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Intel has a plan to go beyond 3nm chips
Intel revealed a rebrand of their node names, and an aggressive new roadmap that ends with inconceivably tiny 18-angstrom transistors.
Researchers push Moore's Law with a 1-nanometer transistor gate
Ready for some hardcore science about transistor elements that are a fraction of the width of a human hair? Good, because that's what this post is all about. "The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," University of California at Berkeley researcher Sujai Desay says. In recent years, though, that assertion has looked shaky, and now it's been thoroughly disproved thanks to the discoveries made by scientists at UC Berkeley and the magic of carbon nanotubes. Or, as they're more commonly known, graphene.
Samsung ready to invest in next-gen chip production: here comes 20nm and even 14nm
As things stand, the super-small and super-efficient 22 nanometer transistors in Intels' Ivy Bridge are about as cutting edge as mainstream chip production gets, which is why this promise from Samsung is rather impressive. As reported by Reuters, the Korean manufacturer is preparing to invest $1.9 billion in a new logic chip line that will make chips for smartphones and processors. These chips will use 20nm and 14nm fabrication processes, making them potentially faster and more efficient than Ivy Bridge -- and leaving the silicon currently found in Sammy's 32nm Exynos Quad and Qualcomm's 28nm Snapdragon S4 far behind. Of course, Intel is gearing up for 14nm production next year too, and even setting its sights on 5nm after 2015, so the coming battle for Moore's Law should be just as lively as it is today. [Silicon wafer photo via Shutterstock]
University of Twente's new lens reveals the sub-100nm level with visible light
Small is beautiful, but only when you can see it. Specifically, we're talking about nanostructures -- including cellular organelles and nanoelectronic circuits -- around the order of 100nm. The problem is with a microscope, visible light only takes us down to a resolution of 200nm at best, and it's not always ideal to use conventional methods to boost the resolution -- you'd either have to dope the subject with fluorescent dye or use highly delicate equipment. Thankfully, the University of Twente has come up with a new type of lens that would solve this problem: in a nutshell, a nanoparticle is placed on one side of the gallium phosphide lens, while the other side -- disorderedly etched with acid -- takes in a precisely modulated laser beam and scatters it into a focal point of your choice. Sure, this sounds bizarre and ironic, but apparently the modulation is controlled in such a way that the scattered beam focuses much tighter than an ordinary beam would using an ordinary lens. Have a look at the comparison shots of some gold nanoparticles after the break -- that's some sweet 97nm resolution right there for ya.
Engineers create 3D microscope lens, see the tiny elephants in your ear
The ability to view tiny images in the third D has been made possible by Lei Li and Allen Yi of Ohio State University. The two have crafted a one-of-a-kind 3D lens that, unlike other three-dimensional microscopes that capture images by circling around the subject, sees teeny objects while stationary. Although the engineers crafted the lens on a precision cutting machine using a diamond blade themselves, they say it can be produced using traditional molding methods. At the size of a fingernail, the thermoplastic material, aka acrylic glass, was cut with 10 nanometer spacing (that's tiny) to ensure a flat plane. The top is surrounded by eight facets -- sort of like a gem stone, but not symmetric -- allowing the viewer to see 9 different angles at once. This should pave way for scientists to get better angles of microscopic objects, but they can always try using the 3DS and some DIY lens attachments, right?
Intel plans to shrink its Atom chip circuits to just 15 nanometers, and other glorious tales of wonder
Earlier this week at IDF Intel dropped some very, very tiny news on us... namely that the Atom SoCs will soon include circuits which are 22 and 15 nanometers in size. The smaller, 15 nanometer width is the size of about 60 atoms -- seriously. Intel's processors, which are categorized by the size of their circuitry, are currently 32 nanometers at their smallest. So, we'd say you should be on the lookout for them but... yeah, well, you know where we're going with this.
Researchers create pixels eight times smaller than the Retina Display
You might be pretty proud of your iPhone 4's Retina Display, and those teensy pixels 4x smaller than the already good-looking usual Apple displays. Or maybe you're looking forward to seeing the Retina installed in some of Apple's other products at the event later this week. But like most consumer electronics these days, that display isn't quite state-of-the-art. Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a display with nanometer-thin sheets of metal (called nanoresonators) that use slits to create pixels eight times smaller than the pixels currently on the iPhone 4. To show off their work, the University of Michigan researchers created their school's logo on a display only 9 microns tall (a strand of human hair is about 100 microns wide, so the display itself could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence). Crazy. You have to wonder what an iPhone-sized display would look like with a resolution like that (or if we'd even tell the difference, given that our eyes have a limit on the amount of detail they can discern). Obviously, this is strictly a research project at this point -- creating all of the "nanoresonators" required to make a fullsize display would probably cost a lot more than the iPhone 4 actually does. Maybe it's something to look forward to for the iPhone 5, 6 or 7.
NC State gurus develop new material to boost data storage, conserve energy
We've all assumed that anything's possible when dabbling in the elusive realm of spintronics, and it seems as if a team at NC State University is out to prove just that. While using their newfound free time on Saturdays (you know, given that the football team has quit mid-season), Dr. Jagdish Narayan and company have utilized the process of selective doping in order to construct a new type of metallic ceramic that could be used to create a "fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text." The material could also be used (in theory, anyway) to create a new generation of ceramic engines that could withstand twice the heat of normal engines and hit MPG ratings of 80. Granted, this all sounds like wishful thinking at the moment, but we wouldn't put it past the whiz kids in Raleigh to bring this stuff to market. Too bad the athletic director doesn't posses the same type of initiative. [Thanks, Joel]
Samsung's GDDR4 graphics memory goes to 2000MHz
While Samsung has been dabbling in the RAM world quite a bit of late, kicking out the micro-sized OneDRAM and cellphone-bound gigabit-density DRAM, the firm is now officially loosing its 2000MHz GDDR4 RAM on the world. While the zippy memory is already found on ATI's Radeon X1950 card, it'll now be available en masse to graphics card producers in order to speed up current and future offerings "by up to 66-percent." By using 80-nanometer production technology, the memory boasts a 4Gbps throughout, which is nearly two-thirds higher than the widely used 2.4Gbps GDDR4 variety out now; additionally, it'll be offered to vendors in just a 512MB density, rock a 32-bit data bus configuration, and utilizes "JEDEC-approved standards for signal noise reduction to help attain the highest possible speed." No word on how much Sammy plans on charging speed-freaked manufacturers, nor how long it'll take for a kilowatt-burnin' card other than the X1950 to include such a luxury, but we wouldn't count on it being too much longer, regardless.[Via TGDaily]
