IEEE Spectrum: Semiconductors

New MEMS for Monitoring Bridges

HP's new, bigger MEMS sensor promises thousandfold sensitivity improvement

New Schemes for Powering Processors

Building an on-chip high-voltage transmission grid is one way researchers think they could distribute power better

Nobel Controversy: Who Deserves Credit for Inventing the CCD?

An interview with Carlo Sequin, a member of the Bell Labs CCD team. While recent Nobel Prize winners Willard Boyle and George Smith sketched out the charge transfer concept, they were not the ones who actually built the CCD, Sequin says.

Tunable Logic

New logic family could help optimize FPGA performance and power

The Recession's Silver Lining

How the semiconductor industry can use the recession to create the next technology renaissance

New Chips Loaded With Dummy Parts

Reverse-engineering firm reveals how "design for manufacturability" is changing the look of ICs

Semicondutor Manufacturing Plants can use as much water as a small city.

As the Industry Grows, Finding New Ways to Recycle and Conserve Water

Hot Chips for Games

Game development for mobile devices

Fantasy Sports Prep: Semiconductor Edition

David Kanter reviews and analyzes the 32nm process technologies presented at IEDM 2008 and VLSI 2009.

Crowdsourcing the Complexities of Electronic Design Automation

Researchers develop an online game that may one day help chipmakers improve their designs

Intel fellow gunshy about EUV future

Sam Sivakumar says Intel is hedging its bets

I believe in EUVL, I do I do!

Day One of International Workshop on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff in Nanotechnology Research Data

An incremental improvement to statistical analysis could lead to significant improvement in nanotech research

Sun Can Kill Rock, but Not Its Memory Tech

Sun's Rock processor is probably dead, but the technology behind it, transactional memory, lives on at competitors

Report: Sun Micro to Scrap Big Chip Project

The ambitious Rock multicore processor may now be as fractured as the computer firm itself

Semicon Industry Group Sees Hope After 2009

Semiconductor Industry Association predicts better times nearing

Sun's Rock CPU Could Be a Gem for Oracle

Upcoming processor first to use "transactional memory," a boon to programming multicore processors

Engineers Evolve Transistors for Next-Gen Chips

Evolutionary algorithms lead to new logic and memory that may smooth the way as CMOS nears its size limits

Slideshow: The Many Facets of Microchips

NOW WE’RE TALKING

The Speak & Spell was a learning toy that Texas Instruments created using its TMC0281, the first single-chip speech synthesizer. One of the hits of Christmas 1978, the toy was the brainchild of four TI engineers [from left]: Gene Frantz, Richard Wiggins, Paul Breedlove, and Larry Brantingham.

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A hand-drawn diagram, a long-forgotten memo, a photo of a Ferrari--intriguing images of chips and their creators

The Runners-up: More Earthshaking Chips

These 13 great little chips didn't make our list--mainly because we ran out of space in print. And, well, one isn't even a chip