And because the gate and the insulation layer are formed right at the end of the chip-making process, after the high-temperature steps have been completed, it is possible to choose from a wider range of materials for the insulation layer.
Lewis brought in two programmers from his old chip company and imposed a design process akin to one for building a chip, focusing on small components to deliver their complex product.
Bigger wafers mean more chips per wafer, and since a fair portion of the cost of a chip is in the process itself (the upfront development cost is another major piece), rather than the wafers, bigger wafers mean cheaper chips.
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One example is the nanolithography used in chip making, which eliminates process chemicals that are hazardous to the environment.
In addition, faster signal processing and lower power consumption can also be achieved through the use of leading process for the chip containing the circuits.
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Look, Chip, there is a legislative process that takes time to wind its way through.
This fingerprint (aka Physically Unclonable Function, or PUF) is a byproduct of tiny errors in the fabrication process -- something chip makers usually try to minimize.
Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS), a global leader providing software, IP and services used to accelerate innovation in chips and electronic systems, today announced that its multi-year collaboration with Samsung on FinFET technology has achieved a critical milestone: the successful tapeout of the first test chip on Samsung's 14LPE process.
In an October 19th interview, Andreas Olofsson, CEO, told me that Adapteva is working on a chip that uses much less power to process information.
While most of the financial activity that now takes place on smartphones involves people engaging in transactions with their bank, the credit-card industry has spent millions of dollars to issue new plastic with the contact-less chip that speeds the check-out process.
The chip and cuffs are designed to read and process electrical and chemical signatures of appetite within the nerve.
Since then, most European nations as well as Japan and Canada have adopted this so-called EMV international credit card standard and abandoned magnetic stripe credit cards for chip-and-pin cards in the process.
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Although Dr Michel has not yet applied his idea to an entire chip, he has shown that the electricity-generation part of the process can be made to work perfectly well in a system of channels like those found in a 3D chip.
One very challenging problem, though, involves the process of patterning the device onto the chip.
Small organic molecules won't dissolve in a liquid and so must be deposited onto a screen using a process similar to etching a standard computer chip.
The megahertz number so often cited in the marketing materials of computer companies refers to the computer's central processing unit chip as a partial measure of its ability to process data.
And in the process take on ARM (ARMH), the British chip firm that dominates mobile phones?
The test chip will enable the correlation of the simulation models to the FinFET process and contains test structures, standard cells, a PLL and embedded SRAMs. The memory instances include high-density SRAMs designed to operate at very low voltages and high-speed SRAMs to validate the process performance.
The chip has a bandwidth of 300 gigabytes per second, which could conceivably process the download of the entire iTunes music catalog -- more than 5 million songs -- in about a minute.
The Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) will apparently offer the same power-efficient 28nm process found on its Snapdragon rival and according to the slide from Chip Hell, there's a dizzying 72-core graphics setup.
This speeds up the design process enormously, because making changes becomes as simple as downloading a new configuration into the chip.
In a process similar to printing a photograph, engineers beam high-powered light through a masklike image of the chip, thus creating a duplicate on a silicon wafer.
By 2003 Illumina scientist Kevin Gunderson invented a chemical process that allowed Illumina to get more-accurate results, even as it packed more DNA on a chip. (Instead of the lithography that Affymetrix uses, Illumina affixes DNA to tiny glass beads packed in the chip.) "I've been in the analytical sciences for 30 years, and I've never seen anything this accurate, " says John W. Hooper, chief executive of Quebec gene-finding firm Genizon, an Illumina customer.
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