transistors

In the effort to find a replacement for today's silicon chips, IBM researchers have pushed carbon nanotube technology a significant step ahead.

Carbon nanotubes are very small structures made of a lattice of carbon atoms rolled into a cylindrical shape, and a team of eight researchers have figured out a way to precisely place them on a computer chip, IBM announced today. That development allows them to arrange the nanotubes 100 times more densely than earlier methods, a key step in economical chipmaking, and IBM has built a chip with more than 10,000 carbon nanotube-based elements.

The new … Read more

Sharp will pay a total of $198.5 million to Dell and two other companies a part of an out-of-court settlement reached over the Japanese tech company's thin-film-transistor, or TFT business.

It's not clear from initial reports which companies are invovled or even what the suit pertained to. AT&T and Nokia both sued Toshiba a few years back and are likely the two unnamed companies paid in the settlement.

However, the news likely relates to last week's news that Toshiba, Samsung, LG, and Sharp colluded to fix prices of LCD panels.

Sharp said after "… Read more

Intel officially announced the high-end, third-generation Core "Ivy Bridge" processor today, and confirmed that more mainstream processors will be coming later.

As expected, Intel said that 13 quad-core i5 and i7 Ivy Bridge processor models are available starting today, aimed at high-end desktop, laptop, and all-in-one designs.

And the chipmaker confirmed that dual-core processors for ultrabooks and mainstream designs will be announced "in the coming months."

Those processors will ultimately find their way into Windows 8 hybrids. "There's a whole new wave of convertible designs coming, where you can get the best of a … Read more

You might not need a whole 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time, after all.

Computer engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have found a way to reduce the minimum voltage required to store a charge in a capacitor--an electron-storing device that works somewhat like a battery--paving the way for ultra-low-power computing. This is a result of a project started in 2008 and led by Asif Khan, a UC Berkeley electrical engineering graduate student, and Sayeef Salahuddin, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of electrical engineering.

The engineers took advantage of ferroelectrics, a class of materials that can hold both positive and negative electric charges, even when there's no voltage applied. On top of that, the electrical polarization in ferroelectrics can be reversed with an external electric field.

The team was able to demonstrate that when a capacitor made of ferroelectric-based materials was paired with an electric insulator, the charge accumulated for a given voltage could be amplified in a phenomenon called "negative capacitance." This means you can create a charge that would normally require a higher voltage. And this, when applied to transistors--the on-off switch components that generate the zeros and ones that are the core of binary computing used in all personal computers--would translate into lower minimum voltage required to operate a computer processor. … Read more

NASA proves Einstein is still a genius, just in case you forgot. Anonymous officially denies being involved in hacking the Playstation Network, Facebook and Google want Skype, and we're getting even closer to a world of digital distribution. Apple and EA are going to make sure of it.

I thought it would be fun to contrast and compare the tubes vs. solid-state debate with the analog vs. digital standoff. I'd readily concede that solid-state/transistor components are, watt for watt, cheaper, more reliable, cooler running, smaller and lighter in weight. But if solid-state is so terrific why haven't tubes become extinct in the half century since transistors came onto the scene? Maybe, just maybe, because tubes sound better?

Ultimate AV Magazine recently conducted a poll, "Do You Prefer Tube-Based or Solid-State Audio Gear?," and the results demonstrated a nearly two-to-one preference for transistors over … Read more

Correction, 10:45 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated Fred Terman's title at Stanford University. He was provost.

Sixty years ago, on December 16, scientists at Bell Labs--William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain--built the world's first transistor and nothing has been the same since. We'll be covering the anniversary in subsequent articles, but here's a smattering of some of the implications, in somewhat chronological order, of the event:

1. The dawn of electronics. Vacuum tubes consumed lots of power and were fragile. ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, weighed 28 tons, consumed … Read more

In prehistoric times, when cassette tapes ruled the Earth, people were known to hold their recorders up against their radio speakers to capture a song. The results were predictably primitive.

If only something like the iTalk were around then. (Food and shelter would have helped too.) Griffin Technology says the device, which plugs into the iPod's dock connector, "faithfully records under real-world conditions," including concerts, lectures and, yes, even open-air radio if you should so choose.

Griffin also claims that the $50 recorder has CD quality and an easy one-touch operation. But we think the smartest thing … Read more