Moore's Law Lives!

I've been hearing for years now that the end of Moore's Law is just around the corner. Think again, folks!


Intel, IBM reveal transistor overhaul

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology WriterSun Jan 28, 4:44 AM ET

In dueling announcements, Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors as the technology shrinks to the atomic scale.

Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller.

Technology experts said it's the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s and is crucial in allowing semiconductor companies to continue making ever-smaller devices that are also energy-efficient.

It also ratchets up the competition between Intel and rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which helped IBM develop the technology along with electronics makers Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news). and Toshiba Corp.

Semiconductor experts said Intel and IBM scientists have concocted a clever way to maintain the industry's frenetic development pace.

Companies are feverishly trying to discover new ways to adhere to Moore's Law, the 1965 prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip should double about every two years.

So far, chip development has generally advanced according to that schedule, leading to the creation of faster and more powerful processors that also give off less heat and are cheaper to run.

But scientists in recent years have reported serious problems in stopping electric current from leaking out of the tiniest chip parts, threatening to halt the march of Moore's Law.

The problem is that the silicon dioxide used for more than 40 years as an insulator inside transistors has been shaved so thin that an increasing amount of current is seeping through, wasting electricity and generating unnecessary heat.

Intel and IBM said they have discovered a way to replace that material with various metals in parts called the gate, which turns the transistor on and off, and the gate dielectric, an insulating layer, which helps improve transistor performance and retain more energy.

Intel said new materials help provide a 20 percent boost in transistor performance. IBM did not release specifics of its project.

"This gives the entire chip industry a new life in terms of Moore's Law, in all three of the big metrics — performance, power consumption and transistor density," said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a social networking Web site for semiconductor enthusiasts and part of VLSI Research Inc. "It opens the door to some pretty rapid improvements."

Intel appears the farthest along in bringing a product based on the technology to market.

The Santa Clara-based company said it has created working microprocessors using the new materials that will go into mass production in the second half of 2007.

Intel also said the chips will be built using its new manufacturing process that involves shrinking parts of the chips down to 45 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, from the 65-nanometer process the company uses now.

The advanced manufacturing process allows Intel to shrink the size of the circuitry on its chips and pack more transistors onto a single sliver of silicon at a lower cost.

While IBM won't sell the chips by themselves, the Armonk, N.Y.-based company said it would begin selling servers with chips using the technology in 2008.

"This is a very big deal for the industry," said Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group. "Intel will be the first to have this in production, but IBM could potentially have a density advantage compared with Intel's scheme. But both should get gold medals."

Sunnyvale-based AMD said it was not disclosing when it expects to use the technology in its own chips, but said it plans to introduce its own 45-nanometer products in mid-2008.

One Very Cool Cat!

Here's a little news items from Nature magazine that I thought was very cool:


Photonic Schroedinger cat breaks record

Physicists in China, Austria and Germany claim to have created the
largest ever photonic "Schroedinger cat", a popularized term given to
entangled particles that are in a superposition of two quantum states.
The physicists also claim their apparatus can create a six-photon
"cluster" state, which could bring the physical realization of a quantum
computer one step closer.

Source: Nature Physics

Putting the Brakes on Light Speed

A very cool quantum development. Watch this space!

********************************

Researchers Slow Waves While Maintaining Their Ability to Carry Information

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 19, 2007; A08

Scientists said yesterday that they had achieved a long-sought goal of slowing waves of light to a relatively leisurely pace and using those harnessed pulses to store an image.

Physicists said the new approach to taming light could hasten the arrival of a futuristic era in which computers and other devices will process information on optical beams instead of with electricity, which for all its spark is still cumbersome compared with light.

Even the best fiber-optical systems today rely on intervening electrical signal processors, because no one has figured out a practical means of putting the brakes on light at critical junctions.

The new experiments bring scientists closer to that goal.

"We only have to turn a knob and it slows," said John C. Howell, the University of Rochester physicist who led the effort, described in the Jan. 22 online issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

The achievement is the latest in the fast-paced field of "slow light" -- a discipline that barely existed a decade ago. While other researchers have dragged light to slower speeds than the Rochester scientists, who got it down to one-three-hundredth of its normal velocity, the new method is far simpler. That means the dream of domesticating one of nature's most feral forces for use in computing, image processing and a host of military and homeland security applications could be nigh.

"This is a big step toward bringing slow-light technology into practical usage," said Steve Harris, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Stanford University.

As the fleetest form of energy in the universe, light has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of technologies. Pulses of light can substitute for the digital "ones" and "zeros" that are today conveyed by relatively massive electrons on silicon chips. Light waves can also carry detailed images, encrypted in their complex, self-propagating ripples.

