Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.
Since the invention of the transistor, silicon semiconductors have been king. But now silicon-based transistors are nearing the limit of their potential. Excess heat and manufacturing hurdles are impeding the development of ever-faster and smaller processors.
David Crane is a man who isn't afraid of a challenge. When he took the helm at NRG Energy in the winter of 2003, the company was mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings -- just one of many companies caught in the meltdown of the U.S. power generation industry, instigated by the scandalous collapse of Texan power giant Enron in 2001.
Twenty four hours before the greatest scientific experiment of our time gets underway at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, political and scientific dignitaries assembled at a site a few hundred miles north east of the French/Swiss border at a site in Germany to inaugurate another groundbreaking engineering test.
It looks like a scene from an old episode of The X-Files: As a red-tailed hawk circles overhead and a wild pronghorn sheep grazes in the distance, a dozen people in dark sunglasses move methodically through a vast field of golden barley, eyes fixed to the ground, GPS devices in hand. They're searching for bodies.
Intel Corp. cracked the lid Tuesday on a new chip design that is at once a big challenge to smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and an admission that AMD nailed a key design feature before it slipped into a severe financial slump
Whisky is for drinkin', water is for fightin'.
Widespread anxiety about the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels, coupled with a genuine fear that oil and gas will become scarce before the century ends are fueling a renewed interest in renewable energy and, in particular, solar power solutions.
"We were at heightened security - we were at red," recalls Al Griffith, spokesman for the utility that owns the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire.
Clouds hang low over the New Mexico desert, deep inside a military reservation a dozen miles south of Albuquerque. A breeze stirs the air; tumbleweeds roll by. Then the sun shines through and a low...
Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.
Since the invention of the transistor, silicon semiconductors have been king. But now silicon-based transistors are nearing the limit of their potential. Excess heat and manufacturing hurdles are impeding the development of ever-faster and smaller processors.
David Crane is a man who isn't afraid of a challenge. When he took the helm at NRG Energy in the winter of 2003, the company was mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings -- just one of many companies caught in the meltdown of the U.S. power generation industry, instigated by the scandalous collapse of Texan power giant Enron in 2001.
Twenty four hours before the greatest scientific experiment of our time gets underway at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, political and scientific dignitaries assembled at a site a few hundred miles north east of the French/Swiss border at a site in Germany to inaugurate another groundbreaking engineering test.
It looks like a scene from an old episode of The X-Files: As a red-tailed hawk circles overhead and a wild pronghorn sheep grazes in the distance, a dozen people in dark sunglasses move methodically through a vast field of golden barley, eyes fixed to the ground, GPS devices in hand. They're searching for bodies.
Intel Corp. cracked the lid Tuesday on a new chip design that is at once a big challenge to smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and an admission that AMD nailed a key design feature before it slipped into a severe financial slump
Whisky is for drinkin', water is for fightin'.
Widespread anxiety about the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels, coupled with a genuine fear that oil and gas will become scarce before the century ends are fueling a renewed interest in renewable energy and, in particular, solar power solutions.
"We were at heightened security - we were at red," recalls Al Griffith, spokesman for the utility that owns the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire.
Clouds hang low over the New Mexico desert, deep inside a military reservation a dozen miles south of Albuquerque. A breeze stirs the air; tumbleweeds roll by. Then the sun shines through and a low...
With global warming on everyone's mind, combined with a slew of electronic gadgets consuming more and more electricity, there's a greater need than ever for clean coal technology in the United States.
Apple's unveiling of the iPhone at this year's Macworld trade show quietly signaled the end of Moore's Law as we know it. At the same time, it ushered in a new era of technical innovation, driven b...
Most people don't spend an hour gabbing on their cell phone in the middle of the day. It's just too expensive.
Big lumps of sooty coal hardly seem like the future of energy, but that's exactly what the U.S. Department of Energy predicts. Consumption of the fossil fuel --the main source of greenhouse gas and a major contributor to acid rain, smog and mercury poisoning --will hit 10.6 billion tons a year by 2030, a near doubling of the 5.4 billion tons burned in 2003, according to the agency.
The planet's most pressing environmental problems—global warming, energy shortages, overfishing, pollution—may seem just too big to be solved with today's technology. But don't despair: A lot of br...
Space weather forecasters revised their predictions for storminess after a major flare erupted on the sun overnight threatening damage to communication systems and power grids while offering up the wonder of Northern Lights.
Hands on" doesn't adequately describe Steve Sanghi's impulse for tinkering - whether it means donning a bunny suit at his company's chip-manufacturing plant to help troubleshoot defects, mixing it ...
