Lifeboat Foundation

Chemical engineers at UCLA have been demonstrating what they argue is scientific evidence that bunches of synthetically grown nanowires exhibit behaviors similar to that of memory in a living brain. Whether you believe their claim depends on what you think memory actually is.

Maybe we can’t keep packing transistors onto substrates the way Gordon Moore showed us how to do. So how about if we replaced those millions of transistors with components “inspired by the true story” of the brain?

A MIND reading brain computer chip has been announced at the World Intelligence Congress in China.

The breakthrough device is called Brain Talker and allows a person to control a computer with just their brainwaves.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are devices that have been designed to create simple communication between the human brain and computers.

Continue reading “China invents ‘mind-reading chip’ called Brain Talker that ‘sends your thoughts to a computer’” »

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded 13.5 million US dollars (12.6 million euros) to promote the development of a particle accelerator on a microchip. DESY and the University of Hamburg are among the partners involved in this international project, headed by Robert Byer of Stanford University (USA) and Peter Hommelhoff of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Within five years, they hope to produce a working prototype of an “accelerator-on-a-chip”.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone claim to have developed a fully-programmable quantum optical chip able to encode and manipulate photons in an infinite number of ways. This breakthrough may pave the way for true quantum optical computing systems.

IEEE Spectrum recently summarized a major breakthrough out of DARPA’s Photonically Optimized Embedded Microprocessors (POEM) program:

It can produce or sense photons for optical interconnects within chips.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners have demonstrated an experimental, next-generation atomic clock — ticking at high “optical” frequencies — that is much smaller than usual, made of just three small chips plus supporting electronics and optics.

Described in Optica, the chip-scale clock is based on the vibrations, or “ticks,” of rubidium atoms confined in a tiny glass container, called a vapor cell, on a chip. Two frequency combs on chips act like gears to link the atoms’ high-frequency optical ticks to a lower, widely used microwave frequency that can be used in applications.

The chip-based heart of the new clock requires very little power (just 275 milliwatts) and, with additional technology advances, could potentially be made small enough to be handheld. Chip-scale optical clocks like this could eventually replace traditional oscillators in applications such as navigation systems and telecommunications networks and serve as backup clocks on satellites.

Shrinking transistors have powered 50 years of advances in computing—but now other ways must be found to make computers more capable.