Silicon: It's worth a billion an acre
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Fashions come and go, but some of the equations in the chip business never change, says Gordon Moore.
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Its memory-chip breakthrough could lead to new products.
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The computing technologies to go beyond Moore's Law
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In an advance that could lead to lighter spacecraft and smarter cars, researchers have developed a new technique for producing a high-quality semiconductor that's much more resistant to extreme conditions than the silicon found in most of today's electronics.
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It's a question of keeping up standards. That famous slab in Paris has lost 50 micrograms, so Australian scientists are creating a perfect sphere out of Silicon 28. They even know how many atoms it'll contain.
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(InfoWorld) - Strong chip sales in the Asia Pacific region and the U.S. helped lift global sales to $20.1 billion in the month of July, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). The figure represents an 11.5 percent increase over July, 2005, and is 1.8 percent higher than the $19.8 billion in sales registered in June, according to SIA. The industry association also noted thatÂ falling chip pricesÂ are helping pull down the cost of gadgets for end-users. "For example, the average selling price for a PC declined by approximately 7 percent year-over-year," the SIA noted in its report. Around 40 percent of all chips sold go into computer products. AÂ price warÂ between IntelÂ and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could be a large part of theÂ fall in PC prices. The companies both halved prices on some desktop PC microprocessors, the most expensive PC component, in July. The global chip industry remains on course to set record high sales this year of over $240 billion, the industry group said, thanks to strong growth in the Asia Pacific and the U.S. But the figure the SIA noted isÂ lower than its May forecastÂ calling for $250 billion in chip sales this year. SIA representatives were not available to comment on the apparent full year sales target discrepancy.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Hit $25bn Global chip sales soared to $20.5bn in August, a new monthly record, according to data from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).â¦
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Global semiconductor sales next year are expected to total $215.3 billion, up just 1.2% from this year, according to a forecast released this week by an industry group that tracks global chip sales.
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The company's latest nanotech development could pay dividends over the long term.
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In anticipation of Moore&#39;s Law becoming irrelevant in the next 10 to 20 years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wants funding for research that could lead to a replacement for current silicon technology.The NSF last week requested $20 million from the U.S. government for fiscal 2009 to start the &quot;Science and Engineering Beyond Moore&#39;s Law&quot; effort, which would fund academic research on technologies, including carbon nanotubes, quantum computing, and massively multicore computers, that could improve and replace current transistor technology.Moore&#39;s Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on silicon, and its attendant computational capability, doubles every 18 months.Human and economic progress in the U.S. over the past 20 years has depended on an increasing ability to do information processing and computing, said Michael Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at NSF. &quot;If the current technological basis of that ends, we&#39;ve got to find some way to replace it, or we&#39;re going to stop moving forward.&quot;The traditional way to improve transistor performance is to decrease the thickness of the gate oxide, or insulator that separates one part of the transistor from the other. The looming barrier is that transistors will be shrunk as small as possible for them to still work effectively, after which they may need to be replaced or somehow improved on, Foster said.&quot;In the kind-of near future -- in 8 to 10 years -- we will have reduced that gate oxide thickness to the point where it will no longer act as an effective insulator,&quot; Foster said. &quot;I don&#39;t know of any other proposals to increase the performance of... [current] transistors, which is why we have to look at really radically new structures like transistors based on nanostructures.&quot;Carbon nanotubes could provide a way to create smaller transistors, Foster said. Transistor performance is correlated to transistor size -- the smaller a transistor, the better it performs. &quot;Carbon nanotubes give us the possibility of much smaller transistors than we can make right now,&quot; Foster said.Carbon nanotubes could also be used as interconnect on circuits, Foster said. Nanotubes could be placed one after another on a circuit, though it would require fault-tolerant architectures. That would require new research and improvements on chip architecture as well, Foster said. &quot;We think architecture is going to become an important component of any beyond-Moore&#39;s-Law topic,&quot; Foster said.Looking far ahead, quantum computing could be the next answer to delivering massive computing power, Foster said. Quantum computing uses matter -- atoms and molecules -- to process massive amounts of tasks at supercomputing speeds because basic data units, called qubits, hold both the values 0 and 1 simultaneously and share those values among all qubits. It is based on the laws of quantum mechanics, which look at interaction and behavior of matter on atomic and subatomic -- proton, neutron, and electron -- levels.&quot;The implementations we have so far will, for example, trap single ions at very cold temperatures and use those as qubits. That takes a room full of equipment to make a very small register. We clearly need progress there, but it&#39;s promising,&quot; Foster said.The idea behind quantum computing is that it provides inherent parallelism, so its development requires improvements in parallel programming, in which several computers work on the same program together, Foster said. Parallel programming has been researched since the 1970s, but progress has been slow, Foster said.&quot;We could continue to expand our IT abilities without necessarily expanding the capabilities in any one computer. But we need software research to understand how to coordinate the efforts of not just one or two computers, but thousands or millions of computers,&quot; Foster said. That poses a research problem as scientists have been trying to understand parallel programming for decades and haven&#39;t succeeded yet, Foster said.NSF is already doing research in nanotechnology, software, and architectural ideas that will contribute to the effort to develop chips that will continually improve computing power beyond Moore&#39;s Law.Ultimately, current transistors may be hard to replace, Foster said, so researchers may look to develop better architectures and chip designs that use current transistor technology to maintain the computing capability growth rate.&quot;It&#39;s not out of the question to me that we could build very large chips with thousands of cores on them -- I hesitate to go too much higher than that just because it will sound crazy -- but if we did that... we [could] use those things to get done the computing and information technology that we need to have done,&quot; Foster said.The $20 million budget request is modest compared to research budgets of companies like Intel and IBM. &quot;The funding is intended to help laboratories assist, not compete, with research from the private sector,&quot; Foster said. NSF will seed academic laboratories and industry associations like Semiconductor Research to conduct research, which in turn may work with commercial organizations. The commercial organizations may further invest in the research to drive it into mass production, Foster said.Expectations from the project are modest, Foster said. &quot;It&#39;s very early-stage research. Any expectations we have will probably not be accurate.&quot; However, it could lead to better fault-tolerant techniques to design and operate systems with small components in them, Foster said.
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Semiconductor chips that can manage a good bit of their own upkeep are moving closer to reality.
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A new carbon-based nanoscale material could be used to make ultrafast computers.
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Growth driven by consumer electronics biz World chip sales totalled $247.7bn last year, the US-centric Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said late Friday. Alas that's below the SIA's own full-year sales forecast of $248.8bn, a prediction made only last November.â¦
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New Japanese research into silicon carbide growth could revolutionise the electronics industry. A team of scientists has developed a method of making near-perfect silicon carbide crystals.
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Don't forget to consider a company's ability to obtain silicon wafers.
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By Richard Orange, The Business, London  Feb. 24--It is more than 40 years since Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder  of Intel, first observed that the number of transistors that could be crammed  onto a computer chip doubles roughly every two years.
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Paris - One of the last frontiers of semiconductor technology - environments where electronic devices have to run at high power, in fierce heat or at lethal doses of radiation - may be about to fall.