Chips

Highlighting the march of technology, IBM has unveiled new semiconductor chips with the smallest transistors ever made. The new 2- nanometer tech allows the company to cram a staggering 50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail.

Engineers have created one of the smallest memory storage devices ever, made out of a 2D material measuring 1 nanometer square. The device works on the movements of single atoms, paving the way for memory systems with incredible information density.

Engineers at EPFL have created a new computer chip that can both process and store data in the same circuit. It’s made using a two-dimensional material called molybdenum disulfide, paving the way for smaller and more energy efficient electronics.

​We're getting one step closer to a portable, practical and affordable "cocaine breathalyzer," thanks to research being conducted at the University at Buffalo. Scientists there have created a chip that detects the drug in samples of a person's blood, breath, urine or saliva.

​When the water in a building's air conditioning system gets infected with Legionella bacteria, people can get Legionnaires' disease. Therefore, it's important to check that water for the bacteria on a regular basis. A new chip is promised to do the job faster than ever.

Intel has used CES to unveil a new kind of processor with a Radeon GPU built right into it. By embedding a Radeon RX Vega M Graphics chip into an 8th Gen Intel Core CPU, the new configuration can share power and data more efficiently and boost the graphical grunt in smaller devices.

Samsung has started mass production of new embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) chips, which should bump up the storage capacity of future smartphones to a more capacious 512 GB. The chips can reportedly double the density of storage in the same amount of physical space as the previous unit.

Several benefits previously exclusive to Qualcomm's high-end 800 series processors are coming to the mid-ranged 600 series. If smartphone makers push these chips to their full capabilities, budget phones could have much more to offer.

With different IoT devices having different hardware setups that achieve similar ends, Intel is aiming to streamline things for manufacturers with the Compute Card, a self-contained, customizable computer the size of a credit card, that can power various IoT devices.

Resistive random-access memory (RRAM) is an emerging tech that relies on temperature and voltage to store data, although exactly how is a mystery. Now a team has investigated the chips and found the optimal temperature range was lower than expected, paving the way for more efficient memory.

Swarm, a new chip architecture developed at MIT, automates critical aspects of parallel processing to speed up multi-core CPUs by up to 75 times, while requiring programmers to write a fraction of the code​.

As electronic devices are becoming outdated at an increasingly fast pace, e-waste continues to be a huge problem. That's why scientists have started producing "wooden" semiconductor chips that could almost entirely biodegrade once left in a landfill.