Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have come a long way since the first working device was reported three decades ago. Prized for their dark blacks, crisp image reproduction, and power efficiency, today’s OLEDs dominate the screens of Android phones and LG televisions. They may take over iPhones as early as next year. And because OLEDs are cheap and easy […]
A lot can change in seven years. Google Glass, a wearable display with a camera and other tools that feed wearers information and allow them to capture photos and videos, began shipping to selected developers in 2013. It was released as a more open beta test in 2014. Then, in early 2015, Google withdrew the product. It has since […]
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Power consumption and heat generation: these hurdles impede progress toward faster, cheaper chips, and are worrying semiconductor industry veterans far more than the slowing of Moore’s Law. That was the takeaway from several discussions about current and future chip technologies held in Silicon Valley this week. John Hennessy—president emeritus of Stanford University, Google chairman, and MIPS Computer Systems founder—says […]
How might the U.S. chip industry solve a problem like China? A panel of semiconductor industry veterans took up this question at a Churchill Club event this week. The group generally expressed worry about the impact China will have on the future of the U.S. chip industry, and the lack of good ideas about how […]
What seems like a simple task—building a useful form of augmented reality into comfortable, reasonably stylish, eyeglasses—is going to need significant technology advances on many fronts, including displays, graphics, gesture tracking, and low-power processor design. That was the message of Sha Rabii, Facebook’s head of silicon and technology engineering. Rabii, speaking at Arm TechCon 2019 in […]
Scientists and engineers in Switzerland and California have come up with a technique that can reveal the 3D design of a modern microprocessor without destroying it. Typically today, such reverse engineering is a time-consuming process that involves painstakingly removing each of a chip’s many nanometers-thick interconnect layers and mapping them using a hierarchy of different imaging techniques, from […]
Optical microcomputing, next-generation compact LiDAR units, and on-chip spectrometers all took a step closer to reality with the recent announcement of a new kind of optical lens. The lens is not made of glass or plastic, however. Rather, this low-loss, on-chip lens is made from thin layers of specialized materials on top of a silicon […]
In a lawsuit filed in California, U.S. battery manufacturer Celgard, a subsidiary of Polypore International, has sued Shenzhen Senior Technology Material Co., Ltd. (Senior) for patent infringement and for misappropriating Celgard’s trade secrets and confidential information. The suit has a bit of a spy novel twist in that Celgard alleges in its complaint that one of […]
Silicon Valley-based D2S revealed last week that it had solved the last problem in a nascent technique called inverse lithography technology, or ILT. The breakthrough could speed the process of making chips and allow semiconductor fabs to produce more advanced chips without upgrading equipment. The solution, a custom-built computer system, reduces the amount of time needed […]