Today’s computer chips spend a lot of time on probability-based calculations, from your Amazon recommendations to determining fraudulent credit-card purchases. By using probability instead of 1′s and 0′s, those statistical calculations can be done more simply, efficiently and faster. More »
This is Dr Mark Gasson. He’s a human being who’s managed to contract a nasty computer virus. Don’t feel too bad for him, though: he did it to himself. More »
When chipmakers slim down their silicon, they need finer and finer tools to organise all that circuitry. With MIT’s latest self-assembling chips, the detail work is handled by molecular strands that, freakishly, just know where to go. More »
From the “at least 10 years out” category of microchip fabrication comes word that IBM is working to reduce future costs and microchip sizes by using DNA. That’s correct, the building blocks of life could one day contribute to your virtual reality headshot in Halo 28: Master Chief Comes Back From the Dead for the 12th Time. More »
McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter to go along with good ol’ solid, liquid, gas, plasma and a handful of quantum states–it’s called a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal. While the name sounds like something that would sap Superman’s powers, this new state of matter could be used to fabricate modern transistors and continue Moore’s Law… possibly indefinitely.
50 years ago today, Texas Instrument’s Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit, or microchip. It’s a crude conglomeration of just five components, but it was also proof that a circuit could be miniaturised by housing all of its components on one piece of semiconductor material, allowing all these parts to work together without laborious (and technologically infeasible) manual connections. In essence, it’s the electronic wheel captured in first eureka. [Wired]
