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Japan Is Investing Over $5 Billion to Solve the World’s Chip Shortage

Bringing global giants into the economic fight.

The world’s biggest chip-making nation is getting serious.

Japan has 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.

While the funds will go to several chipmakers, the most notable among them is the largest one in the world, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), according to an initial Tuesday report from Nikkei.

Japan invests $5.2 billion in Taiwan’s giant chip-making firm TSMC also said that it would construct a new chip plant in Japan for $7 billion in a joint effort with Sony Group Corp. Understandably, the government of Japan was pleased. The remaining 200 billion yen of Japan’s new investment will be directed toward preparing other factories for multiple new projects, including one under development by the U.S. memory chipmaker Micron Technology Inc, and Japan’s Kioxia Holdings, according to the report. Japan has remained the largest chip-making industry in the world since the 1980s. But since then the nation has fought an uphill battle to maintain its competitive edge in an increasingly crowded industry, falling into a steady decline in the last three decades as economic rivals like manufacturers based in Taiwan continued to close the gap.

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TSMC To Receive $3.47 Billion In Subsidies From Japan Government For $7 Billion Chip Factory It Will Set Up In Kumamoto

TSMC getting half their factory paid for by the Japan government shows how concerned governments are getting about the fact that we are down to 3 companies in the world that can make high-end chips. Sony is also contributing $500 million to this factory in addition to the Japan government money.


Japan will provide 600 billion yen ($5.2 billion) as part of its fiscal 2021 supplementary budget to support advanced semiconductor manufacturers.

The Mathematical Structure of Particle Collisions Comes Into View

And that’s where physicists are getting stuck.

Zooming in to that hidden center involves virtual particles — quantum fluctuations that subtly influence each interaction’s outcome. The fleeting existence of the quark pair above, like many virtual events, is represented by a Feynman diagram with a closed “loop.” Loops confound physicists — they’re black boxes that introduce additional layers of infinite scenarios. To tally the possibilities implied by a loop, theorists must turn to a summing operation known as an integral. These integrals take on monstrous proportions in multi-loop Feynman diagrams, which come into play as researchers march down the line and fold in more complicated virtual interactions.

Physicists have algorithms to compute the probabilities of no-loop and one-loop scenarios, but many two-loop collisions bring computers to their knees. This imposes a ceiling on predictive precision — and on how well physicists can understand what quantum theory says.

Theoretical Breakthrough at MIT Could Boost Data Storage

New work on linear-probing hash tables from MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.

Quantum computers to explore precision oncology

The most promising application in biomedicine is in computational chemistry, where researchers have long exploited a quantum approach. But the Fraunhofer Society hopes to spark interest among a wider community of life scientists, such as cancer researchers, whose research questions are not intrinsically quantum in nature.

“It’s uncharted territory,” says oncologist Niels Halama of the DKFZ, Germany’s national cancer center in Heidelberg. Working with a team of physicists and computer scientists, Halama is planning to develop and test algorithms that might help stratify cancer patients, and select small subgroups for specific therapies from heterogeneous data sets.

This is important for precision medicine, he says, but classic computing has insufficient power to find very small groups in the large and complex data sets that oncology, for example, generates. The time needed to complete such a task may stretch out over many weeks—too long to be of use in a clinical setting, and also too expensive. Moreover, the steady improvements in the performance of classic computers are slowing, thanks in large part to fundamental limits on chip miniaturization.

Don’t fall for quantum hype

Check out the physics courses that I mentioned (many of which are free!) and support this channel by going to https://brilliant.org/Sabine/ where you can create your Brilliant account. The first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

What are the quantum technologies that are now attracting so much research funding? In this video I go through the most important ones: quantum computing, quantum metrology, the quantum internet, and quantum simulations. I explain what these are all about and how likely they are to impact our lives soon. I also tell you what frequently headline blunders to watch out for.

The White House report I mention at 10 mins 34 seconds is here:

https://www.quantum.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/QuantumFrontiers.pdf.

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Exotic New Material Could Be Two Superconductors in One — With Serious Quantum Computing Applications

Work has potential applications in quantum computing, and introduces new way to plumb the secrets of superconductivity. MIT physicists and colleagues have demonstrated an exotic form of superconductivity in a new material the team synthesized only about a year ago. Although predicted in the 1960s.


“An important theme of our research is that new physics comes from new materials,” says Joseph Checkelsky, lead principal investigator of the work and the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor of Physics. “Our initial report last year was of this new material. This new work reports the new physics.”

Checkelsky’s co-authors on the current paper include lead author Aravind Devarakonda PhD ’21, who is now at Columbia University. The work was a central part of Devarakonda’s thesis. Co-authors are Takehito Suzuki, a former research scientist at MIT now at Toho University in Japan; Shiang Fang, a postdoc in the MIT Department of Physics; Junbo Zhu, an MIT graduate student in physics; David Graf of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory; Markus Kriener of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan; Liang Fu, an MIT associate professor of physics; and Efthimios Kaxiras of Harvard University.

New quantum material

Classical physics can be used to explain any number of phenomena that underlie our world — until things get exquisitely small. Subatomic particles like electrons and quarks behave differently, in ways that are still not fully understood. Enter quantum mechanics, the field that tries to explain their behavior and resulting effects.