Until now, body-embedded circuitry was very limited. The electronics were hard, or had to be separated from the body. With this new technology, flexible circuits can be directly implanted anywhere in the body, protected by a cocoon of silk, which is human friendly. The silk melts away over time, leaving a small substrate of silicon circuitry inside that can’t be noticed.

This opens the door to things like LED tattoos, which can monitor and display sugar levels in the bloodstream, other kinds of sensors and chips that connect to the nervous system. You know, so the government and their extraterrestrial allies can deactivate our will at any time and convert us into alien egg nests. [Technology Review]

Using oral histories from those who experienced the creation and development of the integrated circuit, the Computer History Museum compiled a documentary on this invention that irrefutably changed the world. The year-long exhibit will feature examples of early transistors, the vacuum tubes they replaced, and early integrated circuits, as well as explaining who was behind the inventions, especially the so-called “Traitorous Eight” engineers that largely developed the IC back in 1959.

After departing from the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, engineer Jean Hoerni and the rest of the “Traitorous Eight” moved to Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. There, Hoerni developed the planar process which would become the foundation for the integrated circuit. The planar process involves using an oxide layer to protect the joining of the p-n semiconductors on a silicon chip, named because of the flat surface in which it results. The planar process is more electrically efficient than the then-common method of stripping the oxide layer for fear of contamination, but more importantly, the design allowed for a complete circuit to be built on a silicon chip.

Later in 1959, fellow “Traitorous Eight” member Robert Noyce demonstrated that the combination of the oxide coating and the flat surface allowed for a complete integrated electrical circuit, with diodes, transistors, resistors and capacitors, to be built within a planar chip. Simultaneously, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments independently developed a similar idea based on the planar process, though his was based on a germanium chip, rather than Noyce’s silicon. This new integrated circuit, called the “monolithic integratic chip,” is the basis for pretty much everything we love today, including computers, radio, television, audio equipment, cars and anything else that uses a microchip.

It’s no exaggeration to call the IC an invention that profoundly changed the world. Microchip technology has exploded since its invention 50 years ago, and few (if any) other inventions have become so essential worldwide in such a short amount of time. The technology is kind of tough to wrap your mind around, but the Computer History Museum’s exhibit sounds like an illuminating look at how Silicon Valley and our favourite hobby began. [Computer History Museum]

The chip (see it in action here), of unspecified capacity, actually uses transparencies like your grampa used to use with his overhead projectors. This clear plastic is flexible, unlike silicon chips. We’ve been seeing flexible components lately, most notably displays, but memory is tiny and has to be inside the gadget anyway. I’ve been thinking for at least a minute and a half and I can’t figure out a circumstance in which flexible memory would be preferable, besides maybe a gadget that isn’t so much folded as rolled like a poster. So give me a hand: What’s the point of all this? [Wired]d

The MIT Technology Review says that they both pulled their inspiration from the mind grapes of a British student who hypothesised that making objects look like a flat conducting sheet would successfully render an object invisible.

The basic idea is that objects hide under the mirror bump, and tiny silicon nanopillars on the surface of the mirrors steer light away from the object, making it—and the object it’s covering—look flat. Technology Review likens this to hiding something under thick carpet.

That means, unfortunately, that this isn’t an invisibility cloak we can run around in. These concepts follow suit with the original concept in thinking that a stationary, conductive sheet would work much better for rendering things invisible. So we all can’t start skipping out on our dinner bills quite yet.

Still, you can’t overlook the importance of taking little steps towards creating an invisible man. Invisibility is cool, even if just a concept in a lab somewhere. [Invisibility Cloak One and Invisibility Cloak Two via MIT Tech Review via KurzweilAI]

To create the special silicon, Harvard physicist Eric Mazur shined a super powerful laser onto a silicon wafer. The laser’s output briefly matches all the energy produced by the sun falling onto the Earth’s entire surface at a given moment in time. To spice the experiment up, he also had researchers apply sulfur hexafluoride, which the semiconductor industry uses to make etchings in silicon for circuitry. Seriously, he did this just for kicks and to secure more funding for an old project.

“I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up,” he said. “I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why,” he said.

The new experiment made the silicon black to the naked eye. Under an electron microscope, however, the dark sheen was revealed to be thousands, if not millions, of tiny spikes. As we said above, those spikes had an amazing effect on the light sensitivity of the wafer. Mazur said the material also absorbs about twice as much visible light as traditional silicon, and can detect infrared light that is invisible to today’s silicon detectors.

And there’s no change to the manufacturing process, Mazur said, so existing semiconductor facilities can create black silicon without much additional effort or, more importantly, money. [New York Times]

The team has created a silicon chip that can control and observe a single electron. What makes that useful? Well, according to Susan Angus, who’s leading the scientific team, “Building a quantum computer involves perfect control of the most fundamental properties of our universe. Controlling and observing individual electrons is an important step towards that goal.” Being able to control individual electrons gives some of that control.

Instead of using binary to transfer information, Quantum computers will use quantum physics, which (from my very, very limited understanding), lets information be transferred even when the computer is switched off.

If you’re struggling to get your head around the idea, you’re not alone. However, the guys at Science in Public have a pretty good grasp on the whole situation, so it’s definitely worth a trip on the link express to try and gain some insight into why this is important.

[Science in Public - Thanks Niall!]

By combining laser interference technology with a new “scanning beam” wafer technique, the team at the Space Nanotechnology Lab has demonstrated manufacturing of semiconductor wafers with 25nm detail. And it’s easily extendable to 12nm. In the scanning technique, Doppler shifts affect the laser’s ability to create accurate patterns, so the clever MIT guys synchronise the wafer under construction by oscillating the laser elements with 100Hz sound waves. Looks like that venerable old law will hold true for a while yet. [EETimes]

Two engineering professors at Columbia University tested graphene’s strength at an atomic level by indenting a perfect sample of the material with a sharp probe made of diamond. The results confirm what many had suspected all along–and that will go a long way to bolster the case that graphene would be able to handle the heat produced in future ultrafast processors. [Technology Review]