But light's great attractions -- its outlandish speed and general unwillingness to slow down -- also pose a huge challenge. That's because to be useful, bits of information must coordinate their travel with countless other bits -- in some cases yielding to other data streams and in other cases merging to make a splintered message or image whole.

Chipmakers long ago perfected the art of traffic control for electricity, using transistors to halt and release electrons at microscopic gates. But light is not so easily regulated. Moreover, when light is slowed -- by passing through a dense material, for example -- its wave form changes, typically resulting in a loss of whatever information it was carrying.

"It's not enough to slow the light down," said Lt. Col. Jay Lowell, a program manager at the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has funded much of the latest work. Unless information can survive the ride, he said, "it's just going to be a scientific curiosity."

Howell and his colleagues created a four-inch-long chamber filled with cesium gas heated to about 212 degrees Fahrenheit. When they sent pulses of laser light through that gas, the cesium atoms put the brakes on the leading edge of that wave, creating a photonic traffic jam.

"Essentially, the light just piles up," Howell said.

Once the slowed light exits, it naturally resumes it normal velocity -- 300 million meters per second, or fast enough to circle the Earth seven times in one second.

Most important, the peaks and troughs of Howell's light waves remained in phase as they stacked up, meaning they did not get out of step and cancel one another out. That is key, because phase is one aspect of light that carries information.

To prove that their slowed light did not get scrambled, the team sent their beam through a tiny stencil, less than one-fourth inch on each side, with the block letters "UR" -- the university's initials. Like a shadow-puppet image, that "UR"-shaped beam passed through the chamber, slowed and then emerged with its block letter message intact, as detected by a camera at the end.

Unlike most other systems for slowing light, this one worked at very low light levels. In one experiment, the "UR" image was clear even when a single photon -- the smallest possible quantity of light -- was beamed through the stencil.

The cesium-induced delays were brief, on the order of a few billionths of a second each. Looked at differently, each instance amounted to a two-foot long beam of light being compressed to less than four inches.

But that seemingly small degree of braking is nothing less than a means of storing, or "buffering" waves of light. Moreover, the system is tunable. With the turn of a knob the temperature in the chamber can be changed, which alters how much the incoming light is slowed and stored.

"This is a tremendous boon," said Alan Willner of the University of Southern California, president of the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. "Unless you have control over time delays, you can't have the beauty of high-speed optical information processing."

The new work complements previous efforts. A few years ago, scientists at Harvard, Stanford and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., created a weird, plasmalike substance called a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is to light what quicksand is to feet. That slowed light to just 38 mph, about one-20-millionth its normal speed. But it required temperatures of about 450 degrees below zero, and the process was not friendly to carrying information.

More recently, researchers at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., etched a series of tiny "race tracks" -- 100 of them crammed within a tenth of a square millimeter -- on the surface of a silicon chip and forced beams of light to perform more than 50 laps around each track before each was allowed to move on. Those extra laps added up to a delay of about a half a billionth of second -- long enough for about 10 bits of information to pile up.

Optical image processing could allow automated comparisons of facial images from security cameras to images maintained by law enforcement officials. It could also become a valuable tool for scientists studying subtle changes in microbes or other kinds of cells over time.

Optical processing also is likely to ease the storage of holographic images directly on hardware and could lead to breakthroughs in cryptography, the science of making and breaking codes.

A Revolution in the Making?

Here's a good piece by John Markoff on Apple's new iPhone. Steve Jobs says not to think of the new phone as a computer, but that's really what it is. The iPhone runs OS-X off the iTunes platform. I'm looking forward to seeing how the product evolves in coming years. When I compare the first iPod I purchased (Version 1.0) and the iPod I bought late last year (an 80 gig version), I'm blown away at the progress Apple has made.
I'll bet Steve was bummed after he left the company he started - particularly the way everything went down. But as we all know now, it was truly a blessing. The only important, unresolved issue facing Steve right now is the options backdating issue.
It would be tragic to see Apple lose one of the greatest innovators of all-time over a greedy and mindless activity.

**************************

January 10, 2007
Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 9 — With characteristic showmanship, Steven P. Jobs introduced Apple’s long-awaited entry into the cellphone world Tuesday, pronouncing it an achievement on a par with the Macintosh and the iPod.

The creation, the iPhone, priced at $499 or $599, will not be for everyone. It will be available with a single carrier, Cingular Wireless, at midyear. Its essential functions — music player, camera, Web browser and e-mail tool as well as phone — have become commonplace in hand-held devices.

But it was the ability to fuse those elements with a raft of innovations and Apple’s distinctive design sense that had the crowd here buzzing.

