Process Technology

Flash drives ready to jump in capacity

In the wake of a series of technical announcements from flash memory supplier SanDisk, larger-capacity solid-state drives are on the way.

Flash memory is gaining as a replacement for hard drives in ultra-thin, ultra-small notebooks such as the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC. Why? Flash uses less power, generates less heat, and has faster access times than hard drives. The Air, for example, offers a 64GB flash-based SSD as an option while the Eee PC is sold standard with flash storage.

There is a big catch, though. High-capacity SSDs are expensive. Prohibitively so. The flash drive in the pricier $… Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 3-- Gordon Moore interview

Gordon Moore is a man of extraordinary significance in the semiconductor industry. He co-founded Intel, identified the trend now known as Moore's Law, and has made innumerable personal contributions to this field.

When Moore came up on stage for an interview here at IDF, he received a standing ovation. This was a 10th anniversary appearance; Moore keynoted the very first IDF in 1997.

He was interviewed by… Read more

IDF Fall 2007, part 2-- Process technology

I'm in a press briefing here at IDF covering Intel's 45nm and 32nm manufacturing processes.

Intel's tick-tock product schedule keeps moving along. The latest tick is Penryn; next year comes the tock of Nehalem. Both these chips are from Intel's 45nm process.

Stressing its environmental awareness, Intel stresses that these 45nm chips are… Read more

Live from Hot Chips 19: Looking beyond CMOS

This is the fifth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

I'm back for one last session today, a panel discussion on the topic of "What's Next Beyond CMOS?" The question refers to the common processes for making complementary metal-oxide semiconductors.

The panel includes many leading experts in the… Read more

'Moore's Law under fire again,' again and again

My friend Jerry Pournelle calls Unix the full-employment act for computer wizards (presumably a reference to the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978).

Similarly, I regard Moore's Law as the full-employment act for computer pundits. I've written about it several times myself (e.g. here and here); the phrase gets 930,000 hits on Google today.

One of the duties of any publication in the computer industry is to cast periodic doubt on the future reliability of Moore's Law, thus keeping the phrase prominent in the public perception. EDN Magazine discharged its duty for this year with … Read more