Hard to believe that Jack Kilby's unsightly concoction (pictured above) turned 50 yesterday, but it's true. Half a century ago, Mr. Kilby crafted the integrated circuit, which ended up having a monumental impact on taking computers from warehouse-sized to, well, not-warehouse-sized. As the story goes, the very first microchip was demonstrated on the 12th of September in 1958, and it passed its first test: "producing a sine wave on an oscilloscope screen." Safe to say we all know how things progressed from there. Here's to you, IC -- and here's to 50 more.

[Via MAKE]

Texas Instruments has a lot to do with the original microchip, if for no other reason than being the employer of inventor Jack Kilby. Now, however, TI is looking to produce chips and other related gizmos that require an infinitesimally small amount of energy to operate. The overriding theme guiding the engineers is "energy scavenging," which alludes to grasping power from even the most unlikely of places -- vibrations from a bridge as cars pass over, capturing wasted exhaust from a car or bottling up all that frustration your sibling shows when you own him / her again in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The possibilities are just about endless, with networked battery-free smoke alarms, solar-powered mobiles and gaming laptops that feed off of extraordinarily focused brain waves in the mix. Okay, so that last one is still eons from reality, but at least we're headed in that direction.

Bad news, Atom fans. That dual-core nugget of netbook-powering goodness that you were so looking forward to seeing in Q3 won't begin shipping until Q4. According to some data picked up by Fudzilla, the Atom 330 will only be debuting in Q3 (September 21st, to be precise), but it isn't scheduled to get a shipping label until a few months later. Also of note, we're told that the chip will sell (at some place in the supply chain) for $43, but don't count on those savings being completely passed onto you.

[Thanks, sinai]

We're pretty certain we'll be hearing this same story each year, every year for the rest of eternity, but hey, not like we're kvetching over that or anything. Once again, we're hearing that mad scientists have developed a breakthrough that makes Mr. Moore look remarkably bright, as a new approach to chip making could carve features in silicon chips "that are many times smaller than the wavelength of the light used to make them." Reportedly, the new method "produces grids of parallel lines just 25-nanometers wide using light with a wavelength of 351-nanometers," although the grids aren't functional circuits just yet. If you're interested in more technobabble on the matter, head on down to the read link, but we'd recommend against if you're easily frightened by terms like "photolithographic" and "nanotechnology."

Sigma Designs has been dabbling in wireless HD technologies for eons, so we aren't going to get too excited until we see this here system-on-chip (SoC) actually hit some products that we care about. Still, the CoAir is a fairly sweet concept, wrapping integrated wireless, coax and gigabit Ethernet capabilities into one single chip aimed at whole home networking. Put simply (or as simply as possible), this chip is the world's first to "simultaneously deliver multiple independent streams of video and data over coax cable, Ethernet cable and wirelessly without compromising quality of service and throughput." Based on the WiMedia standard, it can reach speeds of up to 480Mbps with UWB (ultra-wideband) wireless streaming, and room-to-room linkage via UWB-over-coax can peg those same rates. What we have here is a great basis for building a whole home server on, but until said device emerges and performs flawlessly, we'll just smile and carry on.

It doesn't look as if much has changed with Nehalem since Intel showed the thing off at IDF, but rather than staring at still images and imagining just how fast said processor can churn through data, TweakTown hosted up a video to really get the point across. According to them, the demo setup was wicked fast at everything it did, and while representatives wouldn't divulge the clock speed, whispers have it right around 3.2GHz. Check out the vid just after the cut, and be sure to peep the full writeup in the read link below.

[Thanks, Lin Mei]

Intel, clearly not wanting to be left in the dust by the slew of new wireless technologies that are starting to converge, nasty-like, inside our shiny new devices, has begun testing on a chip which can effortlessly swap between WiFi, WiMAX, and DVB-H. The idea is that the chip's radio would talk to your WiFi at home, hand over the data to WiMAX if you hit the road, and also allow you to pull down digital television while staying mobile -- without having to use an array of separate radios or silicon. This should open up a whole new vista of possibilities for time-wasting activities, so whenever manufacturers want to get this into our phones / laptops, just say the word. We're ready.

[Via Slashdot]

Oh AMD, you just can't keep it together, can you? Advanced Micro Devices, a company known for its share of "issues," has once again delayed its much-hyped, energy efficient Barcelona CPU. Apparently, a technical irregularity has caused the company to push back the release date for widespread availability of the chip until sometime early next year. The glitch, which causes the chip to fail, is just another line of setbacks on the product's path to release (originally set for mid-2007). John Taylor, a company spokesman, says, "We're continuing to ship it but only to specific customers." The company is offering a workaround for the chips until the problems are solved, though users will see an impact on performance. In other heart-wrenching (though seemingly unrelated) AMD news, the chipmaker has decided to re-up its older K8 architecture, refocusing on "Brisbane"-based chips, and even adding a few new models to the line. Over the next two quarters, the company will release 11 new 65nm chips based on the older format, while just three new entries will be made in the "Phenom" -- or K10 -- line. Look, Hector, everyone is pulling for you (except maybe Intel) -- just get it together, man!