Apple’s goal, Mr. Jobs said, was to translate the Macintosh computer’s ease of operation into the phone realm. “We want to make it so easy to use that everyone can use it,” he said. And he was clearly betting on translating Apple’s success with the iPod music player to a hot category of multifunction devices.

Underscoring the transformation of a quirky computer maker into the dominant force in digital music, and signaling his ambitions to extend that reach, Mr. Jobs also announced that Apple was dropping “computer” from its name and would henceforth be known as Apple Inc.

Investors took quickly to the pitch, sending Apple’s stock price up to a record close, while shares of established cellphone makers slumped.

Still, the phone is a gamble on a new business for Apple. And even with its success with the iPod and a reborn line of computers, it has not been immune to marketplace failures, like the Macintosh Cube introduced in 2000.

But in his two-hour presentation before an audience of reporters, analysts and Apple employees at the Macworld Expo trade show, the parallel he repeatedly drew was between the new phone and the Macintosh personal computer, which had a vast impact on the computer industry when it arrived in 1984.

Noting that there are occasionally new products that change everything, Mr. Jobs said, “Apple has been able to introduce a few of these into the world.”

He said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cellphones by the end of 2008. That may seem small, but with a billion handsets sold last year worldwide, that would mean 10 million iPhones — a healthy supplement to the 39 million iPods that Apple sold last year.

“Steve can make the internal combustion engine appear to be something new and cool,” said Reed E. Hundt, the former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. “He will provide a certain magic even to the 30-year-old cellphone.”

Mr. Jobs’s product tour de force was even more remarkable for its timing, as questions continue to be raised over the company’s stock options practices and his role in them.

“The truth of the matter is everything is fine,” he said during an interview after his presentation. “We’ve shared it all with the S.E.C.”

He acknowledged the controversy over the timing of some of Apple’s stock option grants, which Apple appears to have fanned recently with a disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission that contained a circumspect description of his role in the options award process.

“It’s raised questions,” he said, “but some of the journalism has been so off the mark. But I know the truth. It’s painful to read some of this stuff, but I know it’s kind of ridiculous and will pass.”

If he is in any trouble, Mr. Jobs showed no signs of it either on stage, where he was treated with great warmth by his audience of 4,000, or in an interview afterward in which he showed obvious delight in highlighting subtle industrial design features.

Mr. Jobs showed a series of applications including e-mail, advanced voice mail, photo collections and visually appealing Web searching. He promoted the fact that the new iPhone is powered by the same core OS X operating system that the Macintosh computer is based on, offering power-management features and advanced graphics abilities.

The user interface relies heavily on a high-resolution touch screen that makes it possible to use a finger to control the phone. It has features that are still more subtle, including sensors that track light and movement and proximity, to prompt the phone to control screen brightness and physical orientation and other aspects of its operation. For example, when the phone is placed next to the user’s face, the keyboard is automatically turned off.

Apple chose the name iPhone even though Cisco Systems, the network and consumer wireless company, has recently introduced a Wi-Fi-based phone with the same name. Mr. Jobs had been negotiating with Cisco executives over the trademark in recent days.

The $499 version of the device will have four gigabytes of storage, and the $599 version will offer twice that.

“At $499 and $599, it’s a pretty expensive deal,” said Rob Glaser, chief executive of Real Networks, whose online music store is a rival of Apple’s iTunes Store. “Steve is more focused on not cannibalizing iPod sales than on driving volume of phones. Those are not high-volume prices.”

Mr. Jobs defended the higher price of the new phone in a market where prices of so-called smartphones — those combining voice calling with Internet functions — are rapidly plunging to $200 and below. He contrasted the iPhone, which has only one mechanical button on its surface, with the BlackBerry and smartphones from Motorola and Palm. Rather than what he called “small plastic keyboards,” the iPhone will have a display that becomes both the keyboard and control panel, morphing to suit the current application.

“After today I don’t think anyone is going to look at these phones in the same way,” he said.

Apple’s relationship with Cingular began two years ago when Mr. Jobs phoned Stanley T. Sigman, Cingular’s chief executive, and proposed that they speak about a relationship. The two had an initial meeting in February 2005 in a New York hotel.

Apple spoke with other carriers before committing itself to its exclusive link with Cingular, Mr. Jobs said, but he would not give details.

In addition to the Apple relationship with Cingular, which Mr. Jobs said was forged without offering the wireless carrier even a peek at an early prototype, the iPhone will offer special applications from both Google and Yahoo. Users will be able to use both services’ search and e-mail services as well as a custom version of Google Maps.

Eric E. Schmidt, who is chief executive of Google as well as a member of Apple’s board, and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, came on stage to endorse the new hand-held.

