produced by a set of lasers of different colors would not be of high enough quality for general illumination. We tested this belief experimentally, and found the opposite to be true. This result paves the way for the use of lasers in solid-state lighting.

Sensors using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond are a promising tool for small-volume nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, but the limited sensitivity remains a challenge. Here we show nearly two orders of magnitude improvement in concentration sensitivity over previous nitrogen-vacancy and picoliter NMR studies. We demonstrate NMR spectroscopy of picoliter-volume solutions using a nanostructured diamond chip with dense, high-aspect-ratio nanogratings, enhancing the surface area by 15 times. The nanograting sidewalls are doped with nitrogen-vacancies located a few nanometers from the diamond surface to detect the NMR spectrum of roughly 1 pl of fluid lying within adjacent nanograting grooves. We perform 1H and 19F nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy at room temperature in magnetic fields below 50 mT. Using a solution of CsF in glycerol, we determine that 4 ± 2 × 1012 19F spins in a 1 pl volume can be detected with a signal-to-noise ratio of 3 in 1 s of integration.

The linear systems optical resolution limit is a dense grating pattern at a lambda/2 pitch or a critical dimension (resolution) of lambda/4. However, conventional microscopy provides a (Rayleigh) resolution of only ~ 0.6lambda/NA, approaching lambda/1.67 as NA ?lambda1. A synthetic aperture approach to reaching the lambda/4 linear-systems limit, extending previous developments in imaginginterferometric microscopy, is presented. Resolution of non-periodic 180-nm features using 633-nm illumination (lambda/3.52) and of a 170-nm grating (lambda/3.72) is demonstrated. These results are achieved with a 0.4-NA optical system and retain the working distance, field-of-view, and depth-of-field advantages of low-NA systems while approaching ultimate resolution limits.

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Structured illumination applied to imaging interferometric microscopy (IIM) allows extension of the resolution limit of low numerical aperture objective lenses to ultimate linear systems limits (

We report on the optical refrigeration of ytterbium doped silica glass by >40 K starting at room temperature, which represents more than a two-fold improvement over the previous state-of-the-art. A spectroscopic investigation of the steady-state and time-dependent fluorescence was carried out over the temperature range 80 K to 400 K. The calculated minimum achievable temperature for our Yb3+ doped silica sample is ≈150 K, implying the potential for utilizing ytterbium doped silica for solid-state optical refrigeration below temperatures commonly achieved by standard Peltier devices.

In recent years, an increasing number of mobile electronic products such as mobile communicators, combining the functions of a mobile phone and a PDA are beginning to emerge. These devices are highly miniaturized and yet provide a variety of functions at ever higher speeds. Additionally, the product cycle time is getting faster, requiring short design and production cycles at ever lower cost. These trends are posing great set of challenges for the microelectronics and packaging and assembly industry. There seem to be two approaches to solve these challenges-system-in-package (SIP) by stacking of packaged integrated circuits (ICs) or system-on-package (SOP) by stacking of packages with embedded active and passive components. The buried components in SOP require significantly less space in z direction, thereby allowing the formation of three-dimensional (3-D) stackable packages. In this paper, two approaches for stacking SOPs were presented, the so-called chip-in-polymer (CIP) technology and duromer molded interconnect device (MID)/WLP technology.Index Terms-Embedded passives, modular systems, molded interconnect device (MID), packaging, system-on-package (SOP).

Imaging interferometric microscopy (IIM) is a synthetic aperture imaging approach providing resolution to the transmission medium (refractive index n) linear systems limit extending to greater, similarlambda/4n using only low-numerical-aperture (low-NA) optics. IIM uses off-axis illumination to access high spatial frequencies along with interferometric reintroduction of a zero-order reference beam on the low-NA side of the optical system. For a thin object normal to the optical axis, the frequency space limit is [(1+NA)n/lambda], while tilting the object plane allows collection of diffraction information up to the material transmission bandpass-limited spatial frequency of 2n/lambda. Tilting transforms the spatial frequencies; the algorithm to reset to the correct image frequencies is described. IIM involves combining multiple subimages; the image reconstruction procedures are discussed. A mean-square-error metric is introduced. For binary objects, sigmoidal filtering of the image provides significant resolution improvement.