Now comes the tantalizing possibility of combining speed and versatility on a single chip.
Meanwhile mixed signal devices proliferate with both analog and digital components on a single chip.
Once stand-alone devices are feasible, Quake hopes to combine them into a single chip.
Repeating the necessary accuracy, millions of times across a single chip, may be impossible.
The company announced the industry's first quad-combo to integrate certified NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and FM onto a single chip.
But, the rumors were that Qualcomm had some issues integrating both GSM and CDMA standards onto a single chip.
What used to be a five-chip solution has been whittled down to a single chip produced by Texas Instruments ( TXN).
He says that with so many devices around, the value of having a powerful computer on a single chip has diminished.
Work will go faster still when an entire chemistry lab fits onto a single chip, such as the one the folks at Orchid are developing.
By carefully controlling its properties, he could turn a single chip of semiconductor into resistors, capacitors and transistors connected in any way he liked.
The design, which combines a CPU and modem on a single chip, is more affordable, efficient and compact than systems that use two chips, said Lin.
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The plan is to lure away television manufacturers with a single chip that can do many of the things now handled by a grab bag of pricey parts.
With 4.8 billion transistors on a single chip, Trident II is optimized for software-defined networks and cloud-scale data centers, supporting tens of thousands of servers and virtual machines.
Scala programs apportion parallel computing tasks among everything from the different computing cores on a single chip, to the different servers in a data center, to different data centers.
Sandbridge Technologies' SB3010 chips are flexible enough to handle a wide range of protocols, multimedia and application processing, which would enable handset makers to built multifunction handsets using a single chip, driving costs down.
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Mr Joy says that his new design, which turns a single chip into a parallel-processing system, can handle huge amounts of video and audio data at speeds that would overwhelm the usual Intel chip.
Although those first prototypes will have storage roughly equivalent to NAND flash at tens of gigs per circuit, the plan is to rapidly scale up to 100s of gigs and finally to 1TB on a single chip.
ENGADGET: Array-based flash memory could enable 1TB memory chips
Using Intel's "dual core" technology, in which computations are done within two "brains" on a single chip, Otellini predicted that next year notebooks would run at five watts, desktops at 65 watts and servers at 80 watts--a drop from today's wattage.
"We're the only company now in the industry that has intellectual property in both of those main technologies, " Prairie said, pointing to the company's recently launched mobile system and said that eventually, the company plans on integrating the technologies into a single chip.
It incorporates Creative's innovative patented Quartet digital signal processor (DSP) with four independent processor cores, and is the first processor to integrate an array of DSP cores with high-quality HD audio codecs of over 100dB on a single chip, giving it tremendous versatility for PC and embedded configurations.
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While competing solutions require either two sensors or multiple chips to support pen and multi-touch, N-trig is the first company to offer both on a single chip and a single sensor, providing device manufacturers with a compact, low-power solution and paving the way for N-trig to enter the handheld market.
Some researchers believe that it will eventually be possible for a device that contains a single computer chip to analyse all the -omes.
The new inductees included Gordon Moore, the co-founder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and most famous for his Moore's Law, which predicted the rate of semiconductor progress), and Carver Mead, who did much of the work that made it possible to pack tens of thousands of transistors onto a single silicon chip.
There have been commercial hurdles: Gale has so far nailed not a single blue-chip tenant.
Drives shriveled down to desk size, then to desktop size, then the size of a fat dictionary, followed by a thin paperback, a deck of cards and now just a single card or chip.
Based on wireless technology from Wisair, a leading provider of single-chip based Wireless USB solutions, the Easy Dock consists of a USB dongle that connects to your laptop and a receiver that connects to your monitor, mouse, keyboard, and speakers.
ENGADGET: Source R&D brings Wisair-based wireless docking station to Macs and PCs for $150
The Voodoo 4 4500 PCI video accelerator board will feature a single VSA-100 chip, a fill rate of 333-367 megapixels per second and 32M bytes of video memory.
Instead of a traditional key stored in the secure element's memory, every single copy of this chip carries a unique fingerprint within the physical structure of its transistors.
In September 2010, Intel launched its second-generation core architecture, Sandy Bridge, a 32-nanometer chip that can put CPUs and GPUs onto a single piece of silicon designed for tasks like handling high-definition video.
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