AllThingsD » transistors

Fans of New Chip-Making Style Hope to Step Out Soon

Don Clark — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 18:00:34 +0000

Manufacturers keep shrinking transistors and other tiny components on computer chips, to the point that some materials and processing techniques used for decades are no longer sufficient. Backers of one new approach believe they are positioned to make a difference.

An industry group that includes influential players like IBM and ARM Holdings on Thursday is talking up the progress of one particular production recipe. It is a variant of a technology called “silicon-on-insulator,” or SOI, which has been used by IBM and others such as Advanced Micro Devices to make chips that are mainly known for high performance.

The group, called the SOI Industry Consortium, says they now have data to back up a claim that the version called fully-depleted SOI can play a major role in a different sort of application altogether–portable, battery-powered devices where power consumption is paramount.

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From Snowmobiles to Cellphones, a Scramble for Parts

Dana Mattioli — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:00:25 +0000

Companies are reconfiguring products and paying up to stockpile parts, as persistent supply shortages in the electronics industry continued to curb sales in the second quarter.
Shortages of key electronics components such as transistors, capacitors and integrated circuits became pronounced in the first quarter, and continued in the second. Manufacturers haven’t been able to ramp up supply fast enough to meet rebounding demand.

A wide range of companies have seen sales get hit. General Electric Co. (GE) said supply constraints for electronic components used in its healthcare equipment cost the company $50 million in sales for the quarter.
Network-equipment vendor Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson said shortages cost the company $400 million to $550 million in sales and delayed shipments. Royal Philips Electronics NV said shortages constrained sales in its TV and lighting businesses.

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H-P Sees Second Future for Novel Breed of Circuitry

Don Clark — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:29:59 +0000

Stan Williams is one of Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) most oft-quoted scientists, dreaming up electronic devices that are almost too small to imagine. He and his colleagues are discussing another feat of micro-magic on Thursday, this time concerning a novel piece of circuitry dubbed a memristor.

The creation–whose name combines memory and resistor–was postulated in 1971 by a professor named Leon Chua and turned into working prototypes by H-P in 2008. Among other things, memristors are expected to store data in a much smaller space than conventional transistors. That’s a big deal, because experts believe that it will eventually become impossible to keep shrinking transistors in chips such as flash memory to keep improving the storage capacity of those products.

Nearly all of the discussion about memristors so far, in fact, has focused on their use data storage.

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Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect

John Paczkowski — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:30:46 +0000

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