Most products travel a long and winding road from raw material to a customer's cart, and those materials pass through a lot of hands along the way. At each stage of this process, there's a company ...

Purely geometric scaling of transistors ended around the 90-nanometer (nm) era. Since then, most power/performance and area/cost improvements have come from structural and material innovations.

During the 1990s, companies bought packaged software solutions such as SAP, Oracle ERP, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards, Siebel, Clarify, and so on. Although such packaged software solutions worked well ...