Revolutionary Plastics May See Laptops Bend

When you hear ‘plastic’ the first thing that probably comes to your mind is ‘electrical insulator’. This is perhaps because most plastics have exceptional electrical insulator properties, albeit this doesn’t necessarily mean that all plastics share the same properties. It was proven some three decades ago that certain classes of plastics may conduct electricity and could be used to create some of the most amazing electronic devices ever seen, such as flexible laptops, electronic billboards or ultra-thin displays.

Imagine an electronic device made of plastic material only. The creation of such a piece of equipment would most certainly revolutionize the electronics industry. Let’s take the humble transistor for example, the building block of every electronic device today. Although it is usually made out of silicon, a lot of semiconductor materials can be used to manufacture transistors, neither of which very flexible. However, flexibility is not the only issue with transistors. By using plastics to build transistors the manufacturing costs could also drop considerably. Read more

Intel Six-Pack

It’s called Dunnington and it’s Intel’s latest Six-Core (count-em…) microprocessor chip. Now why on earth anyone would want a six-core chip remains to be seen, dial-core chips have hardly set the computing world alight. It’s all very well having multiple cores, but without the fancy software to take advantage of the extra power you might as well not bother. Nevertheless, there’s clearly a market for such devices way above the heads of us mere mortals, at the top end of the market, in graphics processing in particular and Dunnington will there to help at the back end of this year, and with around 1.9 billion transistors buzzing away inside, it’s bound to do whatever it does really quickly!