Digital BW, The Print

Actually the US Department of defense was working with industry in the 
late 60's to develop the gallium arsenate technology (amoung others). It 
was one technology that showed promise in developing faster super 
computers. The issue with it is it is a power hog - and heat producer. 
It is used in many RF applications and it is the only technology that 
can support very high bandwidth (>= GHz) analogue to digital converters. 

Probably the best thing that can be said about it is that through almost 
40 years of development there have been a huge number of spin off 
technologies that are much better.

My understanding is the Foveon chip uses a quantum effects of silicon to 
provide filtering of photons so that the sensors can actually be stacked 
and the red photon ( I don't remember which is the top level so it may 
be green or blue) passes right through the sensor for the other photons 
on the way to its sensor.

Since the RGB sensors are stacked this camera may be one digital where 
B&W conversion from RGB makes sense.

Truman

Truman

Austin Franklin wrote:

> Claude,
>
> > Carver Mead, it's founder created the gallium arsenide family of
> > chips, VLSI,
> > which makes ALL modern computers possible...
>
> All?  Possible?  That's simply not true.  There are no gallium arsenide
> computer chips in %99.9999999 of modern computers, these chips (processor,
> memory, chipsets etc.) are silicon based.  (for those that don't know VLSI
> means is Very Large Scale Integration...basically a lot of transistors
> packed together in one package...and it's considered arcane technology
> today, as today's computer chips are hundreds of millions of gates,
> sometimes called ULSI, and most are considered ASICs today, Application
> Specific IC, such as your video controller and motherboard chip set).  
> Also,
> VLSI doesn't mean it *has* to use GaAs, GaAs is simply one of many 
> processes
> that was used to make a VLSI IC, or other semi-conductors.
>