Spintronics or Just Spin?
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Is NVE's technology a nanomaker or a nanofaker?
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Materials that could allow levitating trains and ultra powerful computers to become commonplace are coming of age
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. has taken a large stride in its race with Intel Corp. to make faster, smaller chips by building silicon transistors from a rare combination of metals. Both companies announced in January that they had discovered theÂ special materials needed to build "high-k metal gate" transistors. The special materials are much better insulators than standard silicon dioxide, a crucial trait as chip designers struggle to fit more and more transistors on each microprocessor, since electricity tends to leak from the closely-packed wires, making them hot and inefficient. Until now, neither company had announced the ingredients of this new mix of materials. But IBM researchers said on Monday they had used their Blue Gene supercomputer to model 50 combinations of hafnium dioxide and basic silicon. The company plans to build chips based on the new mixture in 2008. The new material looked good in theory, but IBM engineers had to create simulations of different mixtures to avoid any surprises when they added it to semiconductor production lines, said Alessandro Curioni, a supercomputing expert at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Curioni was one of three authors who published this research in a paper published in the January edition of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. The team used new algorithms and a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 4,096 processors to crunch the numbers. The program took about five days to run a simulation for each combination of ingredients, modeling the interaction between individual particles for the 600 atoms in every model. If the researchers had used a typical notebook PC, the 250-day job would have taken them 700 years, he said. Despite IBM's advance, Intel insists it is on track to reach markets first with chips using its own type of "high-k metal gate" transistors. Intel plans to use the technology in a family of 45-nanometer architecture chips scheduled for launch later in 2007, the company said. Â
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Developments in silicon carbide wafers may lead to a new world of fast, robust electronics.
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No 'beaming up' was involved Researchers at the University of Singapore have demonstrated that it is possible to "teleport" information from one so-called quantum dot to another.â¦
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Liberal bias versus right-wing conspiracy is a wonderful distraction. There is evidence enough on both sides. How can opposite claims be true? Confront a physicist with evidence supporting contradictory hypotheses and she will go looking for a more basic cause. Let's try that.
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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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There may not be a lot of agreement among the worldâs religions on exactly what constitutes humans âplaying God,â but you never hear a preacher or rabbi suggesting such behavior is wise or laudable. So you would think they might have a lot to say about nanotechnology.
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Vector supercomputers, the original giant machines for massive computing tasks, have largely been replaced in recent years by cheaper cluster models. But the vector's maker and many researchers want a comeback.  By Nancy Gohring.
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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.    Devices built with the rugged material would not require cooling and other protections that add size, weight and cost to traditional silicon electronics in power systems, jet engines, rockets, wireless transmitters and other equipment exposed to harsh environments...
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Companies are developing MRAM, which could be used in portable electronic devices.
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Earth's magnetic field has flipped many times over the last billion years. But only recently have scientists developed computer models to reveal how these reversals occur.
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Square nanoscale rings could be the key to reliably manufacturing high-capacity magnetic memory chips.
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The existence of a new electronic state in superconductors, materials that can carry an electric current without resistance, has been confirmed experimentally according to research to be published in the 12 November 2004 issue of the journal Science by a
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The fundamental memory component of a quantum computer has been built for the first time using a string of atoms. This could offer a more reliable way to build a working quantum computer than other techniques, suggest researchers.
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A new scheme allows individual electrons to serve as the quantum bits that store and process computer information.
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Did you think notebooks were all about components?  Think again.  The notebook market now has everything to do with design.