Asking venture capitalists for great startup ideas is a little like asking Curt Schilling what pitch he's going to throw next. When we posed the question to dozens of VCs and investors around the c...
CNN.com asked users for their ideas on the best way to fuel America and break the country's dependence on fossil fuels, especially from foreign sources. Here is a sampling of the responses, some of which have been edited:
Aart de Geus is one of the most insightful people I know in the technology industry, so I was happy to sit down for lunch with him this week. De Geus is CEO and co-founder of Synopsys, a company that sits at the intersection of just about every trend there is.
In 1991, an instructor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business presented his class with a case study. It went like this: A CEO was scheduled to address a major industry gathering, and he could gi...
To reach the lab where IBM, Sony, and Toshiba engineers have spent four years and more than $400 million toiling in secret on a computer chip that, if they are right, will usher in a dramatic new e...
On a raw winter afternoon, the training manager at Cooper Nuclear Station, a power plant run by Entergy Corp. on the bleak plains of eastern Nebraska, sits across a conference table from his boss, ...
MARK WADSWORTH JUST chuckles when he thinks of it. Still tooling around on Mars with slowly dying batteries, the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity--which began sending pictures of the Red Planet's...
The silicon chip is the most significant invention developed during the past 50 years, according to a poll of CNN.com users.
Outside, it's another warm summer afternoon in Madison, Pa., a forested suburb 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Inside—in a brightly lit Westinghouse control room packed with computer monitors, sc...
Rick Priory was on top of the world. It was early 2002, and as CEO of Duke Energy he had taken a conservative electric utility and plunged it headlong into the newly deregulated power market. Durin...
There was never much question that one of the first companies President Bush and his administration would call on to help with the vital task of rebuilding Iraq would be Bechtel Group.
The world's leading chipmaker has been obsessed with building faster and faster microprocessors. And it still is. But with CEO Craig Barrett required by company bylaws to retire next year, his des...
Gordon Moore is the Lou Gehrig of Silicon Valley. In the same way that the Baseball Hall of Famer, sandwiched between Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, is sometimes overlooked in the Yankee pantheon, Moo...
When the bottom dropped out of the technology market two years ago, Wim Roelandts of Xilinx was one of the few tech CEOs who kept their cool. Even as chip giants Intel and AMD eliminated more than ...
If Intel's formula for success as a chipmaker were written down, it would fit nicely on an index card and possess an Einsteinian elegance: C+E+E=W+D, or "copy everything exactly equals world domina...
A new chapter is being written in the history of light manipulation. Lenses that return sight to the blind. Smaller ones, the size of a lentil, that make DVD and CD players possible. High-tech ligh...
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rarely keeps his opinions to himself. He tends not to compromise with his enemies. And he clearly disdains the communist regime in North Korea. So it's surprising ...
The labyrinthine vastness of Intel's nearly completed D1D semiconductor factory in Hillsboro, Ore., is every bit as breathtaking as the microscopic intricacy of the microprocessors it will soon sta...
Hector de Jesus Ruiz, the new chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices, is a short, balding fellow who is so quiet and soft-spoken that his sentences often disappear into an inaudible mumble. In f...
The headlong rush of semiconductor miniaturization, it seems, waits for no one. Just because chipmakers are staring at woefully thin order books doesn't mean they can stop following Moore's law, th...
A few years back, Duke Energy CEO Rick Priory left Charlotte, N.C., and headed north to make one of his periodic pitches to Wall Street. As far as Priory was concerned, he had a pretty exciting sto...
On the western edge of the vast Nevada Test Site, where hundreds of nuclear weapons have been detonated, lies a dusty ridgeline known as Yucca Mountain. Located in a desert region of north-south mo...
It is worth remembering, now that mighty Intel has fallen from grace, that between 1985 and the turn of the century, this company pulled off one of the most amazing extended runs of technological, ...
UCLA professor James Heath is trying to build a computer--though you wouldn't know it from the lab where he works. There's hardly a sliver of silicon to be found. No one wears a bunny suit. In one ...
After you're garbed head to toe in your bunny suit, the unisex uniform of semiconductor manufacturing, your first thought as you pass through the air lock and walk out on the production floor of Fa...
There are executives who set lofty goals for themselves: turn their company into an industry beater, develop a world-changing technology, maybe even have a business dictum named after them. Then th...
About a year ago Jason Selch, an analyst for Liberty Wanger Asset Management, had a eureka moment. Energy prices were soaring, and Dynegy, a Houston-based wholesaler of electricity and natural gas,...
