SiliCon

This Sheet of Space-Bound Silicon Contains 1.75 Billion Transistors

This single 8 inch-diameter sheet of silicon is etched with 35 replicas of five different chips, each one destined to be sent into space. Those brave hands in the picture are holding around 1.75 billion transistors in total, with each of the circuits being made up of around 10 million transistors or basic circuit switches.…

Pomegranate-Inspired Batteries Hold 10x The Juice

A team of Stanford scientists recently made a breakthrough. After years of trying to create a new generation of lithium-ion batteries that use energy-efficient silicon to hold a charge, they found the secret to the winning design in an unlikely place: pomegranates. The problem with using silicon in batteries is two-fold. For one, the fragile…

AMD Will Run Android and Windows on the Same PC, Too

Yesterday, Intel announced its plans to run Android and Windows on the same PC in perfect harmony. Now, it seems AMD has the exact same plan. Verge reports that AMD is teaming up with BlueStacks to develop technology which will allow Android to run within Windows, on the same piece of silicon, in a way…

Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon Chips Will Power TVs and Cars, Not Your Phone

Snapdragon’s latest hunks of speedy silicon aren’t destined for your telephone or tablet. No, instead, new tweaks made to the Snapdragon 600 and 800 will power your connected car and home theater, respectively, instead. A tweaked version of the Snapdragon 600, the 602A, will share similar specs with its sibling, but come rated for temperature…

Nvidia took to the fields to help publicize its new Tegra K1 chip, its first with a staggering 192 CUDA cores. The result is this deliciously geeky crop circle, cut into a field two hours south of San Francisco. [Nvidia]

Intel Is About to Start Making ARM Chips

It at first you don’t succeed, join forces with people that do things better than you. At least, that’s what Intel is doing, as it starts producing ARM chips at its fabrication plants. Forbes reports that Intel partner Altera has announced that the chip manufacturer will start making ARM’s 64-bit silicon at its foundries next…

This Graphene-Coated Silicon Power Cell Signals a Battery-Free Future

Imagine a future without batteries. But in the same future, your cell phone charges in minutes and stays charged for weeks. Thanks to the world’s first silicon power cell, this future might not be so far away—and graphene is helping us get there. A team of engineers at Vanderbilt just built such a device. Their…

The First Carbon Nanotube Computer: The Hyper-Efficient Future Is Here

Coming just a year after the creation of the first carbon nanotube computer chip, scientists have just built the very first actual computer with a central processor centered entirely around carbon nanotubes. Which means the future of electronics just got tinier, more efficient, and a whole lot faster. https://gizmodo.com/scientists-are-making-computer-chips-of-the-future-out-5955734 Built by a group of engineers…

iPhone A7 Chip Teardown: Power-Dense Samsung Silicon

We’ve already seen inside the iPhone 5S and found out that its guts are blisteringly fast—but now iFixit has taken a very close look indeed at the A7 silicon that powers the new phone. https://gizmodo.com/the-iphone-5s-teardown-everything-new-is-on-the-inside-1352885479 By using an Ion Beam Etcher, it’s possible to take layers off a semiconductor and analyze how it’s made. So…

The First Flexible Silicon Paper Could Revolutionize Mobile Gadgets

Imagine a smartphone you can roll up and slip into your shirt pocket. Or a tablet that can be folded like a newspaper and slipped in your back pocket. It’s an idea that’s been tossed around in science fiction for a years, but now it’s a small step closer to reality because researchers at Sun…

Intel Has Made a Processor That’s Powered By Wine

The Intel Developer Forum is coming to an end, meaning its execs get to go wild and show some of the oddball concepts under way at the tech giant. These include a processor so efficient it can pull all the energy it needs to run from a glass of red wine. Intel’s Dr Genevieve Bell…

Samsung: Our Next-Gen Phones WIll Have 64-Bit Processors, Too

Not be outdone by Apple, Samsung has swiftly reacted to the announcement of Cook & Co.’s new 64-bit A7 processor by announcing that its next slew of phones will pack similar silicon, thank you very much. https://gizmodo.com/apples-new-a7-chip-is-apples-first-64-bit-soc-1278205052 Speaking to the Korea Times, Samsung’s mobile business head JK Shin has explained that the company’s future phones…

Why Your Next Smartphone Might Be Full of Wax

It might not just be your ears that are stuffed with wax for long—because researchers from the University of Michigan want to pack your phone full of the stuff, too. In the process of trying to make processors more efficient, they’ve hit on an intriguing idea: cover the chip in a mesh of wax which,…

Scientists Just Figured Out How to Make Lightning-Fast Graphene CPUs

Graphene has the power to change computing forever by making the fastest transistors ever. In theory. We just haven’t figured out how yet. Sound familiar? Fortunately, scientists have just taken a big step closer to making graphene transistors work for real. https://gizmodo.com/where-do-all-those-amazing-discoveries-go-anyway-1053115334 Graphene transistors aren’t just fast; they’re lightning fast. The speediest one to date…

Bloomberg: Qualcomm Chips Are Headed For Microsoft’s Surface RT

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft is planning to give its Surface RT tablet an overhaul using chips from Qualcomm. According to “people with knowledge of the company’s plans” some new versions of the tablet will used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor—rather than Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip which currently drives the device. Once source, however, suggested that Nvidia…

Report: AMD Is Making Its First Ever ARM Chip

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AMD is taking a leap into unknown waters, as it readies its first ever ARM chip. The new chip—codenamed ‘Seattle’ and previously hinted at—is apparently based on the architecture designed by ARM which is now prolific in smartphones and tablets. Interestingly though, according to the Wall Street Journal,…

New Image Sensor Tech Captures Better Photos By Ditching Silicon

Basically every digital image sensor out there relies on silicon photodiodes to capture light. Jointly developed by researchers at Panasonic and Fujifilm, a new image sensor technology uses an organic layer instead—and early tests results of the technology blow the status quo away. The new organic CMOS image sensor technology is currently being presented by…

These Tiny Chiplets Could Coat Nearly Anything in Digital Intelligence

Imagine if silicon chips were smaller than a grain of sand and could be made using a laser printer: everything under the sun could be made unobtrusively smart. But that’s not science fiction, and you don’t have to imagine too hard—because researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center have already done it. The New York…

Rumor: Intel in Discussions to Produce Apple Chips

Reuters is reporting that Intel has been in rather unlikely discussions that could pave the way for the processor giant producing chips to Apple specifications. A source “close to one of the companies” claims that executives from both Apple and Intel have met over the past year to discuss the idea of Intel making chips…

The World’s Smallest Arm Chip Is Going To Be Inside You

Manufactured by Freescale, this chunk of silicon claims to be the world’s smallest ARM-powered chip. Measuring just 2 x 2 x 0.5 millimeters, it’s so small that it will likely end up inside… you. It packs a modest 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, paired with 32KB of flash memory and 4KB of RAM. That might…