US Defence backs nano-manufacturing

The US Senate defence appropriations committee has approved $4 million to develop the University of Massachusetts Lowell's nano-manufacturing research project, reports Mass High Tech.

The project, backed by Senator John Kerry, has $2 million earmarked from the US House of Representatives earlier this year.

UMass Lowell's nano-manufacturing research includes a structural damage detector for weapons, vehicles and body armour, and a sensor to detect biological and chemical agents. The school is studying manufacturing solutions to mass produce the technology for the military.

UK chip-design house ARM is developing a pair of dual-core processors intended to go head-to-head with Intel's Atom line in the battle for the hearts and minds of netboook manufacturers, writes Channel Register.

According to an announcement this week, the two Cortex-A9 MPCore implementations are designed for silicon pumped up to clock rates in excess of 2GHz.

Both implementations are speed-optimised using hard macro IP, meaning they specify not only the logic elements themselves, but also the physical pathways among them, and that they are designed for a specific manufacturing technology.

Two manufacturers of NAND Flash memory, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba, believe a technique to achieve larger capacity will be needed by about 2013, to take the place of merely shrinking design rules, states Tech-On.

The most promising candidate is stacking memory cells in three dimensions, in what is called 3D cell technology. Technology development efforts are accelerating rapidly.

NAND Flash memory seems likely to offer even lower prices and larger capacity in the future. Many people in the industry agree, at least, that the 2Xnm generation chips (64Gb to 128Gb) entering volume production in 2011 and 2012 will be implemented through extensions of current technology.