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Category: computing – Page 420

Using a new fabrication technique, NIMS has developed a diamond field-effect transistor (FET) with high hole mobility, which allows reduced conduction loss and higher operational speed. This new FET also exhibits normally off behavior (i.e., electric current flow through the transistor ceases when no gate voltage is applied, a feature that makes electronic devices safer). These results may facilitate the development of low-loss power conversion and high-speed communications devices.

Diamond has excellent wide bandgap semiconductor properties: its bandgap is larger than those of and gallium nitride, which are already in practical use. Diamond therefore could potentially be used to create power electronics and communications devices capable of operating more energy efficiently at higher speeds, voltages and temperatures. A number of R&D projects have previously been carried out with the aim of creating FETs using hydrogen-terminated diamonds (i.e., diamonds with their superficial carbon atoms covalently bonded with hydrogen atoms). However, these efforts have failed to fully exploit diamonds’ excellent wide bandgap semiconductor properties: the (a measure of how quickly holes can move) of these diamond-integrated transistors was only 1–10% that of the diamonds before integration.

The NIMS research team succeeded in developing a high-performance FET by using hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) as a gate insulator instead of conventionally used oxides (e.g., alumina), and by employing a new fabrication technique capable of preventing the surface of hydrogen-terminated diamond from being exposed to air. At high hole densities, the hole mobility of this FET was five times that of conventional FETs with oxide gate insulators. FETs with high hole mobility can operate with lower electrical resistance, thereby reducing conduction loss, and can be used to develop higher speed and smaller electronic devices. The team also demonstrated normally-off operation of the FET, an important feature for power electronics applications. The new fabrication technique enabled removal of electron acceptors from the surface of the hydrogen-terminated diamond.

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Humans have been trying to understand how the brain works and how it acquires information for centuries. While neuroscientists now have a pretty good understanding of how different parts of the brain work and what their function is, many questions remain unanswered; thus, a unified neuroscience theory is still lacking.

In recent years, computer scientists have been trying to create computational tools that artificially recreate the functions and processes of the human . New theories clarifying how the brain makes predictions could help to significantly enhance these tools so that they replicate neural functions in increasingly realistic ways.

Researchers at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience in Lethbridge, Canada have recently carried out a study investigating how individual learn and make predictions about the future. Their findings, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, suggest that the ability of single neurons to predict their future activity could offer a new learning mechanism.

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Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox.

The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1,600 × 1,200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.

But since running a long cable all the way from the house was not an attractive option, the whole module had to be completely wireless. [fhuable] decided to power it using a single 18,650 lithium ion cell, which gets topped up continuously thanks to a 1.5 W solar panel mounted on the roof of the mailbox. The other parts are housed in a 3D-printed enclosure that’s completely sealed to keep out moisture.

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More recently, digital twins have been the focus of a European Union-funded project that seeks to clone a patient’s entire brain. Dubbed Neurotwin, the research project aims to create virtual models that can be used to predict the effects of stimulation for the treatment of neurological disorders—including epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. When it comes to epilepsy, non-invasive stimulations (where electrical currents are painlessly delivered to the brain) have proven effective in tackling seizures. Given how drugs don’t help a third of epilepsy patients, the technology is coveted yet needs refinement. This is where virtual clones come in.

“The digital avatar is essentially a mathematical model running on a computer,” Giulio Ruffini, coordinator of the Neurotwin project, told WIRED. Including a network of embedded “neural mass models,” the technology hopes to create a map of the neural connections in the brain—a concept termed as the ‘connectome’. “In the case of epilepsy, some areas of the connectome could become overexcited,” the outlet mentioned. “In the case of, say, stroke, the connectome might be altered.” Once the digital clone has been created by the team, with about half an hour-worth of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data and ten minutes of electroencephalography (EEG) readings to capture electrical activities and realistically simulate the brain’s main tissues (including the scalp, skull, cerebrospinal fluid, and grey and white matter), it can then be used to optimise stimulation of the real patient’s brain.

According to Ruffini, this is possible “because we can run endless simulations on the computer until we find what we need. It is, in this sense, like a weather forecasting computational model.”

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Doorbells are among those everyday objects that started out simple but picked up an immense amount of complexity over the years. What began as a mechanism to bang two pieces of metal together evolved into all kinds of wired and wireless electric bells, finally culminating in today’s smart doorbells that beam a live video feed to their owners even if they’re half a world away.

But sometimes, less is more. [Low tech obsession] built a doorbell out of spare components that doesn’t require Internet connectivity or even a power supply. But it’s not a purely mechanical device either: the visitor turns a knob mounted on a stepper motor, generating pulses of alternating current. These pulses are then fed into the voice coil of an old hard drive, causing its arm to vibrate and strike a bell, mounted where the platters used to be.

Besides being a great piece of minimalistic design, the doorbell is also a neat demonstration of Faraday’s law of induction. The stepper motor is apparently robust enough to withstand vandalism, although we can imagine that the doorbell’s odd shape might confuse some well-meaning visitors too. If you’re into unusual doorbells, you might want to check out this one made from an old wall phone, as well as this electromechanical contraption.

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TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Following multiple news organizations covering allegations of animal abuse at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain chip company, the tech developer issued a statement on its animal welfare policies.

Earlier this month, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine announced lawsuits against the University of California, Davis and Neuralink over its treatment of the macaque monkeys used to test the experimental brain implants developed by Musk’s company.

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To show how bad the chip shortage is, Nvidia just spent about $10 billion in bribes (prepayments) to get TSMC to build some chips for it!

Why it matters: Securing enough manufacturing capacity is going to be critical to the success of Nvidia’s RTX 4,000 GPUs, which are expected to land as soon as this summer. The RTX 3,000 series were regarded by gamers as paper launches, but the company is said to have paid through the nose so that wouldn’t be the case for its upcoming GPUs.

Back in November 2021, the rumor mill was abuzz with hints that Nvidia was planning to use TSMC’s 5nm process node for its upcoming GeForce RTX 4,000 series (Ada Lovelace) GPUs. These are widely expected to be significantly faster and more power-hungry when compared to the current Ampere lineup, but a much bigger issue for the Jensen Huang-powered company is securing enough manufacturing capacity.

Continue reading “Nvidia reportedly spent billion for a chunk of TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing capacity” | >

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Continue reading “Now that the final book in The Cybernetic Theory of Mind series is released, the entire eBook series is available on Amazon all in one place!” | >