Word: transistor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MOORE There's still room for creativity. Designers are still going to have to think, Well, how do I use my billion-transistor limit? I don't anticipate the end of innovation...
...course, cyber Cassandras have been tolling the bell for Moore's law for decades. As physicist Carver Mead puts it, "The Chicken Little sky-is-falling articles are a recurring theme." But even Mead admits that by 2014 the laws of physics may have their final revenge. Transistor components are fast approaching the dreaded point-one limit--when the width of transistor components reaches .1 microns and their insulating layers are only a few atoms thick. Last year Intel engineer Paul Packan publicly sounded the alarm in Science magazine, warning that Moore's law could collapse. He wrote, "There...
...OPTICAL COMPUTER This computer replaces electricity with laser light beams. Unlike wires, light beams can pass through one another, making possible three-dimensional microprocessors. An optical transistor has already been invented; unfortunately, the components are still rather large and clumsy. The optical counterpart of a desktop computer would be the size...
...transistor is invented (will replace vacuum tubes...
Many of the countries in the deepest demographic trouble have imposed aggressive family-planning programs, only to see them go badly--even criminally--awry. In the 1970s, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi tried to reduce the national birthrate by offering men cash and transistor radios if they would undergo vasectomies. In the communities in which those sweeteners failed, the government resorted to coercion, putting millions of males--from teenage boys to elderly men--on the operating table. Amid the popular backlash that followed, Gandhi's government was turned out of office, and the public rejected family planning...