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Modern computing on the head of a pin
News We cast an eye back over the ever-shrinking transistor, the invention that became the cornerstone of computing and the modern world. The transistor was invented by Bell Labs scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley to replace...
[January 29, 2008, 11:49]
Celebrating 60 years of transistors
News On 16 December, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two Bell Labs researchers, built the world's first transistor. Their device, called a point contract transistor, conducted electricity and amplified signals, a job previously handled by bulky...
[December 17, 2007, 7:33]
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Blog Not content with inventing the transistor, the research arm of Lucent -- which is a bit like calling Einstein the Princeton town scientist -- has found the transistor's ending. To be precise, it's come up with a transistor where the active bit is...
[October 19, 2001, 17:52]
Cosmic threat to tomorrow's computers
Blog Intel's first two billion transistor processor, details of which appeared yesterday, is quite the beast. Any sort of radiation can blunder into a transistor and change its operating conditions - and when those conditions are necessary to store or...
[February 4, 2008, 23:35]
New IBM technology to boost chip speed
News IBM will describe a new type of transistor this week that it says will vastly increase the performance and reduce the power consumption of chips in the coming decade. In a presentation at the International Electron Devices meeting that starts...
[December 3, 2001, 8:53]
Bell Labs finds end of the road for transistors
News Bell Labs, where the transistor was invented in 1947, has now announced what it believes to be the smallest transistor possible. This is effectively the smallest that a transistor can be, says Bell Labs, and thus marks the end for the smaller...
[October 18, 2001, 15:34]
Chip researchers go ballistic for faster transistors
News US scientists at the University of Rochester are working on a new kind of transistor that could be massively more powerful than today's designs. Known as the "ballistic deflection transistor" (BDT), the device uses individual electrons that are...
[August 17, 2006, 13:05]
Intel sharpens its memory
News Intel is working on a transistor design that could help the company's designers pack more memory onto its processors. The company would like to get that down to one transistor per bit of information. This approach also borrows from the work Intel...
[December 12, 2006, 7:40]
IBM paves way to 100GHz chips
News As expected, IBM today announced the world's fastest silicon-based transistor, paving the way to speeds five times faster than at present. The device isn't the fastest transistor in the world, but it does use standard production techniques -- other...
[June 25, 2001, 18:23]
Photos: Intel's Silverthorne, Tukwila review
Reviews Silverthorne is a 45 million transistor chip that can run at up to 2GHz while using between around 0.6 and 2 watts at 1 volt and 90 degrees C. Silverthorne reduces power consumption by transistor design, by aggressively turning down or off unused...
[February 5, 2008, 15:28]
Intel to serve up metal chips
News Transistor count can be doubled because engineers can shrink the size of their transistors. The chipmaker is looking at revamping two fundamental elements of its transistors -- the transistor gate and the gate dielectric -- so its chips will...
[November 5, 2003, 7:50]
AMD strains for processor improvements
News The gate oxide, for example, one of the crucial components of a transistor, is only about five or six atomic layers thick on current chips, Sander said. The chipmaker is examining how to incorporate a wide variety of cutting-edge concepts...
[June 12, 2003, 9:03]
Photos: Intel launches its 45nm chips
News This involves using several elements, including the metallic element hafnium, rather than silicon in part of the transistor. Intel showed off several systems using its upcoming Penryn family of chips, which will be the first to use the new...
[January 30, 2007, 14:46]
IDF: Where no chip has gone before
News Transistor gates inside current chips measure 70 nanometres. While Gelsinger spoke of future applications, Chou focused on chip and transistor roadmaps, or release schedules. The company confirmed, for instance, that it is working on a multiple...
[September 13, 2002, 7:46]
Opportunities and Challenges of III-V Nanoelectronics for Future High-Speed, Low-Power Logic Applications
White Papers The major potential advantage of using a III-V quantum-well field-effect transistor as a logic transistor is that it can be operated under very low supply voltage(e.g. This paper highlights the opportunities and challenges of III-V nanoelectronics...
[July 19, 2007, 1:00]
IBM adds zip to PowerPC chips
News For the past five years IBM has been developing SOI technology, which adds a layer of insulation underneath a transistor inside of the processor. The resulting manufacturing technique embeds an insulating layer of oxide between the transistor and...
[May 23, 2000, 8:13]
Scalability of 3D-Integrated Arithmetic Units in High-Performance Microprocessors
White Papers It explores the behavior of the 3D-integrated arithmetic circuits with increasing issue-width (parallel execution capability), transistor sizing, and temperature. It demonstrates that the 3D-integrated circuits have less sensitivity to transistor...
[July 11, 2008, 1:02]
Intel 'peels onion' with nanosurgery
News Moreover, if you focus a very low power IR laser on a transistor and monitor the reflection, you can detect tiny changes in the beam as the transistor switches between on and off. Not only can a laser beam reflect the actions of a transistor, but...
[September 16, 2003, 11:15]
Nanotech set to beef up chips
News According to the report, the researchers made a transistor from a carbon nanotube, and topped it with a layer of silicon nitride sandwiched between layers of silicon oxide. The oxide-nitride sandwich can hold an electric charge, and the transistor...
[June 19, 2003, 8:55]
IBM, AMD team up to strain silicon
News According to early data, DSL improves transistor performance in its chips by 24 percent, but incorporating it does not decrease the number of good chips that come out of a wafer, meaning that it should be relatively inexpensive to adopt.
[December 13, 2004, 8:15]
