Recent advances in quantum computing show progress, but not enough to live up to years of hyperbole. An emerging view suggests the much-publicized quest for more quantum qubits and quantum supremacy may be overshadowed by a more sensible quest to make practical use of the qubits we have now.
D-Wave’s embrace of gates is notable. To date, the company focuses solely on quantum annealing processors. Using this probabilistic approach, it has achieved superconducting qubit processor counts that it claims outpaces most others. Its latest Advantage system boasts 5,000 qubits. That’s well ahead of the 127-qubit device IBM reported in November.
Digitization results in a high energy consumption. In industrialized countries, information technology presently has a share of more than 10% in total power consumption. The transistor is the central element of digital data processing in computing centers, PCs, smartphones, or in embedded systems for many applications from the washing machine to the airplane. A commercially available low-cost USB memory stick already contains several billion transistors. In the future, the single-atom transistor developed by Professor Thomas Schimmel and his team at the Institute of Applied Physics (APH) of KIT might considerably enhance energy efficiency in information technology. “This quantum electronics element enables switching energies smaller than those of conventional silicon technologies by a factor of 10,000,” says physicist and nanotechnology expert Schimmel, who conducts research at the APH, the Institute of Nanotechnology (INT), and the Material Research Center for Energy Systems (MZE) of KIT. Earlier this year, Professor Schimmel, who is considered the pioneer of single-atom electronics, was appointed Co-Director of the Center for Single-Atom Electronics and Photonics established jointly by KIT and ETH Zurich.
In Advanced Materials, the KIT researchers present the transistor that reaches the limits of miniaturization. The scientists produced two minute metallic contacts. Between them, there is a gap as wide as a single metal atom. “By an electric control pulse, we position a single silver atom into this gap and close the circuit,” Professor Thomas Schimmel explains. “When the silver atom is removed again, the circuit is interrupted.” The world’s smallest transistor switches current through the controlled reversible movement of a single atom. Contrary to conventional quantum electronics components, the single-atom transistor does not only work at extremely low temperatures near absolute zero, i.e.-273°C, but already at room temperature. This is a big advantage for future applications.
The single-atom transistor is based on an entirely new technical approach. The transistor exclusively consists of metal, no semiconductors are used. This results in extremely low electric voltages and, hence, an extremely low energy consumption. So far, KIT’s single-atom transistor has applied a liquid electrolyte. Now, Thomas Schimmel and his team have designed a transistor that works in a solid electrolyte. The gel electrolyte produced by gelling an aqueous silver electrolyte with pyrogenic silicon dioxide combines the advantages of a solid with the electrochemical properties of a liquid. In this way, both safety and handling of the single-atom transistor are improved.
An international team of researchers has 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.
Earlier this month, Airtable announced it’s now worth $11 billion after its latest funding round. The company’s “code-for-everyone-else approach allows professionals who aren’t fluent in coding languages such as Java or Python, and don’t have their desk buried deep within the stack, to play a part in rethinking and remaking the consumer and client digital experience,” reports Riley de León of CNBC. “The low-code movement has attracted an even higher level of attention as a result of the pandemic, during which organizations from hospitals to government entities and corporations have had to develop online offerings at a faster pace than ever expected and for new use cases.”
This movement is part of an increasing democratization of programming — borne of extreme necessity. At a time when digital transformation is everywhere, “relying on IT departments and professional programmers is unsustainable,” an O’Reilly report states. “We need to enable people who aren’t programmers to develop the software they need. We need to enable people to solve their own computational problems.”
Amongst many things, the leak revealed that new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles coming to Europe, which are made in China, would come with the new AMD Ryzen chip that is powering the media computer in the new Model S and Model X and the Model Y Performance made in China. Also, the lead-acid 12v battery will change to a Li-ion battery system.
What do you get when you place a thin film of perovskite material used in solar cells on top of a magnetic substrate? More efficient hard drive technology. EPFL physicist László Forró and his team pave the way for the future of data storage.
“The key was to get the technology to work at room temperature,” explains László Forró, EPFL physicist. “We had already known that it was possible to rewrite magnetic spin using light, but you’d have to cool the apparatus to—180 degrees Kelvin.”
Forró, along with his colleagues Bálint Náfrádi and Endre Horváth, succeeded at tuning one ferromagnet at room temperature with visible light, a proof of concept that establishes the foundations of a new generation of hard drives that will be physically smaller, faster, and cheaper, requiring less energy compared to today’s commercial hard drives. The results are published in PNAS.
The Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro, which will be released on December 28, is the first smartphone equipped with the Surge P1. It supports wired 120W charging, 50W wireless charging, and 10W wireless reverse charging. Xiaomi said that the 120W charging technology of the Xiaomi Mi 12 Pro has two modes: low-temperature mode, “the temperature is only 37 degrees Celsius, and the body temperature is comfortable”; the fast mode.
A team of Viennese researchers has developed what likely amounts to the future of classical computing: Intelligent transistors. By tapping into the element Germanium, these transistors are much more efficient and can reduce the number of transistors required for the same computational work by a staggering 85%.
Anil Seth argues, using innovative combinations of theory and experiment, that our brains are prediction machines inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond. Anil’s new perspective on consciousness has shed light on the nature of the self, free will, the intimate relationship between being alive and being aware — and the possibility of conscious machines.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is also a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow, Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness.
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