Transistors are tiny switches that are used as the fundamental building blocks of silicon chips.
In the semiconductor industry, identity has an importance that transcends the value of silicon chips.
The lithography processes used to make silicon chips get ever more expensive as transistors get smaller.
Most are produced in huge, ultra-clean factories using batch processes similar to those for making silicon chips.
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They can borrow the materials, manufacturing tools, knowledge, people, and markets to expand the utility of silicon chips.
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More than half of the world's silicon chips and 85% of its personal computers are assembled in Asia.
The supreme regularity of our silicon chips, optical glass, and electromagnetic wireless waves unleash endless possibilities for unpredictable creativity.
In 1965 Moore (he co-founded Intel three years later) noted that components on silicon chips were doubling every year.
In 1965 Moore (he cofounded Intel three years later) noted that components on silicon chips were doubling every year.
Now bandwidth progression roars along two to ten times faster than silicon chips.
And the combination of cheap silicon chips and cheap biochips could be potent.
In both cases, silicon chips are too rigid and expensive to be practical.
The scientists behind the project believe that, eventually, the technology could make its way into commercial use and be integrated into silicon chips.
As silicon chips continue to shrink they will eventually reach their physical limits and Moore's law will hit a brick wall.
In the never-ending quest for more speed and power in computers, ever-increasing numbers of individual transistors must be crammed onto silicon chips.
But the real goal is to have nanoscale transistors ready when silicon chips can no longer deliver annual increases in computer speed.
For Professor Rakesh Kumar at University of Illinois the demise of Moore's Law is being hastened by an insistence on making silicon chips operate flawlessly.
It appears that silicon chips are fated to evolve like crazy.
At present these LEDs are made in machines similar to those used to make silicon chips, by depositing layers of gallium nitride on sapphire-based wafers.
The promise of the Ion Torrent PGM is that it is based entirely on the kind of silicon chips the microprocessor industry has used for decades.
G6 mainframe computer depends on the use of silicon chips with copper connections that draw on solid-state physics research done in the firm's laboratory in the 1980s.
And just as the cost of making faster and faster silicon chips is rising exponentially, so is it getting more and more difficult to develop new drugs.
Telephone companies have used fiber for two decades, but the network boxes that reroute and switch the signals have always been based on silicon chips and copper circuitry.
Because we already know how to manufacture lots of silicon chips inexpensively using a batch, cookie-cutter approach, we can make micromachines cheaply, sometimes even 100 times cheaper than their traditional counterparts.
Paper transistors, and circuits based on them, are not, it must be said, going to replace silicon chips as the microprocessors in computers any time soon if only because they are nowhere near as miniaturised.
Moore's Law (which predicts that switch densities on silicon chips will double every 18 months, thus yielding a performance-doubling every 24 months) guarantees a 50 gigahertz chip in a Gateway or Dell box by 2010.
So it is that the world of silicon chips divides itself into two camps: the all-purpose ones that power desktop computers, and the fast, specialized, cheap ones that run cellular phones, answering machines or car engines.
This afternoon, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) will hold discussions with representatives of the Netherlands' company known as ASML, the world's second largest manufacturer of lithography machines used to produce high-quality silicon chips.
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