Free Republic

The germanium-tin processor was fabricated at the Helmholtz Nano Facility, the Helmholtz Association's central technology platform for the manufacturing of nanostructures and circuits. Credit: Forschungszentrum Juelich Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich have fabricated a new type of transistor from a germanium–tin alloy that has several advantages over conventional switching elements. Charge carriers can move faster in the material than in silicon or germanium, which enables lower voltages in operation. The transistor thus appears to be a promising candidate for future low-power, high-performance chips, and possibly also for the development of future of quantum computers. Over the past 70 years, the number...

Sheila Bair, former FDIC Commission, and Barney Frank, former Congressman, penned a misleading op-ed in Fortune/CNN Money entitled “Watch out. The mortgage securities market is at it again“. Here is the misleading sentence: Big, ugly giants with names like Countrywide Financial and New Century packaged huge pools of mortgages, sliced them up into securities, and sold them to investors, who now bore the risk if the loans defaulted. It turns out that “big, ugly giants” with names like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did exactly the same thing. They packaged huge pools of mortgages, sliced them up into securities, and...

For Hire or Charter Bethany Stotts, July 8, 2010 In their interim report on a National Study of Charter Management Organization Effectiveness, Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education contrast charter management organizations (CMOs) with coexisting public school districts and explain how the leaders of the former have considerable latitude in terms of hiring, firing and other institutional practices. “In contrast to typical school districts in which school leaders frequently complain about the lack of flexibility in allocating school resources, well over one-third of surveyed CMOs (41 percent) allow their schools to determine the number of teaching positions needed...

Three years ago a team from Bell Labs took on a very daunting challenge – put an optical networking system on a commercially manufactured silicon chip, load it with a smorgasbord of sophisticated opto-electronic devices in a combination that’s never been done before, and make it easy to mass produce. The project is part of a U.S. DARPA-funded program (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) to develop technologies and design tools necessary to fabricate an application specific, electronic-photonic integrated circuit (EPIC). This program is led by BAE Systems in partnership with MIT, Applied Wave Research, and Bell Labs, through Alcatel-Lucent’s LGS...

Fuji surpasses 6 megapixels By Sandeep Junnarkar Staff Writer, CNET News.com February 19, 2003, 10:01 AM PT update Fuji Photo Film on Wednesday unveiled two high-resolution digital cameras built around new sensor chips that are designed to capture more precise variations of light and dark. The new Fujifilm FinePix F700 offers a resolution of 6.2 megapixels using Fuji's new proprietary chip called the Super CCD SR, or charge-coupled device with super dynamic range technology. This chip, introduced in January, mixes a regular pixel sensor with a new type modified to capture high-intensity light. Fuji said that as a result, the...