May 15, 2009 Nobody likes staring at a screen while they wait for their computer to boot up. Sure, you can spend those few minutes making a cup of coffee or ferreting the dirt out from under your ...

Theorists propose a way to make superconducting quantum devices such as Josephson junctions and qubits, atom-by-atom, inside a silicon crystal. Such systems could combine the most promising aspects of ...

In the basement of Hoyt Laboratory at Princeton University, Alexei Tyryshkin clicked a computer mouse and sent a burst of microwaves washing across a silicon crystal suspended in a frozen cylinder of ...

Oscillators are as ubiquitous—and, some might argue, as important—as power supplies in electronics systems, finding use in anything that needs a timing signal, from digital watches to TVs and PCs.

A clever materials science technique that uses a silicon crystal as a sort of nanoscale vise to squeeze another crystal into a more useful shape may launch a new class of electronic devices that ...

Foremost among silicon's distinguishing features is that, quite simply, there is a hell of a lot of it. After oxygen, it's the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust -- but don't expect to ...

Thermal oxide is the real on-off switch for your computer. The nanometers-thick film on the surface of silicon transistors helps turn on and off the flow of electricity through the transistor, ...

If phosphorous has five electrons in its outermost shell, meaning it needs only three more to fill the shell, how can it form FOUR valence bonds when used as a dopant in a silicon crystal? This is one ...