Man, it's like Motorola's got some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. On the one hand we've got a company whose semiconductor arm is spurting red ink like a busted fire hydrant and who spent a year and a half trying to punch through the 500 MHz barrier while the competition duked it out to 1 GHz and beyond; on the other hand, according to faithful viewer Eric, the same exact company just discovered a commercially viable method to combine silicon and gallium arsenide (two great tastes that taste great together) to create a computer chip that an Associated Press article describes as "35 times faster than today's models." What's up with that?

What's up, indeed. At least one analyst at a technology research company is saying that "this could go down in history as a major turning point in the semiconductor industry." Well, at least now we know why Motorola was so loath to sell off its semiconductor business when the going got tough-- this enticing little development may have been considered an ace up the sleeve. The company's plan to license this silicon/gallium arsenide technology to other companies "widely and quickly" might well pull in enough moolah to make the unit profitable again. (Conversely, the pessimists out there might argue that Motorola's announcement is purely an exercise in boosting its asking price when the semiconductor business does go on the auction block.)

Now, for those of you who are drooling onto your shoes at the prospect of gallium arsenide-laced PowerPCs boosting Macs to thirty-five times their current speeds, cool your jets; for one thing, Motorola doesn't expect products housing the new Si/GaAs chip to emerge until 2003. For another, as far as we can tell, this technology doesn't actually apply to CPUs-- at least, not yet. Certainly the AP article avoids any mention of the PowerPC, and instead talks about "cell phones and DVD players," "radar systems to help automobiles avoid collisions," and "new semiconductor-based lighting systems." That doesn't give us a lot of short-term hope for insanely zippier Macs.

In addition, faithful viewer Steven C. Den Beste directed us towards an Electronics Times story which apparently confirms that the gallium arsenide technique isn't destined for the Mac right now. We say "apparently" because any article that tosses around phrases like "strontium titanate dielectric layer" and "molecular beam epitaxy" is so far beyond our limited attention span that we might as well be trying to watch CSPAN. Therefore, we'll take Stephen's word for it that Motorola's breakthrough technology is "intended for things like analog microwave receiver and transmitter components and optoelectronic devices" and that it's "unlikely to appear in the PPC anytime soon." Still, anything that's good for Motorola's financial situation is potentially good news for the Mac platform, so consider this a happy development nonetheless.