[Thanks, Gary J]

Read - A.M.D. Delays Energy-Efficient Chip Again
Read - AMD Resurrects K8 Architecture for 2008 Roadmap

IBM is looking to save around $1.5 million per year and be a kinder citizen to the environment by instituting a greener method for recycling silicon. Previously, IBM would sandblast defunct wafers to make sure no trade secrets left the premises when they were sold off to solar-panel outfits or used as "monitors." The new process, however, involves defacing the circuitry with an abrasive pad and water, which saves a few bills and leaves the silicon in much better shape for reuse. Reportedly, Big Blue has already implemented the new approach in its Essex Junction, Vermont facility, and the East Fishkill, New York plant is all set to follow suit shortly.

Qualcomm -- a company that's arguably more used to suing than being sued -- isn't finding much luck in its protracted quest to avoid a Broadcom-led ban of its 3G hardware from coming into the States. Following a recent denial of its motion to stay the ban in the court system, the President of The United States himself (or his administration, anyway) has swooped in to render an executive judgment, and it ain't looking any better for Qualcomm. Saying that the importance of protecting IP rights outweighs the inconvenience of the ban, the Bush folks have stood by the ITC's decision to impose the ban in the first place, making it seem all that much smarter now for Verizon to have sidestepped the whole ordeal and paid Broadcom itself. Barring any last minute antics, the ban gets enforced starting tomorrow.

Those eager to lay down for the "industry's first" native x86 quad-core processor have but a few months left to wait, as AMD just announced that its quad-core Opteron's would begin shipping in August. Codenamed Barcelona, these CPUs will be launching in both "standard and low power versions," hit frequencies of up to 2GHz, and should provide performance increases of up to "70-percent" over existing Opterons in select applications. Additionally, those who can hold off a bit can look forward to even speedier chips in Q4 of this year, and an elusive "Special Edition" version should also be just around the bend. Per usual, no hints on what kind of premium you'll pay for this wee piece of silicon come August, but AMD did note that the processors wouldn't hit mainstream systems until September.

What do you do when you're always playing catch-up to Intel, watching your workstation market share slip, and piling up something like $2 billion in debt? Well if you're AMD, you seriously consider dropping your fabrication business. According to reports, the company is currently investigating its options for outsourcing more (or all) of its manufacturing to third-party firms in deals similar to the ones it has with Chartered Semiconductor and Taiwan Semiconductor. There are drawbacks, of course, including the possibility of longer development times due to the separation of design and manufacturing (the last thing AMD wants, considering recent Barcelona delay rumors). Regardless of what its final decision will be, it's clear that the news has already hurt the struggling chipmaker in the short-term by causing several market analysts to downgrade the company's stock.

[Via Techmeme]

Intel's been throwing so many mobile processor codenames around in the past 12 months or so that we've resorted to hiring droids to constantly update pivot tables as chips are named and nixed from its ever-evolving roadmap. But being the weekend and all, it looks like we're stuck telling you about yet another presumably vital processor that's likely destined to hit cellphones, UMPCs, and other handheld computing platforms sometime in the not too distant future. According to an interview by Germany's FAZ, Intel's CEO compared the chip "to the original Pentium" in terms of importance to the company, and while Mr. Otellini didn't go into too much detail beyond that (can't blame him for keeping us curious), he did note that the firm hopes the 45nm CPU can infiltrate "10 to 20-percent of the mobile phone market."

[Via TGDaily]

Shortly after revealing that a quad-core laptop chip was indeed in Intel's pipeline for 2008, the firm has decided to go public with even more laptop-based processor details over at Computex. Intel's executive vice president Sean Maloney had the honors of "unveiling" the 3-Series chipset family (formerly known as Bearlake), which will of course support DDR3 RAM, PCI Express 2.0, HDMI, and can come stocked with G33 / G35 Express integrated graphics. More importantly, the outfit formally introduced plans for an Intel Core 2 Extreme mobile processor that should be released in Q3 of this year. According to Mr. Maloney, the chip is targeted to be the company's "highest-performing mobile dual-core processor that still includes energy-saving power features for laptop designs." No word just yet on whether or not this CPU will cost more than the rest of your laptop components combined (but we wouldn't be surprised).

[Via Laptoping]

IBM has most certainly been on a tear of late when it comes to microprocessors, as this tidbit comes right on the heels of the firm's 4.7GHz POWER6 and self-assembling CPUs. Presumably thinking that two five heads are better than one, IBM has garnered support from Chartered, Samsung, Infineon, and Freescale to "develop and manufacture advanced 32-nanometer semiconductors." Of course, we're still not sure if the loose ends surrounding IBM's 65-nanometer team effort are all tied off, but onward and upward they go regardless. The collaborative agreements between the firms "include 32-nanometer bulk complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process technologies and joint development of process design kits (PDKs) to support that technology," which basically means that the companies will attempt to work together at IBM's East Fishkill plant through 2010 to produce "high-performance, energy-efficient chips at 32nm." Unfortunately, we've no idea when these speedsters will be ready for the commercial world, but it's pretty safe to assume it won't be soon.

[Via PCWorld, photo courtesy of Semiconductor-Technology]