Post-Silicon Solutions Emerging

Post-Silicon Solutions Emerging:

Researchers have an array of new technologies in the pipeline to boost CMOS logic and memory performance, Sematech Vice President Raj Jammy said Tuesday at the Device Scaling TechXPOT at SEMICON West. High-mobility graphene channels, gates built around nanowires, finFETs with III-V materials -- all promise to blow past the power/performance capabilities of silicon CMOS.

David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 7/15/2009

Researchers have an array of new technologies in the pipeline to boost CMOS logic and memory performance, Sematech Vice President Raj Jammy said Tuesday at the Device Scaling TechXPOT at SEMICON West.

"We need disruptive materials and technologies," said Raj Jammy of Sematech.

High-mobility graphene channels, gates built around nanowires, finFETs with III-V materials -- all promise to blow past the power/performance capabilities of silicon CMOS. Jammy, in charge of materials and emerging technologies research at Sematech, warned that "people entrenched in the silicon world" may need to rethink as scaling of today's CMOS transistors becomes increasingly difficult.

"We need disruptive materials and technologies," Jammy said, describing R&D progress on several post-22 nm options. Progress is being made on heterogeneous devices, where germanium is used as the channel in the pFET and indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), for example, on the nFET. Nanowires with a gate-all-around design are drawing more R&D attention, and work continues on finFETs -- vertical structures that allow better control of the channel.

Memory R&D is equally vibrant. For decades, mainstream memories have been based on charge storage. "But when you make these devices really small, charge storage is no longer possible." On the horizon are phase change memories (PCRAMs) and metallic resistive RAMs (ReRAMs), though Jammy acknowledged that the question regarding ReRAM technology is: "Does it work at less than 20 nm?"

Also under study are zero-leakage nanoelectrical-mechanical system (NEMS) devices, which Jammy said "exhibit instant on and off." And because they are mechanical, they can safely operate in hazardous environments, such as a nuclear power plant.

Schubert Chu of Applied Materials spoke of the potential of carbon-doped silicon for nFET strain.

Schubert Chu, an Applied Materials product manager for epi/LPCVD products, examined the possibility of embedded silicon carbon (eSiC) being used to enhance the performance of the nFET. While embedded silicon germanium (eSiGe) has served to effectively strain the pFET, SiC has been a tougher challenge, largely because the carbon atoms tend to move around.

Chu said that an AMD-led team has shown a 30% improvement with nFETs strained by SiC structures. "Silicon carbon is on track to be adopted at the 22 nm generation."

SiGe stressors face challenges as the germanium content moves from 25-30% at the 45 nm node to >40% at the 22 nm node. Applied Materials has developed a "Siconi" pre-clean option for its Centura epitaxial deposition tool, which Chu said will extend epi strain technologies.

Jammy said the industry faces serious cost challenges. "When we hear that it may cost $80M for a EUV scanner, we are not going in the right direction on costs," he said.

Read The Full Article:
http://sedemos.blogspot.com/2009/07/post-silicon-solutions-emerging.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Organic semiconductor researchers honoured by
Institute of Physics

From the OSADirect Newsleter:

The 2009 Faraday Medal, one of the Institute's three gold medals, has been awarded to Professor Donal Bradley FRS for his pioneering work in the field of plastic electronics. Professor Bradley who holds the Lee Lucas Chair in Experimental Physics, is Director of the newly established Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial.

Professor Bradley's research focuses on optimising plastic semiconductors for use in a wide range of electronic devices, with applications spanning displays, lighting, electronics, solar energy, communications and medical diagnostics.

Professor Bradley said, "What a wonderful way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of conjugated polymer LEDs - a discovery that helped to launch plastic electronics on the path to its present day vibrancy as an academic research field with great commercial potential. I am delighted to have been able to walk that path in the company of so many talented students, postdoctoral researchers and academic and industrial colleagues ? this award recognises the fruits of a great many, very enjoyable collaborative interactions."

Professor Jenny Nelson has been awarded the Joule Medal. Prof. Nelson is currently working on the use of molecular or 'plastic' electronic materials in solar cells, in order to reduce the cost of solar electricity. Once the basic properties of the materials are properly understood, design rules can be developed for new materials and types of device with better performance.

Professor Nelson said, "I am absolutely thrilled and honoured to receive the Joule Medal for our research into photovoltaic materials. I'm delighted that both the importance of the subject and my own group's contribution to it have been recognised in this way."

