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Article: Transistors: A tall story.(development of transistors that have a vertical current flow, rather than a horizontal one)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 4, 1999
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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MOORE'S meta-law, as coined by The Economist, states that every improvement in the technology of chip-making is followed by a spate of press articles--most of which begin by describing Moore's law--hailing the improvement as a breakthrough. (Moore's law itself predicts that the number of transistors that can be fitted on to a chip doubles roughly every 18 months, thus allowing computers to double in speed, or to fall in price by half.) The meta-law holds because engineers are always claiming that their new trick will turn the business of chip-making upside down.
For the latest twist in chip design--devised by a team at Bell Labs, the research arm of Lucent ...