IBM Builds First Graphene Integrated Circuit 77
AffidavitDonda writes "IBM researchers have built the first integrated circuit (IC) based on a graphene transistor. The circuit, built on a wafer of silicon carbide, consists of field-effect transistors made of graphene. The IC also includes metallic structures, such as on-chip inductors and the transistors' sources and drains. The circuit the team built is a broadband radio-frequency mixer, a fundamental component of radios that processes signals by finding the difference between two high-frequency wavelengths."
Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when it used to be first, by a huge margin?
C is still more wisely used by a huge margin. Just because you "enterprise" developers don't use it (despite the infrastructure of your managed languages being written in C and C++) doesn't change that.
Within a generation, it'll be in the same class as FORTRAN - only used to support legacy apps.
Yeah right. What are you going to write your kernels in? What are you going to use for those millions if not billions of microcontrollers that will still be in use that can't run a JVM? What exactly are you going to write your VMs and interpreters in? Right, they will have to be written in a C or C++ and assembly.
Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment. (Score:3, Insightful)
Things like porting from one UNIX to another UNIX on a different arch - stuff that most armchair programmers view as "just recompile" - can take hundreds of man-hours or more on complex codebases. C is not portable.
Re:This is an extremely important accomplishment. (Score:4, Insightful)
While it is certainly possible to write C code that is endian-dependent, I consider such code to be broken--- as would any sane, professional C programmer.
To wit, the eleventy-million lines of C code in the Linux kernel are fully endian-agnostic. And largely independent of integer representation size, too!