STMicroelectronics Presents Important Research Findings on MEMS
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GENEVA, Sept. 15  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- STMicroelectronics , a leading supplier of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) devices and technology, has published a new issue of the ST Journal of Research focusing on MEMS.
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A dense thin film of carbon nanotubes is transparent, electrically conductive and flexible -- key properties for making flexible displays.
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Using electric fields to alter the electrical properties of a carbon nanotube on the fly makes for a key nanoscale electronic component.
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A new type of memory could soon be available to device makers.
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MIT researchers have developed a new ultralow-voltage chip that could improve the energy efficiency of low-power electronics tenfold.
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Nanowires put more power in smaller packages, researcher reports.
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A detector built from nanowire transistors can identify individual virus particles in real time in unpurified samples.
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Shared research produces fast, tiny memory ideal for consumer devices.
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Intel have announced that they&#39;ve produced a fully functioning memory chip using 35 nanometer transistors. The breakthrough, etching components that are 30% smaller than current processes, should be delivering
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GENEVA, Dec. 14  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics is celebrating ten years at the forefront of digital radio technology.
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One nanotechnology researcher said supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away."If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years," said Michael Zaiser, a professor and researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. "The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close -- 10 years, maybe 15."Zaiser's research into nanowires should help move that timeline along.For the last five years, he has been studying how tiny wires -- 1,000 times thinner than a human hair -- behave when manipulated. He explained that each such miniscule wire tends to behave differently when put under the same amount of pressure. Therefore, it has been impossible to line them up close to each other in tiny microprocessors in a production atmosphere.Zaiser said he's now figured out how to make the wires behave uniformly. He separates the interior material of the wire into distinct groups so the wire can't react as a whole. That makes it much easier to control. "It's like crowd control," he added. "If they can all go one way, you have a big mess."These nanowires will go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, cell phones, or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.Shrinking down the microprocessors is a big step toward shrinking down computers.Zaiser was quick to point out that his nanowire discovery won't immediately lead to the development of supercomputers that can fit in the palm of a hand or even shrink down to the size of a book of matches. In addition to smaller microprocessors, engineers will need to deal with thermal fluctuations that erupt at that size.But he does humbly admit that taming nanowires is a big step toward the goal of small supercomputers."This will enable chips to become much smaller," he said. "Think 10 years back. You could hold [a cell phone] the size of a telephone receiver and it didn't work so well. Today, you can fit what is a powerful computer onto a small device."Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif., said that with advances like nanowire technology continuing to come along, Zaiser's predictions for tiny supercomputers may not be so far off. And that will be a huge step for the industry, considering that not so long ago supercomputers filled up enormous rooms or even entire buildings."Actually, what he's saying is not crazy," said King. "The wire problem was an important one. Solving that particular issue, one so fundamental, needed to be done. If he can solve that, a lot of people, a lot of companies, will appreciate that. The industry is aligning in a direction where we're going to be seeing continuing improvements and developments."Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz., said he definitely can see palm-size supercomputers coming out within 10 to 15 years, but he thinks they'll be based on the basic silicon technology used today. He added that the next generation of tiny supercomputers -- made with carbon nanotubes and nanowires -- may be as far off as another 30 to 40 years, though."You know, everybody says we'll get to a physical limit but every time we think we're going to hit it, we overcome it," said McGregor. "They end up being speed bumps instead of road blocks."King added that over the last 10 or 20 years, technology advancements have put smaller and more powerful computers into the hands of children and researchers alike. That leads him to believe that the shrinking of supercomputers is just ahead of us."We're at the beginning of some very exciting times in supercomputing," he said.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Square nanoscale rings could be the key to reliably manufacturing high-capacity magnetic memory chips.
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(Source: Seagate)  This paper will help you better understand the significance of this inflection point, as well as the specific challenges presented by parallel SCSI and the corresponding advantages of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS).
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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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Intel and STMicroelectronics have developed a new type of PCM (phase-change memory) chip that doubles the memory density over previous versions, giving a boost to an emerging technology that could one day replace the flash memory chips widely used in portable devices.The technology is still experimental, but the companies marked another step in its evolution, delivering samples of the new chips to device makers. Proponents say that PCM is more reliable than flash memory, and that it will offer faster data transfer speeds and be more durable.PCM uses a glass-like material that can change from an amorphous, or gaseous, state to a crystalline state as its atoms are rearranged. The state of the material corresponds to the 1s and 0s in computing, allowing it to be used to store data.As a result of their work, Intel and STMicro said the glass-like material can now be turned into four states instead of two, allowing it to retain twice the amount of data. The material can also exist in liquid and semi-liquid states.The advances from Intel and STMicro have made the chips smaller and more power-efficient, said Guilio Casagrande, director of advanced research and development at STMicro.Intel and STMicro presented their new developments on Wednesday at the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco.Numerous other companies have also been working on PCM, also known as PRAM, including IBM, Qimonda, Macronix, Infineon and Samsung.Phase-change memory has existed since the 1960s, but the cost of the technology and the energy required to drive change between one state and another was not competitive compared to other memory technologies like RAM and flash, said Cliff Smith, technology initiatives manager of Intel&#39;s flash group.PCM has the potential to give fast read and write speeds, while the existing NOR flash type is slow to write and NAND flash is slow to read, Casagrande said. PCM could eventually replace existing memory technologies because of its power efficiency and its ability to reduce data leaks, Casagrande said.Intel and STMicroelectronics signed a contract to develop PCM in 2003 and are in the process of establishing a flash-memory joint venture called Numonyx, due to launch by March 28. STMicro will hold a 48.6 percent stake of Numonyx, with Intel retaining 45.1 percent. The investment company Francisco Partners is also taking part.Numonyx will manufacture existing flash memory types until PCM is ready for market, Smith said. He expects PCM to appear first in devices such as cell phones in two to three years. Its use will eventually overtake that of DRAM, NOR, and NAND flash, he said.
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Researchers have made analog electronics out of carbon nanotubes.
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Anisotropy--there's a word you don't hear everyday. It's the focus of IBM research published this week that could result in incredibly tiny computers.