Semiconductors

Intel Corp. has built a new chip packed with a record 2 billion transistors, more than doubling the processing power of a line of its chips for supercomputers, the company said Monday. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to present more information on its latest Itanium processor and a string of other technological achievements this week at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Dell Inc. has stopped selling many computers with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on its website, although it will continue selling some through retailers. The news was a setback for AMD, which wooed Dell for years before breaking the computer maker's exclusive supplier relationship with Intel Corp. in 2006. Intel still made the processors used in most computers sold by Dell online. But AMD raised its profile in the chip field by being inside some Dell machines.

A long-delayed project to attract computer chip makers to the Mexico-California border is getting a green makeover. Silicon Border Development said Wednesday that it had obtained financing to move ahead with a science park in Mexicali, Mexico, thanks largely to a new strategy of targeting companies in the fast-growing solar energy industry. German solar cell manufacturer Q-Cells is on track to break ground soon in the 3,000-acre site just across the border from Calexico, Calif.

UCLA and Caltech researchers have created the densest computer memory chip ever, a device that can comfortably hold the Declaration of Independence yet is only the size of a white blood cell. The experimental device is nowhere near commercialization, but it demonstrates the potential of molecular manufacturing techniques, which promise to overcome the size limitations of silicon circuitry.

Hafnium Valley doesn't have the same ring to it, but it turns out Silicon Valley's biggest hope for maintaining the dizzying pace of computing advancement isn't silicon. Two chip-making giants will use another substance, a metal called hafnium, to replace silicon in one key part of the semiconductor, each company said Saturday. The competing breakthroughs from Intel Corp. and IBM Corp.

Applied Materials Inc., the world's biggest maker of semiconductor-production equipment, said first-quarter profit more than doubled after it delivered more machines to memory-chip companies. Net income rose to $403.5 million, or 29 cents a share, from $142.8 million, or 9 cents, a year earlier, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said. Sales increased 23% to $2.28 billion in the three months ended Jan. 28.

IBM Corp. has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on microchips and double the performance of processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with one that uses less space on a slice of silicon. The company said Wednesday that its new memory technology would help unclog crippling bottlenecks that built up as increasingly powerful microprocessors attempted to retrieve data from a separate memory chip faster than it could be delivered.

Hafnium was known to hardly anyone outside a handful of scientists and engineers until late last month, when Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. announced a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors that will use the silvery metal. The stable and benign substance, listed No. 72 on the periodic table of elements, has made a breakthrough to the next generation of semiconductors possible, the companies said.

The U.S. semiconductor industry appears to have worked through an inventory glut that had hurt fourth-quarter earnings and sent shares tumbling. Analysts said they expected shares of companies that make microchips to rise in the coming months as orders increased from customers that were using up inventory in the fourth quarter.

Enough with the dillydallying. It's time to get the lead out. That seemed to be the rallying cry Wednesday when nearly 10,000 space-age engineers gathered in Los Angeles to talk motherboards, modules and meltdowns as the computer circuit world faces its biggest challenge in its 70-year existence. The experts are attending the Printed Circuits Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center.