Meanwhile, the bond market rallied, and the stock market in general followed suit. Even sharp criticism of Wall Street from the international financial meetings in Asia couldn't keep the market down. David Blitzer is chief economist at Standard and Poor's. Few economists, though, expect the fed to raise interest rates just yet. In New York, I'm Michelle Brier for Marketplace.
Copper is more conductive and can be made into thinner wires.
That should make for either smaller or more powerful chips to run everything from car engines and toasters, to, of course, computers. Mary Fran Johnson, Executive Editor of ComputerWorld says this appears to extend Moore's Law, an axiom of the chip business that, before the breakthrough, had seemed to be reaching an end. And the law basically states that every 18 months, chips are going to get twice as fast and are going to drop in price. And everyone had thought that by the time we got to the end of this century that Moore's law was going to, kind of, fall off the cliff because the walls were being hit in terms of how far the technology could go. And if the next generation was going to be, say 15 million transistors, but then the wires couldn't make that leap, you know, you're stuck with theoretical places where you can take the chips, but not the manufacturing processes or the technology to actually do it.