Lifeboat Foundation

Technologists envisage an electronically interconnected future that will depend on cheap, lightweight, flexible devices. Efforts to optimize the semiconductor materials needed for these electronic devices are therefore necessary. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have reported a record-breaking germanium (Ge) thin film on a plastic substrate that offers flexibility without compromising performance. Their findings are published in ACS Applied Electronic Materials.

Ge is a popular semiconductor for use in transistors because it has high charge carrier mobility (charge carrier refers to the electrons and electron holes that move through the material). Ge can also be processed at the relatively low temperature of ~500 degrees Celsius and has a low Young’s modulus, which means it is a softer alternative to commonly used materials such as silicon.

Ge thin films can be grown using the solid-phase crystallization technique. These thin films are polycrystalline, meaning they are made up of many Ge crystals. In general, larger crystals lead to greater carrier mobilities because bigger crystals form fewer grain boundaries that obstruct the current. Recent increases in grain size have therefore led to effective Ge thin-film transistors on rigid substrates such as glass.

Experts are estimating the crisis will last till 2023.

There’s no denying that there is a global chip shortage. Last month, we reported how Japan had committed $5.2 billion (roughly 600 billion yen) toward providing support for semiconductor manufacturers in a bid to help solve the world’s ongoing chip shortage.

But is that enough? It seems not. During a recent earnings call, Micron CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, told investors that it is clearly not.

Continue reading “Get Used to Chip Shortages: They Are Not Going Away Anytime Soon” »

Today, magnets have many applications being used for energy generation, data storage, and computing. But magnetic computing devices in two-dimensional systems are quickly approaching their shrinking limit.

That’s why, we have witnessed a growing trend in moving to three dimensions, where higher densities can be achieved and three-dimensional geometries can offer new functionalities.

Now, an international team led by Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory has used an advanced 3D printing method they developed to create magnetic double helices that produce nanoscale topological textures in the magnetic field, opening the door to the next generation magnetic devices.

The so-called “mirror-circuit” testing method will help scientists advance the technology behind these super powerful processors. https://bit.ly/3snkgR8

AMD seems confident about its CPU sales growth.

Hampered by undersupply, AMD has just shown how it can increase sales of its CPUs by at least 33% in the coming years.

AMD, late on Thursday, published details of another amendment to its wafer supply agreement (WSA) with GlobalFoundries. The document primarily emphasizes AMD’s confidence in the growth of its CPU business as orders to GlobalFoundries are essentially multiplex orders to TSMC. However, the new WSA may contain some interesting details too.

MCST’s Elbrus-8C fails to win the approval of Russia’s biggest bank.

Russia’s Sber finds the domestic Elbrus-8C CPU platform to be unacceptable for modern banking workloads.

Continue reading “Russian-Made Elbrus CPUs Fail Trials, ‘A Completely Unacceptable Platform’” »

AMD to offer five Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX CPUs for workstations.

Dual-processor workstations are the stomping grounds of companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo. They tend to cost as much as a car and are aimed at the most performance-demanding professionals with very deep pockets. It is hard to expect motherboard makers to offer dual-socket sWRX8 platforms at this time since 128-core/256-thread machines are complete overkill even for the workstation segment (which is why this capability might be canned if AMD feels that it is easier to offer Epyc platforms for the same market segment instead). Meanwhile, the report also says that Asus and Gigabyte intend to release all-new single-socket motherboards for the upcoming Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX CPUs.

AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro retains eight memory channels to provide loads of bandwidth and support for plenty of memory for professional applications. The CPUs will continue to use the sWRX8 socket, though we do not know whether the new products will be drop-in compatible with the existing sWRX8 platform (probably they will, albeit with a BIOS update).

Continue reading “Threadripper Pro 5000WX’s Secret Weapon: Up to 128 Cores per Workstation” »

In a bit of good news, the spot price for solar grade polysilicon is dropping quite rapidly. If the trend holds, the cost of solar panels in Australia should follow suit soon-ish.

Polysilicon is used in the manufacture of conventional photovoltaic cells used in solar panels. The sought-after stuff was as cheap as chips in July last year, when it was below USD $7/kg. But a series of events including impacts from the pandemic and a couple of factory fires saw it skyrocket.

Polysilicon spot prices were as high as US$36.64/kg at the beginning of this month. But here’s what’s happened in the last few weeks as reported by Bernreuter Research.

An international team of researchers have used a unique tool inserted into an electron microscope to create a transistor that’s 25,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The research, published in the journal Science, involves researchers from Japan, China, Russia and Australia who have worked on the project that began five years ago.

QUT Center for Materials Science co-director Professor Dmitri Golberg, who led the research project, said the result was a “very interesting fundamental discovery” which could lead a way for the future development of tiny transistors for future generations of advanced computing devices.