Texas Instruments claims to have one-upped Motorola's and IBM's recent copper-chip achievements with a new technology that promises to increase performance tenfold and combat the effect of resistance and capacitance. The new chip technology combines copper wiring with a new insulating material called xerogel - a material made of microscopic air-filled glass bubbles.
TI claims xerogel solves the issue of capacitance in chips that continue to get smaller and smaller. New chips using the copper/xerogel combination are expected to be the size of a fingernail, with 500 million transistors.
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Iris scanner verifies ATM customers' ID: Consumers will soon be offered a greater variety of ATM services, such as check cashing and loan-application processing, thanks to iris-scanning verification technology.
Sensar says the system will scan customer's eyes with a standard video camera and special lighting, and compare their digitized iris to a record kept on file.
Iris scanning is currently used in corporate security and corrections, but has not been widely used in the consumer marketplace. Sensar claims that the technology is "virtually fraud-proof," and expects that it will eventually replace PIN numbers altogether. (3.Dec.97)
