The New Chips
''The amount of research and the effort has just gone ballistic'' in the past three years,
says James Harris, a Stanford professor who is studying the new chips in his lab. New semiconductors add blue to the array of colored lights known as diodes, below.
Mercury News photos by Richard Wisdom
New chips promise to extend electronic revolution's reach
A NEW GENERATION of much sturdier semiconductor materials is poised to go where no chip
has gone before -- into hot, hostile, even radioactive places ranging from factory smokestacks
to the innards of jet engines. Not that the old familiar workhorse, silicon, is doomed. For 99 percent of all the things
that electronics can do, it will still be the chip of choice, scientists say. But a new type of semiconductor material, under development for decades and just now entering the market, should greatly extend the reach of the electronic revolution. The first products -- tiny devices that give off blue light, the one color that's been missing from full-color displays -- went on sale in 1991. Next up, researchers say, are a tough new breed of integrated circuits and the first minuscule lasers that cast a blue beam.
Story by Mercury News
Staff Writer Glennda Chui
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