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Ray Blanco, The Daily Reckoning June 29, 2015Do you like your iPhone? Today, you are walking with the equivalent of what was supercomputer not too long ago — in your pocket. The foundation for the modern semiconductor industry got its start in the late 1940s and 1950s. Electronics up until then were dependent on vacuum tubes. These weren’t, to say the least, very easy to miniaturize. But we did try to use them. In 1946, the U.S. government built the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) and contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, along...

Self-Healing Circuits for Deep Space by Paul Gilster on March 18, 2013 Computer failures can happen any time, but it’s been so long since I’ve had a hard disk failure that I rarely worry about such problems. Part of my relaxed stance has to do with backups, which I always keep in triplicate, so when I discovered Friday afternoon that one of my hard disks had failed — quickly and catastrophically — it was more of a nuisance than anything else. It meant taking out the old disk, going out to buy a new one and installing same, and then...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two professors from the University of Illinois; one specializing in materials science, the other in electrical engineering, have combined their talents to take the idea of printing circuits onto non-standard materials one step further by developing a conductive ink that can be used in a traditional rollerball ink pen to draw circuits by hand onto paper and other porous materials. In their paper published in Advanced Materials, team leads Jennifer Lewis, Jennifer Bernhard and colleagues describe how they were able to make a type of ink from silver nanoparticles that would remain a liquid while in the pen,...

Pakistani officers arrested a man at Karachi airport after batteries and an electrical circuit were found in his shoes as he tried to board a plane for the Middle East, an official said. The 30-year-old civil engineer allegedly told interrogators he came from Pakistan's northwestern province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Taliban and Islamist militants have a presence, and had been scheduled to travel to Muscat by Thai Airways. Mohammad Munir, Airport Security Force spokesman, said the bearded man, whom he named as Faiz Mohammad, was arrested when a scanner sounded an alarm. The suspect was not found in possession of explosives,...

The Supreme Court on Monday: * Said ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist will not vote in cases heard in November, unless the other justices are deadlocked. He intends to take part in deciding cases that were heard in December. * Voted 7-2 to put restrictions on companies that want to voluntarily clean up their polluted land and sue former owners to share the costs. The decision goes against Aviall Services Inc., which in 1981 bought land in Texas. * Ruled 8-0 that Florida death row inmate Joe Elton Nixon should not get a new trial, even though his lawyer...

SENATOR JOHN KERRY'S Vietnam War record has been a focus of the presidential campaign for weeks. For a New York company that produces reality-based video games, that makes the topic ripe for a jump from politics to pixels. The company, Kuma Reality Games, which specializes in recreating military encounters, is making one of Mr. Kerry's Swift boat missions the situation for a game. It says that the game is intended to entertain and to inform, and that it is nonpartisan. Armed with a computer keyboard, players are invited to enter an interactive simulation of Viet Cong ambushes on a small...

U.S. jury indicts pair in trade secret theft By Lisa M. Bowman and Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted two men on criminal charges of stealing trade secrets from Sun Microsystems, Transmeta and other computer technology companies with the intention of making and selling processors based on the technology in China. Fei Ye and Ming Zhong face 10 counts of trade secret theft and economic espionage related to possessing stolen internal company documents from Sun, Transmeta, NEC Electronics and Trident Microsystems, according to an indictment filed in San Jose, Calif. The pair was arrested while...

IBM And MOSIS Expand Initiative To Help Emerging Companies And Universities Create Innovative Chip Designs 3 Oct 2002, 10:36am ET - - - - - Multi-Project Wafer Services To Include IBM Copper And CMOS Technologies Fabless Semiconductor Association Supplier Expo -- IBM and MOSIS today announced the expansion of an initiative to assist emerging companies and universities in developing innovative chip designs. Specifically, IBM plans to offer MOSIS access to CMOS technologies including IBM's 0.13- and 0.18-micron production processes that feature IBM's copper-wire technology, which MOSIS will integrate into its Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) services. In addition, IBM plans to...