ng TURBOCHARGING DATA the technology happen." The major sponsor of O's five-year research project is Semiconductor Research Corp. (about $1 million). As chips increase in size and complexity, transmitting information to all parts of the chip simultaneously through the many tiny wires embedded in the silicon platform becomes more difficult, O says. Chip-based wireless radios could bypass these wires, ensuring continued performance improvements in the larger chips. These tiny radios-on-a-chip could also make possible tiny, inexpensive microphones, motion detectors, and other devices, O says. The fastest chips on the market-used in the Pentium 4 and other high-end processors-now operate at a speed of 2 GHz, meaning they perform 2 billion calculations per second, O says. Manufacturers are rapidly developing tech- niques to raise the speed, with chips that process information as fast as 20 GHz, or 20 billion calculations per second, already achieved on an experimental basis, he says. Many experts believe even 100-GHz chips are feasible. The increase in speed will be accompanied by an increase in chip size, O says. Whereas today's average chip is about cm², or slightly under 0.5 inch, the faster chips anticipated in the next two decades are expected to be as large as 2 or 3cm, or about 1.2 inches, on each side, he says. The larger the chip, the harder it is to send information to all of its regions simultaneously because the distances between the millions of tiny circuits within the chip become more varied, O says. This can impact the chip's per- formance when the delay affects distribution of the so-called "clock signal," a basic signal that synchronizes the many different information-processing tasks assigned to the chip. For optimum performance, this signal must reach all regions of the chip at essentially the same time. O and his colleagues have recently broadcast this clock signal from a tiny transmitter on one side of a chip a distance of 5.6 mm, or about a fifth of an inch, across the chip to a tiny receiver at 