Champion Chips

Hewlett-Packard researcher Howard Taub is showing off a sticker about the size of a hole punch. And he can barely contain his glee. That's because hidden in the little dot is a computer chip with enough memory to store a song, a photo, or a 100-page text document. The chip needs no battery, and it can communicate wirelessly with a special receiving device. Taub envisions a world where the chips, called Memory Spots, are stuck on all kinds of objects, and receivers are built into cellphones. But today he's stuck with a clunky prototype receiver, which is attached to a laptop via cable

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders, or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons

According to analysts, the most significant difference between the chips that power today's computers and the computer chips of the future is, in a word, size. In the future, there will be hundreds of billions of embedded chips and sensing devices integrated into everything from key chains and swimming pools to your apartment's walls and even your skin. All of these devices will be able to compute, sense and communicate with each other.

A revolutionary processor package that changes its architecture to adapt to the demands of different computing tasks more than met design expectations in recent trials. "What we have been creating is essentially a supercomputer on a chip," the creator said, "and not just a supercomputer, but a flexible supercomputer that reconfigures itself into the optimal supercomputer for each specific part of a multi-part task."

New thin-film semiconductor techniques invented by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers promise to add sensing, computing and imaging capability to an amazing array of materials. Historically, the semiconductor industry has relied on flat, two-dimensional chips upon which to grow and etch the thin films of material that become electronic circuits for computers and other electronic devices. But as thin as those chips might seem, they are quite beefy in comparison to the result of a new UW-Madison semiconductor fabrication process detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Physics. A team led by electrical and computer engineer Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma and materials scientist Max Lagally have developed a process to remove a single-crystal film of semiconductor from the substrate on which it is built.