JANUARY 30
The transistor gets its most thorough
makeover in nearly 40 years. Intel and
IBM change the composition of the gate
stack, which researchers say is necessary
for the perpetuation of Moore’s Law. The
new high-k plus metal-gate (HK+MG)
design swaps silicon-dioxide insulation,
which has become rather leaky at only
five atoms thick, and a silicon gate for a
“high-k” dielectric insulator and a metal
gate. The redesign will curb power leakage
and consumption and debuts in
Intel’s Penryn chips.
MARCH 30
With the 2009 switch to digital-only TV
broadcasts, the Federal Communications
Commission decides to sell the
700-MHz spectrum that analog TV has
been occupying. A Jan. 16, 2008 auction
date is set, with mobile carriers like
AT&T and Verizon expected to offer
competitive bids. Google is also vying to
be a major player in the deal, which is
expected to generate over $10 billion.APRIL 3
Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore delivers
the keynote address at the Embedded
Systems Conference,
calling on
engineers to stop
global warming.
The former vice
president asks
engineers to
design with efficiency
and conservation
in
mind to improve the “grossly inefficient
systems running our
energy economy.” The
climate crisis, Gore
says, could be the
impetus needed to
inspire a new wave of
electrical engineers.APRIL 4
Skilled foreign workers flood
the offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services with requests for H-1B
visas, reaching the 65,000-visa cap in
just two days. In 2006, applications
took two months to stack up. Congress
is now working on immigration reform,
and part of that includes possibly
upping the cap to 115,000, as well as
raising the limit on employment-based
visas from 140,000 to 290,000 per year.
Major tech companies favor the move,
and the Semiconductor Industry Association
(SIA) and the IEEE have openly
supported it.JUNE 7
The International Trade Commission
(ITC) bans U.S. imports of Qualcomm
3G wireless chips as well as the phones
that use them. Rival company Broadcom
Corp. alleged that Qualcomm
infringed on power-management
patents in its chips. In August, Qualcomm
requests a presidential veto on
the ban that is denied, and a stay of the
ban on its chip imports is denied in September—
although a U.S. Court of
Appeals allows AT&T, Motorola, and
Samsung to import their phones.JUNE 19
Matsushita claims to be the first company
to begin volume production of
45-nm chips. The competition is on
with IBM, Intel, TSMC, Texas Instruments,
and others all racing to
launch volume production
of their own 45-nm chips.JUNE 29
The much-hyped Apple
iPhone hits stores, and
consumers prove the
device’s touchscreen display
and blanket Internet
access are worth standing
in line for. Apple sells 1
million phones by Sept.
10, even though Steve
Jobs announces a price redux in early September. Apple cuts the
price of the 8-Gbyte model by $200 and
does away with the 4-Gbyte model.
Generous Jobs offers a $100 store credit
to those customers who paid full price
for the phone.JULY 6
Microsoft sets aside just over $1 billion
for warranty repairs to the Xbox 360
after scores of customers receive the
deadly “three flashing lights” error message.
Despite technical difficulties,
Xbox comes in second in sales to the
Nintendo Wii, which sells 9 million
units by October. Sony’s PlayStation 3,
which was released the same time as
Wii, finishes last in the gaming console
wars with about 5 million units sold.AUGUST 4
Blackouts halt production at Samsung’s
NAND fabs in Korea. Some industry
analysts predict the outages will give the
memory chip market the boost it needs,
after being in a slump for most of the
year. Revenues, led by DRAM and
NAND-type flash, were on a decline
due to a drop in average selling prices
(ASPs) prompted by an oversupply. The
outages, coupled with demand for
NAND from the iPhone as well as the
holiday season, could get the market
back on its feet.AUGUST 16
Sprint announces plans to spend $5 billion
building WiMAX networks to
bring high-speed Internet to cities. The
company plans to have networks up and
running in Chicago, Baltimore, and
Washington, D.C., by the end of the
year and commercial services available
under its XOHM brand in 2008.AUGUST 24
George Hotz, a 17-
year-old college student
from New Jersey,
cracks the code that
ties the iPhone to
AT&T. The world’s
first iPhone unlock
enables the smart
phone to
work with a sim card
from any other network
provider. Hotz’s hack
sparks a number of companies
that claim to provide the
unlocking service, turning up a
host of legal issues still unresolved.SEPTEMBER 3
IBM announces two innovations signaling
the beginning of computing’s atomic
age. Its Almaden Research Center measures
the ability to store a bit of data on a
single atom, paving the way for harddisk
drives that store up to 1000 times
as much information than today’s
drives, which use a million atoms to
store a single bit of information. The
company’s Zurich Research Lab
demonstrates switching at the
single-molecule level. With
switches that small,
processors could be
scaled down to
make a supercomputer
on a
chip the size of
a speck of dust.
Continued on Page 2
SEPTEMBER 6 Intel revamps its Xeon 7300 quad-core server processors just days before rival company AMD launches its Opteron processor. AMD releases its quad-core Opteron on Sept. 10, just 10 months after Xeon’s initial launch. A week later, to increase competition with Intel, AMD releases triplecore processors that offer fast speeds but lower prices than processors with four cores.SEPTEMBER 7 The U.S. House of Representatives passes its version of the Patent Reform Act of 2007, which focuses on minimizing patent litigation by making it harder to claim infringement on intellectual property. Big companies like Intel, Apple, and Microsoft hail the bill’s passage, but it isn’t likely that the Bush administration will sign off on the legislation.SEPTEMBER 17 Europe’s second-highest court upholds a 2004 antitrust ruling against Microsoft. The company allegedly abused its market power by adding a digital media player to Windows, undercutting Real Networks. The ruling could be a bad sign for other big tech companies like Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm, who are also under scrutiny in Europe.OCTOBER 1 Fairchild Semiconductor celebrates its 50th birthday. The company started the Silicon Valley sprawl after being founded in Palo Alto by the “Traitorous Eight.” These engineers left another firm that was started by William Shockley, one of the three original inventors of the transistor. Fairchild engineers birthed companies like Intel, AMD, and Xilinx. National Semiconductor owned Fairchild for 10 years before spinning it out again into its own company in 1997.OCTOBER 10 Two European scientists are awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), a property employed in hard-disk-drive storage. In 1988, Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany described how particles used in data storage could get denser and still produce the electrical signals computers read as ones or zeros, enabling the shrinkage of disk drives.NOVEMBER 12 Intel releases Penryn, the industry’s first line of 45-nm processors. The dual-core processors incorporate Intel’s HK+MG transistor design the company announced in January.DECEMBER 2007 Sony starts selling its 11-in. organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs in Japan. The 3-mm thick screens boast high-res images and wide-angle views. The TVs are expected to eventually compete with LCD and plasma screens.