Bell Labs gave birth to the transistor. And the laser. And motion pictures. And long-range TV broadcasts. And real-time language translation. And on and on, so that over time this venerable institu...
Imagine a country-club dinner dance, with a bunch of old fogies and their wives shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy Lombardo and his All-Tuxedo Orchestra. Suddenly y...
Never has industry had a greater stake in the process of inventing and producing materials that are the flesh of new technology. Stuff like semiconductors, optical fibers, metallic alloys, and poly...
Read the headlines about U.S. export and import figures or listen to dour comments by TV pundits about the trade gap, and you might conclude that American industry has lost the ability to sell the ...
Three years ago, when communications-chip dynamo Broadcom was a private company, Emery Chang, an employee in the finance department, predicted that when Broadcom went public, its stock would nearly...
Unnoticed, like dust mites on a couch, are growing numbers of tiny mechanical gadgets with amazing capabilities. Rugged motion sensors smaller than a fingernail. Micromirrors, 1.2 million of the li...
There are seven of us dragging our luggage through the airport in Rio de Janeiro, preparing to board the first of three planes that will eventually deposit us on a bumpy grass landing strip in the ...
For the past decade, the chip business has been relatively easy to understand: There was Intel, and then there was everybody else. But a couple of recent developments are changing that hierarchy. F...
In this age of outsourcing, many companies don't actually produce the goods they are known for. Nike doesn't make its sneakers. Snapple doesn't squeeze its juice. Schwinn bikes aren't assembled by ...
The collaboration between Intel and Hewlett-Packard to develop the Merced, a turbocharged big brother to the ubiquitous Pentium microprocessor, has been anything but stealthy. Everybody in Silicon ...
China is trouble. Its political system is unstable and plagued by corruption, its booming economy is perilously brittle. The people in charge show little respect for human rights or copyrights. It ...
Even though it's a glorious Saturday morning and he's coasting downhill astride his jet-black bicycle, Intel Corp. CEO Andy Grove is hard at work. As usual, he's lagging far behind his more athleti...
There's a good reason this man looks happy: Computer engineer Mark Haas, 35, senior software quality manager for Bell-Northern Research, the development arm of Northern Telecom, has the best career...
MADE IN TAIWAN. If that label sparks an image of cheap, shoddy products, think again. In budget personal computers, arguably the hottest segment of the global PC market, Taiwanese suppliers provide...
WESTERN INVESTORS have poured some $15 billion into Eastern Europe in the five years since the Berlin Wall came down, but not everyone is happy. General Electric had to put an additional $400 milli...
WOULD YOU BASE your business strategy on the assumption that AT&T, IBM, Matsushita, Motorola, Philips, Sega, and Sony won't be able to keep up with you? How about gambling nearly a third of your co...
DESPITE his widely noted disavowal last summer of the need for a vision for IBM, Lou Gerstner has one. It's clear and specific. The company he sees will know how to seize more opportunities than it...
JUST about everybody in the global electronics industry agrees that this is the Decade of the Strategic Alliance, and for good reason. As telecommunications, computers, consumer electronics, and me...
TWENTY YEARS after its invention, the microprocessor -- the computer-on-a- chip, a sliver of silicon not much bigger than your thumbnail, like the one on FORTUNE's cover -- has suddenly brought for...
THE BOTTOM LINE of all the hullabaloo over whether cellular phones cause brain cancer: Nobody knows. Why not? Because -- as with electromagnetic radiation from other sources like video display term...
Intel, a standout stock market performer of late, looked like an also-ran just seven years ago. Since then the company has transformed itself from a money- losing producer of commodity memory chips...
IN A LEAP of industrial evolution, many companies are shunning vertical integration for a lean, nimble structure centered on what they do best. The idea is to nurture a few core activities -- desig...
HOW SWEET are the rewards of patience. After losing money on semiconductors for 2 1/2 years -- and suffering an overall $409 million loss in 1991 -- Texas Instruments has rolled up a string of stro...
FOR THE FIRST TIME since Japan devastated the U.S. consumer electronics industry in the 1970s, American companies have a chance to stage a comeback in a mighty market that has annual sales of $32 b...
AMYLIN CORP., a small San Diego biotech firm, was looking for a rat. Not just any rat, but one genetically engineered to carry the human gene that Amylin believes is responsible for a type of diabe...
CHANCES ARE, you've heard of Fujitsu Ltd., one of those sprawling Japanese high-tech conglomerates that turn out computers, telecommunications gear, and, of course, semiconductors. But did you know...
IMAGINE A PROCESSOR more powerful than a mighty supercomputer of just a few years ago. It's your PC, telephone, fax machine, and VCR all rolled into one. You dictate to it, write on it, or type in ...
