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To: TimbaBear who wrote (52656)	6/21/2006 1:40:43 AM
From: shades	Respond to of 116555

This is still quite revolutionary I suspect. IBM suffered from an inept corporate culture - they would fund research - shelve it because it was TOO revolutionary - the scientist would leave to japan and a few years later dumb IBM was leasing technology from asian companies they themselves had initially funded! Gates made the same observations in so many areas of IBM. IBM had many amazing things that were revolutionary but bringing them to you the little retail customer was never a real concern. Gerstner once joked to some mainframe guys the PC division was just expensive advertising/marketing that didn't really pay for itself - hehe. There was a lot of hope when they brought in a NON IBM cultured CEO amongst the geeks there that finally we could start changing the world. They laid off lots of dead middle management and tried to finally bring the innovations to the masses - we had the butterfly keyboard on the thinkpads - even mac fans were drooling - the new CEO now is from the old culture. So much for that experiment. Notice the recent articles posted here where he is focusing on mainframe research and initiatives. Gates kept trying and trying to tell these guys its about empowering billions with an individual PC - this groupware stuff at the high end was not the future. I remember reading about Xerox - they were afraid of GUI software and mice and such because some corporate heads thought it would cannibalize thier copier business - so they shelve it - Steve Jobs comes in to their labs and sees the future and makes all the money. Good artists copy - but great artists steal - I think he said that a few times. Look at the PDA/cellphone market - where is the IBM products in that? I read SI daily on my windows mobile 5.0 platform device - IBM is long gone if you think "revolutionary"

To: TimbaBear who wrote (52656)	6/21/2006 3:50:35 AM
From: XBrit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

You're kind of correct. Current state of the art commercial SiGe BiCMOS technologies only give 200 GHz, so if those grad students got 375 GHz in their lab experiments, it would be a nice advance when commercialized. Exactly on the speed trend for such devices by the way, so presumably several other players will have comparable results soon. These are very expensive transistor fabrication processes, and are economic only for relatively small circuits like radio receivers. They are low-power in the sense that compared to traditional Bipolar they consume much less, but that's not even close to CMOS. If you tried to use this technology for the 100-500M transistors in a Pentium, it would probably consume 2000 Watts, cost $50 million per chip, and have almost zero yield. (A long while ago, Bernie Meyerson was in the next office to me at IBM Research. All I knew about him was he was incredibly annoying... whistled loudly all the time. I later learned he was doing world-changing research on chemical vapor deposition of Ge onto Si i.e. the very technology that this press release is about. Personally I still don't think it justified the whistling.)