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Gordon Moore, the tech pioneer and co-founder of Intel, has died at age 94, Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced Friday. Moore died peacefully in his home, surrounded by family. Moore was best-known for his famous observation known as Moore's Law. In 1965, Moore made the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. Moore's prediction proved to be correct, and the idea of faster, smaller, and cheaper chip technology is still the driving force behind Silicon Valley's mission to this day. “Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his...

Researchers have solved three fiendishly difficult technical challenges that were effectively blocking the realization of the potential shown by semiconducting 2D materials, a key ingredient to creating new atom-thick transistors that can reset Moore's Law. Thanks to the works of a multi-institutional team of researchers the production of high-quality 2D materials at a commercial scale now appears to be solved. The advance of semiconductor development is threatened by natural restrictions imposed by the way transistors are fabricated and the materials that are used. This barrier to Moore’s Law has long been looming on the horizon, and forward-thinking scientists have been...

The researchers created the tiny transistor by simultaneously applying a force and low voltage which heated a carbon nanotube made up of few layers until outer tube shells separate, leaving just a single-layer nanotube. The heat and strain then changed the "chilarity" of the nanotube, meaning the pattern in which the carbon atoms joined together to form the single-atomic layer of the nanotube wall was rearranged. The result of the new structure connecting the carbon atoms was that the nanotube was transformed into a transistor. Professor Golberg's team members from the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow created...

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development – he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley – he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could...

As reported recently in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF), CREOL and the University of Texas have developed a graphene-based transistor that could one day lead to super-fast and super energy-efficient computers. By super-fast we mean a thousand times faster and by super energy-efficient we mean it will only use a hundredth of the power. Right now, the world of electronics relies on silicon-based transistors to power its devices. And while their invention made it possible for devices to be reduced to smaller sizes as the transistors allowed the flow of...

Chipmakers Intel and Micron said Tuesday they've created a hyperfast memory chip, up to 1,000 times faster than standard NAND Flash memory. Intel and Micron say they've been working more than a decade on their new, "3D XPoint" chip, which is based on a new, three-dimensional structure and a different set of materials than standard memory chips. The new chip doesn't use transistors, which are the standard on/off switches in microprocessors and nearly every other category of computer chip.

A typical computer chip includes millions of transistors connected with an extensive network of copper wires. Although chip wires are unimaginably short and thin compared to household wires both have one thing in common: in each case the copper is wrapped within a protective sheath. For years a material called tantalum nitride has formed protective layer in chip wires. Now Stanford-led experiments demonstrate that a different sheathing material, graphene, can help electrons scoot through tiny copper wires in chips more quickly. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a strong yet thin lattice. Stanford electrical engineer H.-S....

* TrueNorth is being hailed as the world’s first neurosynaptic computer chip because it can figure things out on its own * Modern processors have 1.4 bn transistors and consume up to 140 watts but the IBM chip contains 5.4 bn transistors and uses just 70 milliwatts * Richard Doherty, the research director of tech research firm Envisioneering Group, hailed IBM's chip as a ‘really big deal’IBM has developed a computer chip which it says will function like a human brain in a giant step forward for artificial intelligence. TrueNorth is being hailed as the world’s first neurosynaptic computer chip...

Enlarge Image The new graphene. Graphyne may be less famous than graphene, but it could have better electronic properties. Credit: D. Malko et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (2012) Graphene, a layer of graphite just one atom thick, isn't called a wonder material for nothing. The subject of the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, it is famed for its superlative mechanical and electronic properties. Yet new computer simulations suggest that the electronic properties of a little-known sister material of graphene—graphyne—may in some ways be better. The simulations show that graphyne's conduction electrons should travel extremely fast—as they do in graphene—but...

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time the word “transistor” appeared in print was in The New York Times on July 1, 1948, in a Page 46 roundup headed “The News of Radio.” The unsigned article opened with a report of two new radio shows, one called “Mr. Tutt,” and the other titled “Our Miss Brooks,” “with Eve Arden playing the role of a school teacher who encounters a variety of adventures.” The column’s last item began, “A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for...

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world. Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster...

At the heart of semiconductor fabrication are crucial additives called dopants. These impurities change the electronic properties of silicon or other material to make the transistors and other components of a chip. Currently these dopants are added in bulk, their exact location usually no more a problem than the exact location of grains of baking soda or raisins stirred into cake batter. But as electronic devices shrink - and the hope is to get them down to the size of a molecule - serious problems with doping are expected. At that small a scale, the location of a needed doping...

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 9 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. will announce on Monday the smallest ever working silicon transistor to serve as the nerve center in electronics ranging from televisions to PCs and cars.For the past 30 years the industry has been shrinking microprocessors -- the brains of computers -- and other chip components to put more function into smaller and smaller cell phones and other computing devices.Transistors, basically the on-off switches that regulate the flow of electronic signals used for computing and other processes, are key parts of the chip.Reducing the size of the on-off switch in the...

AMD Announces Technology to Enable Ten-Fold Performance Leap in Future Transistors World's smallest version of innovative design can foster better products and lower manufacturing costs Sunnyvale, CA -- September 10, 2002 --AMD today announced it has fabricated the smallest double-gate transistors reported to date using industry standard technology. These transistors, measuring ten nanometers, or ten billionths of a meter in length (gate), are six times smaller than the smallest transistors currently in production. AMD's research breakthrough could foster the placement of a billion transistors on the same size chip that currently holds 100 million transistors, enabling a vastly richer computing...