At the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, USA on 5 February 2006, Hitachi Ltd. (Japan), announced it had developed and verified operation of the world’s smallest and thinnest chip, measuring 0.15 mm² in area, and 7.5 microns (µm) thick. Due to the chip being thinner than paper (typically 80-100 microns), one of its wireless applications could be as an intelligent watermark.