Free Republic

SAN JOSE, Calif. — T. J. Rodgers is surrounded by a sea of silicon wafers on the roof of his company's headquarters in a Silicon Valley industrial park. No, not the ones that Mr. Rodgers, who founded Cypress Semiconductor in 1982, used to make high-speed computer memories or the newer specialized chips that go into iPods and high-end Mercedes-Benzes. These wafers are soaking up the sun's rays and turning them into electricity. On the roof, he fusses over the occasional weed that has grown up in the cracks between the panels and speculates about using robots to keep the glass...

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 7, 2005--Intel Corporation today announced development of a new, ultra-fast, yet very low power prototype transistor using new materials that could form the basis of its microprocessors and other logic products beginning in the second half of the next decade. Intel and QinetiQ researchers have jointly demonstrated an enhancement-mode transistor using indium antimonide (chemical symbol: InSb) to conduct electrical current. Transistors control the flow of information/electrical current inside a chip. The prototype transistor is much faster and consumes less power than previously announced transistors. Intel anticipates using this new material to complement silicon, further extending Moore's...

Three companies are racing to market a new form of technology for detecting concealed weapons, using physics borrowed from radio astronomy and manufacturing techniques from cellular phone makers. The technology, called millimeter wave, is a new category of sensing so unobtrusive that it seems like something out of "Star Trek." Unlike conventional systems such as metal detectors, which sense magnetic fields created by certain materials or objects, or X-ray machines, which pass rays through objects, millimeter wave sensors are passive and rely on detecting energy emitted by objects. The energy the sensors look for is in an unfamiliar part of...

AMD Challenges Intel to a Dual By Michael Singer AMD has challenged Intel to a dual ... as in dual-core processor. The No. 2 chipmaker drew first blood earlier this week at the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., facilities with a demonstration of a new dual-core AMD Athlon 64 processor, manufactured on 90-nanometer technology. The presentation follows last week's display of AMD's multi-core Opteron server and workstation chips at LinuxWorld. Intel's (Quote, Chart) chance to shine won't come till next week's Intel Developers Forum, where it is expected to demonstrate its dual-core Pentium 4, code-named Smithfield, and its Pentium M dual-core...

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics. The Cell microprocessor has been under development by the three companies since 2001 in a laboratory in Austin, Texas. Its unveiling at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been eagerly awaited and products containing Cell including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are expected as early as next year. Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors...

International Business Machines, whose first I.B.M. PC in 1981 moved personal computing out of the hobby shop and into the corporate and consumer mainstream, has put the business up for sale, people close to the negotiations said yesterday. While I.B.M. long ago ceded the lead in the personal computer market to Dell and Hewlett-Packard so it could focus instead on the more lucrative corporate server and computer services business, a sale would nonetheless bring the end of an era in an industry that it helped invent. The sale, likely to be in the $1 billion to $2 billion range, is...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - The State Department will soon begin issuing passports that carry information about the traveler in a computer chip embedded in the cardboard cover as well as on its printed pages. Privacy advocates say the new format - developed in response to security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks - will be vulnerable to electronic snooping by anyone within several feet, a practice called skimming. Internal State Department documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, show that Canada, Germany and Britain have raised the same concern. "This is like putting...

The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable microchips that would provide easy access to individual medical records. The approval, which the company announced yesterday, is expected to bring to public attention a simmering debate over a technology that has evoked Orwellian overtones for privacy advocates and fueled fears of widespread tracking of people with implanted radio frequency tags, even though that ability does not yet exist. Applied Digital Solutions, based in Delray Beach, Fla., said that its devices, which it calls VeriChips, could save lives and limit injuries from errors in...

PEOPLE who are pressed for time often complain that clocks rule their lives. But for most electronic devices, the claim is absolutely true. Vibrations from tiny quartz crystals act like a metronome, producing precise time pulses that, among other things, keep the various operations of microchips in step. Variations of quartz oscillators are used in everything from the least expensive digital wristwatch to complex battlefield navigation gear. But various external factors, particularly heat, can alter the precision of their time beats. Atomic clocks, which rely on the oscillations of atoms, not quartz crystals, are far more precise. But the smallest...

September 23, 2004 From Storage, a New FashionBy MICHEL MARRIOTT OWARD the end of the latest Tom Cruise thriller, "Collateral," the story's action turns on the performance of a player new to most movie audiences. For a suspense-charged moment Mr. Cruise and his co-star, Jamie Foxx, are upstaged by a silvery finger of portable storage technology. In recent months, these slender solid-state memory chips - known by many names, but officially U.S.B. flash drives - have increasingly been seen blinking from the ports of computers in classrooms and libraries, conference rooms and offices, coffee shops and airport lounges.And when...

Microchip trackers, no bigger than a grain of sand, are set to become the latest weapon in the battle of the high street. The so-called Smart Tags can be fitted into virtually everything we buy, and send out a radio signal picked up by internet-linked computers. The technology could already be on its way to a supermarket near you. But there are fears that the retailers' dream is a Big Brother nightmare. At Prada's showcase New York store, you have to steel yourself to look at the prices. But the price tags here are smarter than you'd think: they send...

Next Up For Wireless Communication: The Computer Chip Itself GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The silicon chip may soon join the growing list of devices to go wireless, a development that could speed computers and lead to a new breed of useful products. A team of researchers headed by a University of Florida electrical engineer has demonstrated the first wireless communication system built entirely on a computer chip. Composed of a miniature radio transmitter and antenna, the tiny system broadcasts information across a fingernail-sized chip, according to an article this month in the Journal of Solid State Circuits published by the Institute...