Posted 11/06/09 at 06:46:00 PM by Ryan Whitwam

PC vendors were hoping that the launch of the much anticipated Windows 7 would result in a sales boost. The first reports from those vendors, however, are not painting a very rosy picture. Most vendors report only modest increases in sales.

We know that sales of standalone upgrade licenses for Windows 7 were very good at launch, but it seems not many people went out to get a new PC. Vendors are not expecting sales to pick up in 2009. This may be due, in part, to the fact that Vista users can easily upgrade their existing hardware to the lighter weight Windows 7.

Some notebook manufacturers produced extra units running Windows 7 in anticipation of high demand. With demand ending up weaker than expected, these PCs end up discounted. Expect PC prices to continue to slide. Good for us, not so much for the manufacturers and vendors.

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Posted 06/15/09 at 09:01:10 AM by Paul Lilly

Most chip manufacturers are busy readying the move to a 32nm manufacturing process, including Toshiba, which back in April of this year said it would begin mass producing 32Gb (gigabit) chips from the shrunken process by next month. But forget about 32nm - Toshiba says it has made a breakthrough in the use of strontium germanide (SrGex) that will make 16nm possible sooner than expected.

The breakthrough involves the development of a gate stack and interlayer with high carrier mobility that can be applied to metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MISFETs), ElectronicsWeekly.com reports. Today's MSIFETs use silicon for the channel, however the substance is reaching its design limit in terms of current handling capabilities.

Germanium presents design challenges too, namely the development of thin gate structures. According to Toshiba, it can get around these challenges by combining SrGex, a compound of strontium, and germanium, for use as an interlayer between the high-k insulating layer and the germanium channel.

The details get even geekier, but you'll have to wait for Toshiba to present the technology at the 2009 VLSI Symposia in Kyoto, Japan later this week.

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