Unfortunately the article is dumbed down a lot, so it is not easy to understand what technology is actually supposed to be used. But this sound a lot like a Rapid Thermal Anneal (RTA/RTP), which has been used for decades in semiconductor manufacturing. It has also been used a lot in lab environment to manufacture solar cells. It is possible that the energy consumption can be reduced, but the tool throughput and maintenance costs are quite a bit higher than that of a conventional furnace. I suppose that is why it did not catch on so far.

Nobium is not a rare earth element. It is however a part of coltan, which is a sought after mineral that is mined in congo and a major cause of civil war in that region.

Australia is extremely dumb when it comes to renewable energies and especially photovoltaics. Yes, it is that harsh. AUS has some of the most prolific research institutes in that area (The UNSW and the ANU) and provides ideal conditions for electricity generation by solar energy. Yet, they completely and utterly failed to capitalize on this aspect. There are no photovolatic companies of relevance in Australia and there are hardly any photovoltaic power plants.

The UNSW is now degenerated to educating recruits for chinese solar cell companies. Well done, Oz government, I hope sheep breeding and mining will be relevant for another century.

Yes, I was aware of these approaches of opening a band gap. I also recall a recent paper about field induced band gap opening. 250meV is not a lot, but it is a beginning. A band gap as small as this will still lead to serious junction leakage. Nowaday the ability to turn transistors off has become crucial; a major advantage of intels recently announced 22nm tri gate technology is that transistors can be turned off much more efficiently.

I don't think graphene transistors would require a significant investment. Apart from the tools to deposit the graphene, all other tools can be reused, provided that silicon is still the base material. Investing has never been a big issue for the larger companies.

But which applications involving carbon nanotubes are available on commercial scale today? I am only aware of it being used as (expensive) filler material.

CNTs are one of the topics which belong into the "pure science" realm. The main issues here are that no reliable method exist to separate metallic from semiconducting CNTs on large scale and that there is no reliable way of mass manufacturing CN transistors structurally.

Regarding graphene, there are at least methods to produce it on a wafer scale basis. The problem is, however, that despite the promising electron mobility in graphene, the electrical properties of graphene transistors are extremely bad. The latter is owed to the absence of a band gap and issues with junction formation.

Your response seems to suggest that you are qualified to answer the question I implied: Which application is going to remain when the next big thing comes up?

A few years ago all the rage was about carbon nanotubes. An entire generation of phd students was raised on this material. Carbon nanotubes were the material of the future, enabling the space elevator, nanoscale transistors, near-superconductor conductivity and so on. What is left today?

Even before that there were C60 buckyballs, another previously unnoticed carbon allotrope. Buckyballs were set to revolutionize chemistry and were (are) part of n-type organic semicunductors. What is left today?

A fad is a fad, even in science. Of all the imagined applications a few will remain, and will be turned into real applications by technologists and engineers. The scientists will move on to the next fad - well at least those who are quick enough.

TI is currently ramping their 300mm analog fab. Some analysists dubbed it "death star fab" - guess why...

Analog is getting bigger and bigger. Many applications are driven by "green" technology - power devices for electric cars, control circuits and switching converters for power conversion, LED controllers and so on. The automotive semiconductor industry is very delighted with the current development. The last figures I heard were that 20-30% of the costs of a european mid range car are electronics, with a sharp upwards trend. American cars and cars for the american market are usually based on slightly simpler and older technology.

Another thing is that the market entry barriers for analog devices are higher than for digital ones. Analog devices can often not be designed as versatile as digital ones. That is why you need a very wide product range and a good customer relationship. Furthermore, you simply can not hire good analog designers out of school. All of these things combined means that there is a lof of cash in analog.

I found this to be a good source for uncommented information: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the source, but it does not seem to be very biased.

Unfortunately the nuclear accident seems to have overshadowed reports on the real human tragedy - the tsunami and the earth quake. Especially in Germany, media are instrumentalizing the incident and are plotting doomsday scenarios. The worst of all seems to be "Der Spiegel", which I held in much higher regard until yesterday.

>. I don't know what Atmel did to deserve their good luck.

There was a long time when it basically was AVR vs PIC when it came to "small developer" aka hobbyist microcontrollers. The PIC may have been there first, but the AVR architecture is much more user friendly and has a following that is at least as large as that of the PIC. The reason why the AVR is being used in the arduino is probably because of it's high-level language compatible microarchitecture.

Seems to me for most uses simply increasing the refresh time interval would save tons of power, and also complexity. If you could get it to a couple of days,

Yes, increasing the refresh time is indeed a way to reduce power consumption of a DRAM. The problem is that you are dealing with billions of memory cells. The median retention time of typical cells is well within the range of seconds. But there is a tiny fraction of cells (1/10000) that lose their charge much quicker, and things may get worse at elevated temperatures etc. Those cells impose limits on the minimum refresh time.

There are ways to work around this by introducing on-the-fly error correction. But this will result in a larger device and added latency, which is obviously not desired in many applications. Nevertheless, there are dedicated low power DRAMs which use this kind of scheme to increase refresh time.

I am a semiconductor scientist, but I completely fail to understand what this news is about. The article does nowhere mention the materials used, the device behavior, the application, the purpose or anything else.
A MIM device as is, is a capacitor. And that is exactly what the picture is showing. When this type of capacitor is scaled to the nanometer regime it starts to get leaky due to quantum mechanical tunneling through the dielectric. The abstract mentions 'controlled quantum mechanical tunneling'... Aha, this could be what it is about. But as long as metal electrodes are involved this will only create a nonlinear resistor. Still no idea what the exact purpose is.

Are nanoscale MIM capacitors new? No, not at all. Right now you have billions of them doing their job in your computers main memory. Depending on the vintage of your computer, these capacitors employ nanolaminates of ZrO2 and Al2O3 at a total thickness of 5 to 10 nanometers. Quantum electrical tunneling is of high relevance in these devices, since it leads to loss of stored information. So, is cheap new? A quick calculation suggests that the manufacturing cost of a single MIM device in a DRAM is approximately 10^(-10) US$.

This is not true. You need to be aware of one thing: "Memristors" were not new when they were "discovered". The memory industry knew the concept years before as RRAM. I can assure you that all other nonvolatile memory vendors are developing RRAM or are at least looking into the possibilities. Samsung has been publishing about NiO based RRAM long before it was "discovered" again, IBM has some interesting papers from the Zurich labs. Furthermore, there are several start up companies looking into 3D RRAM which may offer densities far above that of flash. Matrix Semiconductors (bought by Sandisk) and a company by a former Micron guy.

One significant issue with RRAM (and the memristor) so far is that the memory cells have to be "formed". They need an initial high voltage pulse to induce the switching behaviour. This is something that is difficult to do when you have billions of memory cells. To my knowledge no good solution to this problem has been found yet, although there is progress.

This has nothing to do with "leakage" current. As basic field effect transistor theory will teach you, there is a region below the threshold voltage where the current depends exponentially on the gate bias. Yes, exponentially instead of linearly or quadratically as in the "on" region. This means that small changes in the gate bias will allow for a huge change in current. The drawback is here that we are talking about extremely low current. In CMOS logic this equals lower operation frequency.

This idea here is to build circuits that are extremely power efficient but also extremely slow. As mentioned in the article, potential applications may include wireless sensor networks that have to operate on extremely low energy.