“I’m not a board member of Apple, but I would like one of these, too,” Mr. Yang said.

Regis McKenna, the veteran public relations specialist and corporate strategist who tutored Mr. Jobs in the art of high-tech marketing beginning in the late 1970s, said: “This compares favorably with the launch of the Macintosh. The price is high, but it will come down.”

Despite the widespread comment and enthusiasm that the phone generated, there were also many questions about its design and about Apple’s strategy.

Some analysts and industry executives noted that the Apple designers had shunned Cingular’s higher-speed digital cellular network. Mr. Jobs said later models would have additional networking standards.

Others questioned whether the device would be as versatile as other smartphones if it was not truly open — that is, able to accommodate many programs from third parties, as personal computers are.

Mr. Jobs would not say how open the phone would be to other developers, but added: “I don’t want people to think of this as a computer. I think of it as reinventing the phone.”

He also said he was anxious to help protect the Cingular network from the kind of viruses and worms that bedevil the PC world today.

The phones will go on sale in June through Apple and Cingular (online, by phone and in stores). Mr. Jobs said the phone was being announced ahead of its availability to head off disclosure that might have resulted in the course of Federal Communications Commission licensing.

Although it will be a half-year before it is possible to know whether Mr. Jobs has another hit product, there was no shortage of enthusiasm based on the first glimpse today.

“It’s like they read our minds,” said David Myers, executive chef at Sona restaurant in Los Angeles and chief executive of the Food Arts Group, where the employees currently use the Treo smartphone from Palm. “This is the next step in not accepting poor design any longer.”

Before he introduced the phone, Mr. Jobs said Apple TV, the digital video system that he announced as iTV last year, would be available for $299 in February. The device will store up to 50 hours of video and permit wireless streaming of content from a computer to a television.

Laurie J. Flynn and Miguel Helft contributed reporting from San Francisco and Brad Stone from Las Vegas.

iPhone - Yes, Please!

I can't get over how cool the iPhone is. I've been using a Blackberry for the past 3 years, but not for long! My understanding is that the iPhone will be available in June. Can't wait for summer!

Here's the link to learn more about this revolutionary product:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Powered by the Sun

Here's a story from CNet.com that supports the position of investors that are bullish on alternative energies such as solar power.

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is thinking big about solar power.

The company put out an RFP (request for proposal) last month to solar electric suppliers and expects to receive responses early this month, according to a representative. The move is part of a long-term plan to convert to renewable energy sources.

Wal-Mart is keeping the details of the proposal under wraps as the process is still ongoing.

However, one person who saw the proposal said that if completed, it could amount to a significantly large installation--on the order of 100 megawatts of power over the next five years.

"To put that into perspective, the solar system currently being installed at Google headquarters in California--the largest single corporate solar installation in history--is 1.6 MW, about 1/60th the size," wrote Joel Makower, a clean-technology consultant who saw the proposal but is not bidding on it.

Makower said the Wal-Mart proposal called for a system that could be replicated across its stores in five states and make use of available roofing space.

Wal-Mart has set up experimental stores in McKinney, Texas, and Aurora, Colo. These stores are already using renewable power sources, including solar and wind.

"We will continue to use the learnings from those stores to find ways to achieve our renewable energy goals in our other stores across the nation," said spokesman Kory Lundberg.

Corporations take a shine to solar
Although Wal-Mart's bid may not result in any investment, the move is significant as an indicator of growing corporate interest in sustainable practices and technologies.


Installing solar power is a well understood--and potentially visible--way to use renewable energy. Aided by government incentives such as tax breaks, solar electric systems are becoming more cost-effective as solar companies devise new technologies and target specific markets.

Google's installation, for example, is supplied by Energy Innovations, which uses a solar concentrator design to make solar power systems for flat roofs like buildings in office parks.

Microsoft, too, has gotten into the solar game. Last year, it equipped its Silicon Valley headquarters with more than 2,000 solar panels capable of generating 480 kilowatts at peak capacity.

Renewable energy is central to Wal-Mart's environmental efforts as well. The company has a vice president of corporate strategy and sustainability, Andy Ruben, and its corporate policy is to reduce its "carbon footprint" and greenhouse gas emissions.

Its three specific, long-term environmental goals are: using 100 percent renewable energy; creating zero waste and selling products from sustainable resources.

In a speech in October of last year, Wal-Mart president and CEO Lee Scott provided more detail on the company's short-term goals (click for PDF), including a commitment to invest $500 million a year in energy efficiency and technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Scott said the company intends to reduce greenhouse gases from its retail locations around the world by 20 percent in the next seven years.

In the next four years, he said the company is working to develop building prototypes that will be 25 to 30 percent more energy efficient and produce up to 30 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.