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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Return to Sender who wrote (11916)	9/30/2003 10:22:20 AM
From: Gottfried	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95390

RtS, link to your hearts content. :) PS: the drop seems like a mini panic. VIX up slightly. Gottfried

To: Return to Sender who wrote (11916)	9/30/2003 10:22:52 AM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95390

I.B.M. to Disclose Power-Saving Chip Design [NYT 9.30.03] By STEVE LOHR The International Business Machines Corporation plans to announce a new semiconductor design today that it asserts could greatly improve the performance or reduce the power consumption of wireless devices like cellphones compared with today's technology. The new chip design, researchers say, could be used in a number of advanced applications like streaming movie-quality video in cellphones and so-called smart automobile cruise controls — radio technology that would alert a driver when a vehicle is too close to another. The chip technology, which is being described by I.B.M. researchers today at a conference in Toulouse, France, could be widely available in the marketplace within five years, according to the company. Research breakthroughs, however promising, often fail to make their way into widely used products. An innovative chip design, for example, may prove economically difficult to manufacture in high volume. Or a design may show impressive performance in the laboratory but run into fundamental technical constraints — generating too much heat — that hinder its use. But semiconductor experts who have read the research paper seem impressed. Yoshio Nishi, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, said the new design was "a really outstanding achievement." Mr. Nishi, a former director of research at Texas Instruments, said he did not see any fundamental obstacles to manufacturing the chip that I.B.M. would not be able to overcome. <font color=red>I.B.M. scientists made two breakthroughs. First, they designed bipolar chips in such a way that when placed on a thin silicon-on-insulator wafer they could process data at four times the speed that had been achieved in previous experiments, while consuming one-fourth the power. </font> Bipolar transistors are widely used in wireless-communications devices because they are excellent low-noise amplifiers of radio frequency signals. But as currently designed, bipolar transistors — originally used in mainframe computers — tend to be expensive and consume a lot of power, said Ghavam Shahidi, director of silicon science at I.B.M. Research. The silicon-on-insulator technology is one of a series of advances in manufacturing that have been applied to making mainstream computer chips, using a technology known as complementary metal oxide semiconductor, or C.M.O.S. In the silicon-on-insulator process, an ultrathin layer of insulating material is embedded just under the surface of the silicon wafer. The insulating layer sharply reduces the amount of electronic charge a transistor must store each time it is turned on. <font color=red>The other design innovation, researchers say, was the integration of the bipolar technology with traditional C.M.O.S. technology on a single wafer. </font> That combination, they say, will allow advanced "mixed-signal" chips that support both computing applications as well as high-frequency communications applications. Those capabilities will be crucial for new generations of cellphones, which increasingly will be both phones and powerful computers. "We are not at the end of our rope, but this is a significant jump," Mr. Shahidi said. nytimes.com see also eetimes.com