Transistors

International Business Machines on Tuesday announced experimental transistors that it said are the smallest in the world and the most powerful of their type. IBM said the "field-effect" transistors could some day make it possible to forecast weather or recognize human speech on machines the size of today's personal computers instead of giant mainframes.

Arthur P. Stern, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor whose prominent career in electronic engineering included leading the development of General Electric's first transistor radio in the 1950s and guiding the commercialization of satellite navigation at Magnavox in the 1970s, has died. He was 86. Stern, a national leader in the progressive Jewish community, died of congestive heart failure May 24 at his home in Beverly Hills, said his son, Claude. After being imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, Stern trained as an electrical engineer, immigrated to the United States in 1951 and joined General Electric's Electronics Laboratory in Syracuse, N.Y. At GE in the early '50s, Stern participated in the development of the company's first electronic color TV system before being appointed project leader to develop GE's first transistor radio.

IBM Corp. says it has perfected a technique for making faster transistors, opening the door to advanced microprocessors. The advance, to be reported this week at a conference in Washington, will make long-sought "double-gate" transistors economical in chip manufacturing within five years, said Bijan Davari, IBM's vice president of semiconductor development. As a result, chip performance probably will improve by 30% to 100%, Davari said.

Morgan Sparks, 91, a former member of the Bell Telephone Laboratories scientific team who played a crucial role in the development of the improved, second- generation transistor in the early 1950s, died of congestive heart failure May 3 at his daughter's home in Fullerton. Sparks, who joined Bell Labs in New Jersey during World War II, worked on the junction transistor, an improvement on the original transistor invented by Bell scientists in 1947 and designed to replace vacuum tubes.

Scientists are fine-tuning a new transistor that cranks out computations 10 times faster than existing computer technology. The transistor, under development by federal scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, could benefit everything from computers and cell phones to satellites and toxic-materials sensors. "If you can integrate this with conventional silicon processing, it would mean cheaper, faster, smaller, better," said Paul R.

Intel Corp. will showcase a new type of transistor next week as the biggest maker of computer chips looks for ways to build devices that are 500 times faster than today's yet don't need too much energy. The so-called TeraHertz transistors, still being researched at Intel and scheduled for release as early as 2005, operate at a speed of 1,000 gigahertz. They generate little heat and will use only about as much power as today's best 2-GHz chips, Intel said.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., maker of Panasonic, Quasar and Technics products, said Thursday that it will buy about 5 million transistors a month from Motorola Inc. beginning this month. The announcement in Tokyo follows an agreement between the companies made earlier this year. It marks the first time a Japanese consumer electronics maker has made large purchases of semiconductor devices custom-made by a U.S.-based company.

Intel Corp. on Wednesday announced a microprocessor chip that it says contains the most transistors of any computer chip on the market. Intel said it packed 2.5 million transistors on the chip, called the i860 XP. That compares to 1.2 million transistors on Intel's 486 microprocessor, which is its most powerful processor chip used in IBM-type personal computers. Increasing the number of transistors speeds up the processing power of a chip.

Scientists have invented a new transistor that can switch on and off 140 billion times a second, 12 times faster than transistors used in supercomputers, it was announced Monday. The "bipolar transistor," created at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., could have applications in computers, microwave communications and light-wave communications systems that use lasers. A transistor is a solid-state device that controls the flow of electrons in a circuit.

The transistor age began 40 years ago this month when the human voice was amplified by an unlikely contraption that looked like the insides of a light bulb. No one said, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." The New York Times devoted just 4 1/2 inches at the bottom of page 46 to the public announcement the following summer. Nevertheless, that secret demonstration at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., on Dec. 23, 1947, marked the foundation of modern electronics.

A little electronic device that triggered one of the most dramatic technological explosions in history turns 60 on Sunday. The humble transistor and its descendant, the semiconductor chip, which made the digital revolution possible, today touch nearly every facet of our lives. All around us, billions upon billions of transistors are quietly at work in computers, cellphones, radios, TVs, printers, copiers, CD players, cars -- in anything with electronics in it.

Intel Corp. plans to roll out its newest generation of microprocessors today, flexing its manufacturing muscle with a sophisticated new approach that crams up to 40% more transistors onto a chip. The world's largest semiconductor company plans to start shipping 16 new microprocessors -- which also boast inventive materials to reduce electricity loss -- for use in servers and high-end personal computers.

James M. Early, 81, an electrical engineer and inventor best known for his pioneering work with transistors, died Jan. 12 at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto. The cause of death was not reported. Early created much of the design theory of bipolar transistors at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked for Nobel Prize winner William Shockley. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Early was the second of nine children.

Intel Corp. said Tuesday that it had figured out how to shrink transistors for PCs so that 1 billion could fit on a single chip, making it possible to pack the power of a supercomputer into a device the size of a deck of cards. Loading a chip with so many transistors -- Intel's Pentium 4 microprocessor for personal computers holds about 55 million -- would give it mind-boggling muscle while potentially lowering its price.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said it had shrunk key elements of the semiconductor, a development that could lead to a chip with 1 billion transistors. Transistors are the tiny switches that are the basic element of a microprocessor and, when they are flipped on and off in a blindingly rapid series of sequences, give a chip its computational power. Microprocessors are the brains that run personal computers. AMD, based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

IBM Corp. said it has built a transistor that outperforms today's top silicon-based semiconductors and may be the key to smaller, faster computers. The carbon nanotube transistor is about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

It was 40 years ago this week that AT&T's Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., introduced the transistor--a tiny, reliable and relatively inexpensive substitute for the bulky, fragile vacuum tube. The announcement ushered in the "solid-state" revolution, spawning the semiconductor industry and making possible dramatic changes in communications, computers and other fields. For their achievement, physicists William Shockley, Walter H.

A newly developed transistor made of plastic operates at least 1,000 times as fast as previous transistors based on organic materials and is considered a significant step in the development of so-called molecular electronic devices. Industrial scientists caution that molecular electronic devices, such as the new transistor developed at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, are still too immature for everyday use.

IBM Corp. says it has perfected a technique for making faster transistors, opening the door to advanced microprocessors. The advance, to be reported this week at a conference in Washington, will make long-sought "double-gate" transistors economical in chip manufacturing within five years, said Bijan Davari, IBM's vice president of semiconductor development. As a result, chip performance probably will improve by 30% to 100%, Davari said.

Intel Corp. will showcase a new type of transistor next week as the biggest maker of computer chips looks for ways to build devices that are 500 times faster than today's yet don't need too much energy. The so-called TeraHertz transistors, still being researched at Intel and scheduled for release as early as 2005, operate at a speed of 1,000 gigahertz. They generate little heat and will use only about as much power as today's best 2-GHz chips, Intel said.