Following my retirement, we have closed our company for new business.

Please do not hesitate to contact me directly, our email portal remains open and I would be delighted to hear from you and provide ongoing support or advice.

Richard Thomson

support@rta-instruments.com

Companies represented up to the end of December 2023. Please now contact them directly.

k-Space Associates, Inc.
Phone: +1 (734) 426-7977
requestinfo@k-space.com
https://www.k-space.com

STAIB INSTRUMENTS GmbH
Phone: +49 8761 76 24 0
sales@staibinstruments.com
https://www.staibinstruments.com/

Monday, 29 February 2016

Totally bananas

Squeeze the banana to log into this office Wi-Fi ... Ping ping ping ping ping ping ping – banana node

Saturday, 27 February 2016

Friday, 26 February 2016

Serious cheating

World's Fastest Rubik's Cube Solving Robot - Now Official Record is 0.900 Seconds

Thursday, 25 February 2016

Pratchettium?

Discworld fans stake claim to element 117, 'Octarine', surely, Pratchett petition proposes

Wednesday, 24 February 2016

Monday, 22 February 2016

EUV improves but ...

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is making slow progress, re-kindling hopes it could be ready for production use in the 7nm node.

Wednesday, 17 February 2016

Surface Analysis Meets Microanalysis

Fully integrated EDS Option for the ESCALAB Thermo Scientific 250Xi now available, please contact us for further information.

Monday, 15 February 2016

Friday, 12 February 2016

In Brief

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show included everything from manned drones and Segway robots to personalised coffee foam imprinters. Apparently 700,000 to 1 million unmanned aircraft were expected to be given as gifts in the United States last Christmas. Photo-excited quantum dots have been used in experiments to kill drug resistant bacteria. Congratulations to Curtis Cooper for discovering the world largest prime number, a mere 22, 338, 618 digits.

Wednesday, 10 February 2016

Large area graphene

The MBE group at The University of Nottingham has successfully produced graphene on large substrate areas by the use of extremely high growth temperatures and SiC substrates. This is a promising approach to allow large scale integration of the new devices being explored using graphene.

Monday, 8 February 2016

Less big spender

The semiconductor industry spent a record $56.4 billion on research and development in 2015, though growth in this spending slowed according to industry analysts IC Insights. Global chip sales came in at about $353.6 billion last year with R&D spending around $56.4 billion. Market leader Intel accounted for 22% of all semiconductor industry R&D spending in 2015. However Intel’s R&D expenditure grew 5% in 2015, well below its 13% average increase per year since 2010.

Friday, 5 February 2016

Too good to be true?

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all the twenty plus judges in the Sanhedrin, then he or she was acquitted. The legislators had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicated the presence of a systemic error even if the nature of the judicial error was not known. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely something had been missed and a mistake was the end result. This “paradox of unanimity" has been explored with probabilistic mathematical analyses in several real world situations. It turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing can be small, so our confidence in unanimity can be ill-founded.

Wednesday, 3 February 2016

What makes us humans different from other animals?

Perhaps it our ability to make fire, grow food or practice religion. I propose that it is also our desire and need to create rubbish. The earth and the sea are filling up with it. We are currently surrounding the planet with a blanket of the stuff. Some even claim that the internet is full of it. Our actions suggest that, physically and mentally, we just seem to want more of it. Is it time to instill some extra Womble DNA into homo sapiens?

Monday, 1 February 2016