Read The Full Article:
http://sedemos.blogspot.com/2009/07/organic-semiconductor-researchers.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

The Most Recent Counterfactual Attack Against the
Obama Administration

This is kind of silly, but it's always interesting to see what the right-wing attack machine comes up with when it gets desperate. Now it appears that they're going after President Obama's rather innocuous science advisor, John Holdren. Specifically, a recent article in The Washington Times--that bastion of rational commentary--claimed that Holdren "has toyed with extreme measures of population control, even suggesting in one book how to make it more publicly acceptable for the government to spike drinking water in order to sterilize people."

Does that sound just a bit too absurd to be true? That's because it is. Chris Mooney explains just how misinformed this claim is in a post at Science Progress:

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/scientificactivist/~3/NGA9f5JUsTQ/thi
s_is_kind_of_silly.php

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Big Ed gives BA props

Hey, this humble (ha!) blog got a shout-out on Ed Schultz’s show on MSNBC! He showed a clip of the Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen making her ridiculous creationist statements about the Earth and uranium mining, and then mentioned my blog entry[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/16/big-ed-gives-ba-props/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

20th Anniversary of Innovation

View from The Top Executive Interviews "20th Anniversary of Innovation", John Tanner, CEO Tanner EDA Follow audio interview...

Read The Full Article:
http://sedemos.blogspot.com/2009/07/20th-anniversary-of-innovation.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

1979 “iPod” Music Player

1979 music player patent drawings by Kane Kramer, from Gizmodo

Suspiciously Prescient Man Files Patent for iPod-Like Device in 1979 by Dan Nosowitz

Kane Kramer, an inventor by trade, came up with a gadget and music distribution service almost eerily similar to the iPod-iTunes relationship that predates it by three decades. The guy predicted details down to DRM and flash memory’s dominance.

Kramer’s device, the IXI, was flash-based, even though flash memory in 1979 only could have held about three minutes of audio, and featured a screen, four-way controls, and was about the size of a cigarette pack. Even weirder, he envisioned the creation and sale of digital music and foresaw all the good and bad that would come from this: No overhead, no inventory, but a great push for independent artists, with the risk of piracy looming large.

He predicted DRM, though he didn’t go into many specifics, and in his one concession to the time, guessed that music would be bought on coin-operated machines placed in high-traffic areas.

Related: Freeware Wi-Fi app turns iPod into a Phone - Google Patent Search Fun - 2008 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention

Read The Full Article:
http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2009/07/16/1979-ipod-music-player/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Ben Stein sinking ever lower

Several people have notified me that this ugly mug is appearing in the ads on this site:

Yep, Ben Stein is hawking "free" credit reports on my site. Only…they aren't free. They aren't useful. And Ben Stein is being an exploitive douchebag.

A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What's useful is the report -- if there's an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there's only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That's the place where the big three credit-rating agencies will give you a genuinely free copy of your credit report once a year, as required by federal law.

You won't be surprised to hear that freescore.com is not free: in order to get any information out of them at all, you have to authorize them to charge you a $29.95 monthly fee. They even extract a dollar out of you up front, just to make sure that money is there.

Stein, here, has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a "free" credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.

The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason -- as if the case for the prosecution weren't damning enough already -- for the NYT to cancel Stein's contract forthwith. It's simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its "Everybody's Business" columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy.

Who in their right mind would accept economic advice from Ben Stein, anyway?

Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/l1IR2xxBkns/ben_stein_s
inking_ever_lower.php

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Fighting bigotry, one lemonade at a time

Much to the delight of child entrepreneurs everywhere, a new article by Matthew Gailliot and his[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://persistentastonishment.blogspot.com/2009/07/fighting-bigotry-one-lemonade-
at-time.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

No Prison Tat Work For The Iceman

Our favorite Iceman Ötzi isback in the news, having been sliced, diced, and dissected again to determinethat his tattoos were inked from soot. Silicate crystals, such as almandine andquartz, found in the soot during optical- and various electron[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.digipast.com/digipast_archaeology_for_/2009/07/no-prison-tat-work-for-
the-iceman.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Caption This for 07/17/09

This week's image: Vote for your favorite caption! Editors note: Thanks to TechoutReach for submitting this image!

Read The Full Article:
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/9612/Caption-This-for-07-17-09?from_rss=1

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!