That logic can become “digital is obvious. Mathematicians told us it could long before engineers delivered functioning digital computers. Three years ago, we began writing about a new concept –digital power, power under the control of systems so precise, so fast, that the power becomes as tractable, ordered, and determinate as digital logic.
We don’t normally begin with observations from TV correspondents, but James Oberg of NBC News has a rock-solid technical background, and his report came, coincidentally, in the middle of our own exploration of spectral imaging. “The search for debris from the space shuttle Columbia is receiving valuable support,” Oberg reported on March 27, “from a…
Jim Morgan’s law: The number of transistors on a wafer doubles even faster than you think. Gordon Moore’s 18-month doubling rate refers to transistor density– the number of transistors per square inch of silicon wafer. But wafers grow too: 50 millimeters (mm) in diameter in 1970, 200mm a couple of years ago.
We first wrote about radio-frequency (RF) powerchips in November 2000 (Powering RF Photons) – the high powered silicon LDMOS chips that amplify “radio-frequency” (RF) currents to power levels of a hundred Watts or more. These high-frequency currents drive the antennas that punch out signals from million base stations to reach a billion cell phones, along…
A company whose technology we like a lot has seen fit to give itself a name — II-VI (IIVI) — that only inveterate techies can appreciate. Accordingly, we begin this month with a brief review of high school chemistry – there’s simply no other way to make sense of where II-VI came from or what…
The very notion of an electrically powered battlefield seems preposterous, at first blush. How can the power behind the toaster and the hair dryer propel an artillery shell, a fighter plane, or a rocket? Where will they plug in the tanks? The short answer: In the same place they plug in submarines and the rest…
