This is from an interesting BBC article on the creation of computer chips in Silicon Valley. Click here to read the full article.
“Silicon, with its insulating qualities, has been what computer chips have been etched on since they started.
But silicon is getting leaky and hot as the line widths shrink down to 45 nano- microns, the width of a human hair.
So Intel has tuned to this new base, hafnium, to run cooler and less leaky chips, even though the activity on them is doubling in intensity all the time.
Those new chips aren’t on sale yet, but there’s a ferocious price war going on between Intel and its feisty but small rival, AMD. At the moment, AMD is losing out.
Meanwhile, IBM scientists report they’ve come up with a way of storing information on individual atoms, a deep dive into nanotechnology from the inventors of the scanning tunnelling microscope that makes it possible to “see” at these tiny levels. “
So, we can now write to atoms?
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