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Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of speculation about what would happen to TSMC’s semiconductor fabs in the event of an invasion by the Chinese military. TSMC makes the world’s most advanced chips at its Taiwan facilities, so the prospect of those fabs being taken over or controlled by a hostile force is not a pleasant scenario to consider. However, now it’s been revealed for the first time that the machines have remote kill switches, which would render them idle in the case of Chinese aggression.

This revelation about TSMC’s machines comes from Bloomberg reporters, who say they spoke with several people “familiar with the matter.” Dutch company ASML makes the machines TSMC uses and has built a kill switch directly into the hardware TSMC uses. The report says US officials approached ASML with concerns about Chinese aggression against TSMC, and ASML has assured them it can disable the machines remotely if necessary. The Dutch company has also been running simulated shutdowns on its machines to understand better how such a scenario would play out in the real world and what risks it included.

Quantum computers, computing devices that leverage the principles of quantum mechanics, could outperform classical computing on some complex optimization and processing tasks. In quantum computers, classical units of information (bits), which can either have a value of 1 or 0, are substituted by quantum bits or qubits, which can be in a mixture of both 0 and 1 simultaneously.

“In quantum many-body theory, we are often faced with the situation that we can perform calculations using a simple approximate interaction, but realistic high-fidelity interactions cause severe computational problems,” says Dean Lee, Professor of Physics from the Facility for Rare Istope Beams and Department of Physics and Astronomy (FRIB) at Michigan State University and head of the Department of Theoretical Nuclear Sciences.

Practical Applications and Future Prospects

Wavefunction matching solves this problem by removing the short-distance part of the high-fidelity interaction and replacing it with the short-distance part of an easily calculable interaction. This transformation is done in a way that preserves all the important properties of the original realistic interaction. Since the new wavefunctions are similar to those of the easily computable interaction, the researchers can now perform calculations with the easily computable interaction and apply a standard procedure for handling small corrections – called perturbation theory.

While silicon has been the go-to material for sensor applications, could polymer be used as a suitable substitute since silicon has always lacked flexibility to be used in specific applications? This is what a recent grant from the National Science Foundation hopes to address, as Dr. Elsa Reichmanis of Lehigh University was recently awarded $550,000 to investigate how polymers could potentially be used as semiconductors for sensor applications, including Internet of Things, healthcare, and environmental applications.

Illustration of an organic electrochemical transistor that could be developed as a result of this research. (Credit: Illustration by by Ella Marushchenko; Courtesy of Reichmanis Research Group)

“We’ll be creating the polymers that could be the building blocks of future sensors,” said Dr. Reichmanis, who is an Anderson Chair in Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. “The systems we’re looking at have the ability to interact with ions and transport ionic charges, and in the right environment, conduct electronic charges.”