integrated circuit

More than 40 years ago, Gordon E. Moore, one of the cofounders of Intel, observed that the number of transistors that could be incorporated into an integrated circuit had increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. Despite the challenges posed by the incredibly minute sizes of modern-day chips, Moore's Law is expected to hold true for at least another decade.

Having retired from Intel a dozen years ago, maybe Moore has time to work on a new law: The growth in the number of attorneys needed to litigate new chip designs.

Freescale Semiconductor is entering the fast-growing netbook market with a solution that promises to make possible portable devices that feature 8.9-inch displays, eight hours of battery life, and prices under $200.

Freescale's solution is based on its new i.MX515 processor featuring ARM Cortex-A8 technology. The solution includes software, components and resources that aim to help OEMs rapidly develop and deploy netbooks.

It will come as no surprise that Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang believes in the future of graphics processing. As he pointed out in a two-and-a-half hour presentation at the Nvision 2008 conference, today's GPUs have the equivalent of 1,000 times the processing power of a Cray supercomputer from 30 years ago.

What's less obvious is that Huang also sees Nvidia's future in smartphones.

Chip designers have been in a furious race against Moore's Law -- the observation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years -- with some experts suspecting the industry will soon be unable to maintain that rate of growth.

But research announced Thursday suggests chip designers still have a few tricks up their sleeves that may substantially advance Moore's Law. IBM and the Berlin-based Fraunhofer Institute demonstrated a prototype design of a 3-D, water-cooled chipstack.

High-volume network applications are driving the need for optimization technologies. Web transaction rates and throughput continue to increase exponentially with Internet-driven applications and media-rich communications. In response, customers in all verticals are considering deploying or upgrading server load-balancing technology to handle high-volume network applications.

Here are four tips for choosing the right server load-balancing technology for your Web applications.

Computers that boot instantly to the exact place where you left off and mobile devices that don't need recharging for weeks. These are only some of the possibilities resulting from Hewlett-Packard research that proves the existence of what the company described as "the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering."