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Category: computing – Page 521

One of the interesting consequences of the emergent upshift in visual systems is that all streetlights, car headlights and other external sources of lighting will no longer be needed within around a decade. This will not only make astronomers happy, since they will be able to see the dark skies again but will simplify urban infrastructure. The three convergent elements making this change of affairs come about are the following:

1) Quanta Image Sensors, whether of the SPAD or the CIS-QIS versions are expected to become widely available within 5 to 10 years. Unlike the CMOS image sensors in billions of cell-phone cameras, which only register packets of the incoming light, these sensors can register single photons of light. The most versatile of these are the QIS sensors being developed by Fossum—who also developed the CMOS sensor—wherein a single jot\.

Demonstrating single-photon sensitivity at room temperature without avalanche multiplication, QIS technology offers sub-diffraction-limited pixel sizes and many degrees of freedom in computing the reconstruction of the image to emphasize resolution, sensitivity, and motion-deblur.

Continue reading “Advances in Detectors: The Quanta image sensor (QIS): Making every photon count” | >

BRUSSELS/BERLIN (Reuters)-Intel wants 8 billion euros ($9.7 billion) in public subsidies towards building a semiconductor factory in Europe, its CEO was cited as saying on Friday, as the region seeks to reduce its reliance on imports amid a shortage of supplies. The pitch is the first time Pat Gelsinger has publicly put a figure on how much state aid he would want, as Intel pursues a multibillion-dollar drive to take on Asian rivals in contract manufacturing. “What we’re asking from both the U.S. and the European governments is to make it competitive for us to do it here compared to in Asia,” Gelsinger told Politico Europe in an interview.

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Let the farming games begin.

Chinese motherboard manufacturer Onda (via ZOL) has launched the brand’s new Chia-D32H-D4 motherboard. The model name alone is enough to tell you that this motherboard is aimed at farming Chia cryptocurrency, which has already caused hard drive price spikes in Asia.

Designed for mining, rather than to compete with the best motherboards for gaming, the Chia-D32H-D4 is most likely a rebranded version of Onda’s existing B365 D32-D4 motherboard. It measures 530 × 310mm, so the Chia-D32H-D4 isn’t your typical motherboard. In fact, Onda has produced a special case with an included power supply for this specific model. The unspecified 800W power supply arrives with the 80Plus Gold certification, while the case features five cooling fans.

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Circa 2020 o.o!

Researchers have succeeded in creating an efficient quantum-mechanical light-matter interface using a microscopic cavity. Within this cavity, a single photon is emitted and absorbed up to 10 times by an artificial atom. This opens up new prospects for quantum technology, report physicists at the University of Basel and Ruhr-University Bochum in the journal Nature.

Quantum physics describes photons as light particles. Achieving an interaction between a single photon and a single atom is a huge challenge due to the tiny size of the atom. However, sending the photon past the atom several times by means of mirrors significantly increases the probability of an interaction.

In order to generate photons, the researchers use artificial atoms, known as quantum dots. These semiconductor structures consist of an accumulation of tens of thousands of atoms, but behave much like a single atom: when they are optically excited, their energy state changes and they emit a photon. “However, they have the technological advantage that they can be embedded in a semiconductor chip,” says Dr. Daniel Najer, who conducted the experiment at the Department of Physics at the University of Basel.

Continue reading “Efficient Quantum-Mechanical Interface Leads to a Strong Interaction Between Light and Matter” | >

The U. S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and American Semiconductor have combined traditional manufacturing techniques with 3D printed circuitry to produce a flexible Silicon-on-polymer chip.

Besides its material qualities, the new chip has a memory more than 7000 times larger than any comparable commercially available devices, making it suitable as a micro-controller to be integrated into other objects.

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The now-familiar sight of traditional propeller wind turbines could be replaced in the future with wind farms containing more compact and efficient vertical turbines.

New research from Oxford Brookes University has found that the vertical turbine design is far more efficient than traditional turbines in large-scale wind farms, and when set in pairs the vertical turbines increase each other’s performance by up to 15%.

A research team from the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (ECM) at Oxford Brookes led by Professor Iakovos Tzanakis conducted an in-depth study using more than 11500 hours of computer simulation to show that wind farms can perform more efficiently by substituting the traditional propeller-type Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs), for compact Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs).

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Quantum simulators are a strange breed of systems for purposes that might seem a bit nebulous from the outset. These are often HPC clusters with fast interconnects and powerful server processors (although not usually equipped with accelerators) that run a literal simulation of how various quantum circuits function for design and testing of quantum hardware and algorithms. Quantum simulators do more than just test. They can also be used to emulate quantum problem solving and serve as a novel approach to tackling problems without all the quantum hardware complexity.

Despite the various uses, there’s only so much commercial demand for quantum simulators. Companies like IBM have their own internally and for others, Atos/Bull have created these based on their big memory Sequanna systems but these are, as one might imagine, niche machines for special purposes. Nonetheless, Nvidia sees enough opportunity in this arena to make an announcement at their GTC event about the performance of quantum simulators using the DGX A100 and its own custom-cooked quantum development software stack, called CuQuantum.

After all, it is probably important for Nvidia to have some kind of stake in quantum before (and if) it ever really takes off, especially in large-scale and scientific computing. What better way to get an insider view than to work with quantum hardware and software developers who are designing better codes and qubits via a benchmark and testing environment?

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Circa 2020 o.,.o!

By Leah Crane.

Google researchers have used a quantum computer to simulate a chemical reaction for the first time. The reaction is a simple one, but this marks a step towards finding a practical use for quantum computers.

Because atoms and molecules are systems governed by quantum mechanics, quantum computers are expected to be the best way to precisely simulate them. These computers use quantum bits, or qubits, to store information and perform calculations. However, quantum computers have difficulty achieving the precision needed to simulate large atoms or chemical reactions.

Continue reading “Google performed the first quantum simulation of a chemical reaction” | >

O,.o circa 2020.

With the rapid developments in quantum hardware comes a push towards the first practical applications on these devices. While fully fault-tolerant quantum computers may still be years away, one may ask if there exist intermediate forms of error correction or mitigation that might enable practical applications before then. In this work, we consider the idea of post-processing error decoders using existing quantum codes, which are capable of mitigating errors on encoded logical qubits using classical post-processing with no complicated syndrome measurements or additional qubits beyond those used for the logical qubits. This greatly simplifies the experimental exploration of quantum codes on near-term devices, removing the need for locality of syndromes or fast feed-forward, allowing one to study performance aspects of codes on real devices. We provide a general construction equipped with a simple stochastic sampling scheme that does not depend explicitly on a number of terms that we extend to approximate projectors within a subspace. This theory then allows one to generalize to the correction of some logical errors in the code space, correction of some physical unencoded Hamiltonians without engineered symmetries, and corrections derived from approximate symmetries. In this work, we develop the theory of the method and demonstrate it on a simple example with the perfect [[5, 1, 3]] code, which exhibits a pseudo-threshold of p≈0.50 under a single qubit depolarizing channel applied to all qubits. We also provide a demonstration under the application of a logical operation and performance on an unencoded hydrogen molecule, which exhibits a significant improvement over the entire range of possible errors incurred under a depolarizing channel.

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