Is cracked silicon the future for chips?
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Blog: At a recent conference, AmberWave Systems, which specializes in semiconductor substructures, says you need to crack silicon to pile stuff on it.
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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.
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Let's gets pixelated Intel R&amp;D Day Your digital camera is more powerful than you think. Using the basic concepts of digital photography, Intel researchers are reinventing the art of silicon lithography â the technique used to etch circuit patterns onto PC microprocessors.â¦
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Intel co-founder Gordon Moore&#39;s famous law will be re-examined again next week, as Intel shifts away from pure speed to the more efficient utilization of silicon.
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Korean chipmaker expects global sales will halve next year; sales growth could be in single digit. SEOUL  - Growth in global semiconductor sales will probably halve next year and memory chip sales
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Chipmakers are again investing heavily to avoid the mistakes of the 1990s. But can they compete with overseas rivals and avoid a glut?
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Scientists have developed an alloy they say can be used to create memory chips more than 500 times as fast as todayÂs flash chips.
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Upcoming chips will lead to relatively inexpensive hardware, company says.
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Companies will use strained silicon to boost transistor speed.
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Chips have become so tiny that atomic-level defects cause serious problems.
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Author of principle that says the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years says it won't last.
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Is the chip giant bargain-shopping or just wasting money?
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Intel Developer Forum this week will zero in on upcoming chips. Areas for longer-term growth aren't quite so clear.
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers from Intel and the University of California at Santa Barbara have found a way to build low-cost "laser chips" that could eventually shuttle data around PCs at much higher speeds than today's copper wire interconnects. The researchers combined the properties of a compound semiconductor material called indium phosphide, which emits light constantly, and silicon, which can be used to amplify and direct that light. They sandwiched the materials together to create a single device that can be manufactured using standard chip-making techniques. The breakthrough, announced Monday, is significant because it could help the interconnect technologies that carry data between components in PCs and servers to keep pace with the rapid advances in processing power of the chips themselves, the researchers said. "This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical 'data pipes' inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's Photonics Technology Lab, in a statement. The work may be several years away from commercialization, but the researchers expect eventually to be able to put dozens or even hundreds of lasers on a single chip, they said. Indium phosphide is already widely used to make lasers for fiber optic networks, but the cost of assembling and aligning the lasers makes them too expensive for the high-volume PC business. Silicon, on the other hand, can amplify and control light and could be used more affordably, but it is not an efficient generator of light itself. The researchers figured out a way to combine the two materials to build a "hybrid silicon laser" that can be manufactured using Intel's standard manufacturing techniques, keeping costs relatively low. To make the silicon laser they created a thin oxide layer roughly 25 atoms thick on the surface of each material. They then heated the oxide and pressed the two layers together, forming a single chip with a "glass glue" between them. Applying a voltage to the device generates light from the indium phosphide, which passes through the joining layer to be guided and controlled by the silicon. The laser light can send data between computer components at extremely high speed. This can be done using a "silicon optical modulator," which effectively turns the laser beam on and off at very high speeds to represent the 1s and 0s of computer code. Intel has already demonstrated a silicon modulator that can transmit data at up to 10Gb per second. Figuring out how to make the hybrid silicon laser was the last big barrier to using silicon-based optical devices in computers and data centers, the researchers said.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA -- Intel is drawing the curtain on some of its future research projects to continue making transistors smaller, faster, and less power-hungry out as far as 2020.
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. - Everywhere you look at the Fall Processor Forum, there&#39;s another chip with more than one core. At this annual industry conference where chip companies discuss the designs they&#39;re working
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Developments in silicon carbide wafers may lead to a new world of fast, robust electronics.