Twitter opening international base in Ireland

"Ireland is trending. Twitter to establish international office in Dublin," the message said.

Twitter joins a band of high-profile technology and computer multinationals with bases in Ireland, including Citigroup, Dell, Facebook, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Intel and Microsoft.

Foreign companies are attracted to Ireland by its 12.5-percent rate of corporation tax, one of the lowest in Europe.

"IDA is absolutely thrilled that Twitter has decided to establish an international office in Ireland," the agency's chief executive Barry O'Leary said in a statement.

"Twitter is a fantastic addition to Ireland's dynamic digital media cluster and we are excited to support the company's continued international growth."

As it expands operations outside the United States, Twitter already has offices in London and Tokyo.

Tony Wang, Twitter UK's general manager, said the new Dublin office would not mean the demise of the London branch.

"The UK office is here to stay, we will have offices both here and Dublin," he tweeted.

British newspaper the Daily Telegraph quoted Twitter as saying that as it expands beyond the United States, it will "continue to evaluate the need to designate a location for our non-US headquarters."

Created in 2006, Twitter's text-based posts of up to 140 characters attract more than 400 million users every month, with an average of 230 million tweets fired off daily.

The number of new companies setting up in Ireland rose by a fifth to 47 last year. Foreign companies now employ 139,000 people and account for more than 75 percent of total Irish exports of goods and services.

Ireland's once-proud 'Celtic Tiger' economy, famed for its double-digit growth for a decade from the mid-1990s, has contracted sharply in recent years, hit by a domestic property market meltdown and soaring unemployment.

Crippled by massive debts, it required an 85 billion euro bailout last November from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

Under pressure from its EU partners who believe it gives Ireland an unfair advantage, Dublin has fought hard to keep its 12.5 percent corporation tax rate.

Ireland's jobs minister Richard Bruton called the Twitter announcement a "massive win" that showed there was "real ground for Ireland's claim to be the Internet capital of Europe".

"It also shows that, despite our difficulties, we still have real strengths as an economy," he said.

"The challenge now is to build on our strengths and the presence in Ireland of the world-leading companies like Twitter to build an indigenous engine of growth and get people back to work."

The announcement "shows that we have real grounds for optimism in facing that challenge", he added.

New 'FeTRAM' is promising computer memory technology

The technology combines silicon nanowires with a "ferroelectric" polymer, a material that switches polarity when electric fields are applied, making possible a new type of ferroelectric transistor.

"It's in a very nascent stage," said doctoral student Saptarshi Das, who is working with Joerg Appenzeller, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and scientific director of nanoelectronics at Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center.

The ferroelectric transistor's changing polarity is read as 0 or 1, an operation needed for digital circuits to store information in binary code consisting of sequences of ones and zeroes.

The new technology is called FeTRAM, for ferroelectric transistor random access memory.

"We've developed the theory and done the experiment and also showed how it works in a circuit," he said.

Findings are detailed in a research paper that appeared this month in Nano Letters, published by the American Chemical Society.

The FeTRAM technology has nonvolatile storage, meaning it stays in memory after the computer is turned off. The devices have the potential to use 99 percent less energy than flash memory, a non-volatile computer storage chip and the predominant form of memory in the commercial market.

"However, our present device consumes more power because it is still not properly scaled," Das said. "For future generations of FeTRAM technologies one of the main objectives will be to reduce the power dissipation. They might also be much faster than another form of computer memory called SRAM."

The FeTRAM technology fulfills the three basic functions of computer memory: to write information, read the information and hold it for a long period of time.

"You want to hold memory as long as possible, 10 to 20 years, and you should be able to read and write as many times as possible," Das said. "It should also be low power to keep your laptop from getting too hot. And it needs to scale, meaning you can pack many devices into a very small area. The use of silicon nanowires along with this ferroelectric polymer has been motivated by these requirements."

The new technology also is compatible with industry manufacturing processes for complementary metal oxide semiconductors, or CMOS, used to produce computer chips. It has the potential to replace conventional memory systems.

A patent application has been filed for the concept.

The FeTRAMs are similar to state-of-the-art ferroelectric random access memories, FeRAMs, which are in commercial use but represent a relatively small part of the overall semiconductor market. Both use ferroelectric material to store information in a nonvolatile fashion, but unlike FeRAMS, the new technology allows for nondestructive readout, meaning information can be read without losing it.

This nondestructive readout is possible by storing information using a ferroelectric transistor instead of a capacitor, which is used in conventional FeRAMs.

More information: FETRAM. An Organic Ferroelectric Material Based Novel Random Access Memory Cell

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