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    Home Latest News

      Alchemy Gets the Last Laugh

      By
      Peter Coffee
      -
      December 8, 2006
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        An announcement due out today from MIT will report initial results from work with “III-V compound semiconductors”: composite materials, in particular indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), which have shown the ability to handle 2.5 times the current of silicon devices and to provide high performance at voltages as low as 0.5 V in devices on the order of only 60-nanometer size.

        The announcement credits much of the new devices’ performance to the high quality of the material produced by MBE Technology of Singapore. It’s ironic that the next major breakthroughs in computing that carry us into the next decade may be made, not by the applied math of software science or in the artificial timing-diagram world of computer architecture, but in the latest revisions of the old-fashioned alchmists’ workshops. It’s useful to recall that real engineering, sometimes resembling magic as much as science, is the underpinning of digital miracles.

        Bits are a lie, at best a useful approximation to the truth. Cheerleaders for fad labels like Web 2.0 or “the digital lifestyle” forget this at their peril.

        Peter Coffee
        Peter Coffee is Director of Platform Research at salesforce.com, where he serves as a liaison with the developer community to define the opportunity and clarify developers' technical requirements on the company's evolving Apex Platform. Peter previously spent 18 years with eWEEK (formerly PC Week), the national news magazine of enterprise technology practice, where he reviewed software development tools and methods and wrote regular columns on emerging technologies and professional community issues.Before he began writing full-time in 1989, Peter spent eleven years in technical and management positions at Exxon and The Aerospace Corporation, including management of the latter company's first desktop computing planning team and applied research in applications of artificial intelligence techniques. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, he has held teaching appointments in computer science, business analytics and information systems management at Pepperdine, UCLA, and Chapman College.

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