OH, TO BE a businessman in Japan or Germany. In those juggernauts, it's commonly said, government and industry collaborate over green tea and Rhine wine, with results that may yet reduce America to...
GUESS WHO'S gaining market share in the chip business? Japan, right? Not so fast, folks. Last year it was U.S. chipmakers that added to market share -- modestly, but in an almost flat year. Of $58....
FEW AMERICANS worried when Asian imports took over transistor radios and calculators in the 1970s. The auto invasion that followed was different, for it struck at a symbol of national industrial pr...
YOU'VE GOT TO WORRY about American technology when the newspapers seem to tell you there's less of it every day. Nikon emerges as the leading candidate to buy the division of Perkin-Elmer that make...
HERE'S A TEST of your investment acumen. You have a choice of buying stock in one of two companies. Do you believe in return on shareholders' equity? For 1988, Company A had an ROE of 22%; Company ...
I NEED FOUR MEN for a patrol to see how we can wipe out that enemy machine gun position. Lally. Uvanni. Dillenbeck. Mackiewicz. No, wait a minute. What I really mean is Texas Instruments, IBM, Moto...
Managers and investors are starting to realize that Western Europe may well be the fastest-growing market for a host of businesses in the 1990s. Says Federal Express vice president Christos Cotsako...
AS ANDY GROVE likes to say, the price of leadership is eternal paranoia. The chief executive of Intel faces yet another major challenge. Some ten years ago, when IBM was looking for a microprocesso...
AMERICAN COMPANIES once rode into alien country as fearlessly as the Lone Ranger without Tonto. Nowadays they enlist a partner who knows his way around the local gullies. In their quest for new mar...
WHAT you're seeing in the photograph at right is a practical embodiment of one of man's most brilliant intellectual achievements. The tiny semiconductor laser in the palm of the scientist's hand is...
WHEN color television burst upon the world in the early 1950s, the U.S. was in the vanguard: The first commercial broadcasts used a pioneering system developed by RCA. It was the end of the decade ...
THE GOOD TIMES are rolling again for U.S. makers of semiconductors, the tiny electronic circuits-on-a-chip that form the heart of modern computers. Two years ago pessimists were saying, ''Sayonara,...
Simon Ramo -- the Ramo in Bunker-Ramo, a computer venture, and the ''R'' in TRW, the giant defense electronics company -- has advised Presidents and served on the boards of corporations and univers...
WHEN AT&T was broken up on January 1, 1984, admirers of Ma Bell's deep commitment to research wondered about the fate of AT&T Bell Laboratories -- the great American invention factory. Bell Labs ha...
AFTER YEARS of crying for government help, America's ailing semiconductor industry is getting gobs of it. The Defense Department has unveiled a plan to inject over $2 billion into advanced chipmaki...
A NEW PRODUCT hyped with the prefix ''super'' is announced every week, but a semiconductor chip now coming on the scene really deserves that neon term. The most densely packed chips in use today co...
THE FIRST NUCLEAR power plant in the Philippines sits on a verdant bluff overlooking the South China Sea, just off the road where U.S. soldiers marched to their death under the bayonets of Japanese...
NUCLEAR POWER was not a wonderful business to be in even before the disaster at Chernobyl. It now figures to become a lot less wonderful for utilities. Several companies that build and service nucl...
U.S. semiconductor companies are making a slow but steady recovery from 17 months of severe recession, and their stocks have been moving up. Industry analysts are recommending few buys, however, an...
A SOVIET NIGHTMARE is coming true. Despite impressive success in closing its technology gap with the West since the atomic age began in 1945, the U.S.S.R. is in danger of falling further behind in ...
WITH UNINTENDED irony, Japan's Science and Technology Agency conferred a prestigious award in May on Tomihiro Matsumura. Matsumura, 55, senior vice president for microprocessors at Nippon Electric ...
MANY OF THEM didn't know Jerry Junkins. But when the memo went out announcing his promotion, workers at the Dallas headquarters of Texas Instruments privately applauded. To them his elevation to pr...
ONCE IN A WHILE, a material comes along that's made to order to meet the needs of a new generation of technology. Silicon, an excellent conductor of electrons when properly processed, has powered t...
NOW WOULD NOT seem the time to launch a semiconductor company. Industry overcapacity and sluggish computer sales are battering earnings for most major players. Undaunted, Dallas Semiconductor, a ye...
A NEW KIND of semiconductor chip is about to work wonders on a vast assortment of products, including many standard household items. The chip is helping produce air conditioners that run without th...
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