Sony's AIBO robotic dog is a peek at a bizarre future when you won't know if a dog--or the pretty girl walking it--is flesh and blood or plastic and memory chips.
AIBO SITS PATIENTLY ON FREDERIC KAPLAN'S office floor. It remains still when Kaplan leans over to switch it on, but it beeps to reassure us it's awake. Then it stirs. Raising its head, wagging its tail, and with all the poise of a Romanian gymnast finishing off a floor...

Lines of communication.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is in no rush to choose an editor, or maybe it's the other way around, but in some situations, editors, reporters and others continue to flounder at an alarming rate, as shown in fifth-floor conferences and a variety of well-founded rumors, to wit: Discussions have...

Low alpha lead and microtome sliced lead for assessment of alpha particle emissions for computer chip manufacturing. (Collegiate Communications--Undergraduate).
Soft errors in computer memory chips arise when [sup.210]Pb, a radon daughter, generates [sup.210]Po which emits high energy alpha particles (5.3 MeV) in lead solder bumps. These emissions change the charge state of individual transistors. Evidently, the smaller the distance between transistors, the greater the possibility for the computer...

Elephant chips.
EVER GET THE FEELING YOU'VE LEFT the oven on? William Warren had that feeling a couple of years ago, and he was right. Someone in his semiconductor research group at Sandia National Laboratories had accidentally kept an experimental capacitor--a type of component in an electric circuit--roasting too long in the...

Protons as memory aids.
One of the nightmares of the computer age is losing an important document when a power outage or some other mishap shuts down the computer before the user could save the file. Researchers have now harnessed protons embedded in a layer of silicon dioxide to develop a prototype microelectronic...

High-tech hoax: Bill Clinton is no friend of Silicon Valley.
During the presidential campaign and since taking office, Bill Clinton has implied that his plans for high-technology subsidies enjoy the unanimous support of Silicon Valley. T. J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and a longtime critic of industrial policy (see "The New Mr. Chips," July 1990), begs...

Memories are made of this.
GETTING A COMPUTER to remember what you tell it has always posed something of a problem. Memories can be etched permanently during manufacture onto a read-only memory (ROM) chip, but they can never be updated or altered, at least within your computer. Or they can live fleetingly in a...

Twenty things that will be obsolete in twenty years.
ON A FLIGHT FROM TOKYO RECENTLY, MY gaze wandered from the computer sitting in my lap to the Pacific 20,000 feet below. As we descended toward Los Angeles, I watched the blue ripples relentlessly marching toward a distant shore. Suddenly I realized it would be possible to calculate from...

A faster DDR3 chip from Micron.
Micron Technology Asia Pacific Inc, Taiwan, has developed a 1 Gbit double-data-rate memory (DDR3) chip that significantly reduces power consumption, compared to other DDR chips. The chip, likely to be called DDR3 SDRAM (Double Data Rate 3 Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory), will be part of the...

Fastest embedded dynamic random access memory.
Toshiba Corp, Japan, has achieved the world's fastest circuit technology for embedded dynamic random access memory (DRAM) for system large-scale integrations (LSI), achieving a speed of 833 MHz at a density of 32 Mb. The technology will be applied to graphic processing LSI. Embedded DRAMs are applied...