Supplies of new chip metal hafnium remain untested
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Hafnium was unknown to nearly everyone  but a handful of scientists and engineers until late January,  when Intel Corp.  and IBM  announced their  faster, more efficient microprocessors would be constructed  using the silvery metal.
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Britain, France, and Germany to offer Iran nuclear technology if it ends uranium enrichment efforts. Agence France-Presse reports that Britain, France and Germany are &quot;ready to promise Iran nuclear technology
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Via Technologies is not likely to ship its supersmall&#160;Mobile ITX motherboard, aimed at ultramobile PCs (UMPCs) and other light portable devices, in production volume until next year, company officials said here at the CES show Monday.The company attracted industry attention when it unveiled the board at Computex in Taipei last June, declaring that it would find its way into markets this year.But &quot;manufacturability issues&quot; will likely prevent the board from being used in commercially launched devices this year, according to Alp Sezen, a sales director for Via based in Fremont, California. Via expects to announce the Mobile ITX production schedule at this year&#39;s Computex, and will probably just manage to ship sample boards by the end of the fourth quarter, he said.&quot;It&#39;s normal to take about a year between announcing a board to production,&quot; he said. He acknowledged, however, that ultimately in the case of the Mobile ITX, the time between its unveiling and production is going to be more than 18 months.Like prototypes running last year, current Mobile ITX boards use 1GHZ CZ-M ULV (ultra low voltage processors) and CX700 chip sets. The board measures 7.5 centimeters by 4.5 cm -- smaller than a credit card -- and to get it that small, the spaces between the pins underneath the processor need to be shrunk to 0.5 millimeters from the current 1.0 millimeters in the company&#39;s current Pico ITX board, Sezen said.It&#39;s not easy to do this and ensure more than 90 percent of the boards coming off production lines are error free, Sezen said.Chip packaging technology needs to improve, he added. Via is a fabless chip developer and, on its own, faces difficulties developing new, cost-effective packaging technologies.In a sense, Via is dependent on Intel ramping up volume of new generation, 45-nanometer process chips. As Intel does so, new surface-mount technology for chips will be developed that can also be used to manufacture the Via Mobile ITX boards.Although the Mobile ITX is not likely to appear in UMPCs and other light portable devices until next year, the reduced package chip set incorporated into the board will likely be used in com modules for embedded systems by the end of this year, Sezen said. A manufacturer for these embedded systems is likely to make a public announcement this month, he said.Some would-be makers of new lightweight mobile devices, however, are chomping at the bit to get their hands on the new Via board. The MTube project, a research and development project sponsored by the Taiwan government&#39;s Science and Technology Group (STAG), was showing off a Linux-based, prototype Mobile Internet Device (MID) that incorporates the Mobile ITX board and measures 3.3 by 3.3 by 0.8 inches. It sported a 2.8-inch VGA touch screen and supports full rate video playback.The project wants to spin off from STAG and deliver a commercially available product as soon as it can get its hands on a motherboad with the specs that would make it viable, according to H.T. Kung, the project&#39;s advisor. However, to date, neither Via nor Intel could promise to deliver a commercially usable board within that timeframe, he said.&#160;
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AMD and Infineon are to spend â¬170m ($200m) between them to build a nanotech research facility. According to a Bloomberg report, the R&amp;D centre will be located in Dresden, Germany, probably not far from
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(InfoWorld) - Hynix Semiconductor and STMicroelectronicsÂ plan to start making memory chips on advanced production lines at a $2 billion chip plant in China next week. The project, which was inaugurated in November of 2004, will be one of the most advanced chip facilities in China, producing DRAM (dynamic RAM) as well as NAND flash memory chips on 300-millimeter silicon wafers. Hynix ST Semiconductor, which is the name of the joint venture, was built in Wuxi City, a few hours from Shanghai. The company is just the second in China to start producing chips on 300mm silicon wafers, from which thousands of chips can be made. The 300mm technology isn't easy to import into China due to U.S. export restrictions on machinery with the potential to produce items used by China's military, such as advanced chips used in missile guidance systems. The joint venture company is 67 percent owned by Hynix and 33 percent by STMicro. The companies expect the new plant to feed memory chips to the burgeoning contract PC and consumer electronics makers in China.
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New raw materials are proving a technological leap in packaging. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed new products from potatoes and grain for the packaging, paper, construction and medical ...
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The glass-encased room inside Intel Corp.&#039;s microchip factory here, with its shiny, metallic surfaces and frigid air, is a world away from the blistering sun and brown earth outside. An army of robots suspended from the vast ceiling glide from one refrigerator-sized machine to the next. Their cargo: thousands of 12-inch silicon platters that form the raw material for Intel&#039;s most sophisticated computer microprocessor to date.
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The MSI motherboard we tested is actually the very first working sample of the K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI; in fact, as of right now there are only 4 working nForce4 SLI samples at MSI in Taiwan, two of which happen to be in my hotel room.
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Firm may be facing greater difficulties than previously thought in getting hold of chips to power its high-end PCs.
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Chip maker likely is making way for new products.
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But chip production costs won't fall as much as planned
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Company hasn't said when the device will be available.
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Voters will be asked to cast their ballots on machines whose accuracy and security against fraud have yet to be tested on such a grand scale.
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In a report this week, the U.S. Department of Energy said inventory controls at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were not robust enough, and some computers were never entered into the lab's inventory database.
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Advanced Micro Devices is building a new plant in Germany but still needs outside assistance to meet expected demand.
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In an interview with Reuters this morning, AMD's new senior vice president for technology development, Douglas Grose said that the new high-k-plus-metal-gate (HK+MG) transistor technology IBM unveiled two weeks ago might not be integrated with AMD's manufacturing process in time for its first 45-nm CPUs to be produced in 2008.
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National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday it is still unclear whether Iraq attempted to procure tens of thousands of aluminum tubes for a nuclear-weapons program or a conventional rocket program, despite conclusions by the Senate Intelligence Committee and U.N. investigators that the tubes could not be used in any nuclear program.