That market was also destined to end up on the commodity pile, so Endoh in 1994 assigned 50 researchers to a challenging task: Cut plastic chip package costs by one-third.
Until a couple of years ago, plastic chip packages either couldn't stand the heat put out by microprocessors or cost up to several times as much as ceramics to whip up with the necessary properties.
Last week a foreign student in Cambridge showed me his residence permit for the UK, the bit of plastic, plus biometric chip, that was to be the prototype for the ID cards that everyone was threatened with - but is now issued only to visa holders.
An FFV can use ethanol or methanol or gasoline (or some combination) thanks to a chip and some plastic fittings in the fuel system.
The banks, meanwhile, haven't converted their card portfolios because they say that other technology, such as mobile-device payments, may leapfrog the need for the chip-enabled plastic.
Such concerns have not stanched the spread of chip-laden plastic.
The leads also need to be flexible enough to deal with the large thermal expansion of the chip relative to the plastic on which it is mounted yet another engineering headache.
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.
Eventually, he found his target: a square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work.
Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip.
We happened to see it in person at a CES-related event here in Vegas, and our quick assessment is that the screen is responsive, and the design chintzy. (Just look at that tacky plastic.) In addition to that 1080p display, it packs a 1.7GHz quad-core Tegra 3 chip along with a TI multicore OMAP processor.
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