Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is moving quickly to expand its chip-making capabilities, investing billions of dollars in plants and weighing a deal to buy GlobalFoundries that would value the company at about $30 billion.
Category: computing – Page 730
Unconventional superconductor acts the part of a promising quantum computing platform
Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have produced the most compelling evidence to date that they’ve found one. In a pair of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Quantum Materials Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe2 for short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor—a material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other futuristic devices.
“Nature can be wicked,” says Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the papers. “There could be other reasons we’re seeing all this wacky stuff, but honestly, in my career, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
All superconductors carry electrical currents without any resistance. It’s kind of their thing. The wiring behind your walls can’t rival this feat, which is one of many reasons that large coils of superconducting wires and not normal copper wires have been used in MRI machines and other scientific equipment for decades.
Quantum random number generator sets benchmark for size, performance
As pervasive as they are in everyday uses, like encryption and security, randomly generated digital numbers are seldom truly random.
So far, only bulky, relatively slow quantum random number generators (QRNGs) can achieve levels of randomness on par with the basic laws of quantum physics, but researchers are looking to make these devices faster and more portable.
In Applied Physics Letters, scientists from China present the fastest real-time QRNG to date to make the devices quicker and more portable. The device combines a state-of-the-art photonic integrated chip with optimized real-time postprocessing for extracting randomness from quantum entropy source of vacuum states.
Scientists take first snapshots of ultrafast switching in a quantum electronic device
Electronic circuits that compute and store information contain millions of tiny switches that control the flow of electric current. A deeper understanding of how these tiny switches work could help researchers push the frontiers of modern computing.
Now scientists have made the first snapshots of atoms moving inside one of those switches as it turns on and off. Among other things, they discovered a short-lived state within the switch that might someday be exploited for faster and more energy-efficient computing devices.
The research team from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, Hewlett Packard Labs, Penn State University and Purdue University described their work in a paper published in Science today.
TSMC Expects Auto-Chip Shortage to Abate This Quarter
The world’s largest contract chip maker said it expects the chip shortage that has hampered car makers to start easing in the next few months after it ramped up its production of auto chips.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chip maker, said it expects the chip shortage that has hampered car makers to start easing in the next few months after it ramped up its production of auto chips.
The company is on track to increase output of microcontrollers used in cars by about 60% this year compared with last, Chief Executive C.C. Wei said in an earnings call on Thursday. However, he said, the broader semiconductor shortage could persist until 2022.
A dearth of semiconductors, used in products including home appliances and smartphones, has stymied manufacturing activity, notably in the auto industry. That shortfall should be greatly reduced for TSMC customers in the current quarter, Mr. Wei said.
Tesla has Powerwall backlog of 80,000 orders worth over $500 million
Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla currently has a Powerwall backlog of 80000 orders, which is worth over $500 million, but it can’t ramp up production to meet that due to the global chip shortage.
Tesla has been production constrained with the Powerwall for a long time.
The demand has been strong in several markets, like the US and Australia, but production hasn’t been to catch up despite significant ramp-ups.
The next generation of information processing is through coherent gate operations
Many of us swing through gates every day—points of entry and exit to a space like a garden, park or subway. Electronics have gates too. These control the flow of information from one place to another by means of an electrical signal. Unlike a garden gate, these gates require control of their opening and closing many times faster than the blink of an eye.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have devised a unique means of achieving effective gate operation with a form of information processing called electromagnonics. Their pivotal discovery allows real-time control of information transfer between microwave photons and magnons. And it could result in a new generation of classical electronic and quantum signal devices that can be used in various applications such as signal switching, low-power computing and quantum networking.
Microwave photons are elementary particles forming the electromagnetic waves employed in, for example, wireless communications. Magnons are the particle-like representatives of “spin waves.” That is, wave-like disturbances in an ordered array of microscopically aligned spins that occur in certain magnetic materials.
Samsung’s 3nm Node Expected to be Less Denser than Intel’s 7nm and TSMC’s 5nm
The smaller transistors get, the more expensive they get, and similarly, the harder it becomes for foundries to compete at the cutting edge. We’ve been seeing this since the introduction of TSMC and Samsung’s 7nm node (comparable to Intel’s 10nm process). Global Foundries was the first to drop out of the race, and Intel has been stuck on its 14nm node for nearly seven years (although the chipmaker is trying to make a comeback). Samsung is the third major foundry struggling to keep up with TSMC in the race to make the smallest transistors.
Samsung’s 10nm and 7nm nodes were both on par with TSMC’s, at least in terms of transistor density, packing 0.52 and 0.95 million transistors per square mm. Meanwhile, Intel’s 10nm node was denser than both, with a density of 1.06 million per square mm. Starting with the 5nm node, Samsung’s nodes have fallen behind. The Korean foundry’s 5nm node has a transistor density of 1.27 million (per mm2), compared to 1.73 million on TSMC’s 5nm and 1.8 million on Intel’s 7nm.
The deltas become even wider with the 3nm node, with Samsung expected to offer a density of just 1.7 million, compared to 2.9 million on TSMC’s 3nm (despite not using GAA), and 3 million on Intel’s 3nm. Samsung has continued to lose foundry customers, with both Qualcomm and MediaTek shifting to TSMC due to poor supply. It’s being reported that NVIDIA too will rely on TSMC’s 5nm for its next-gen GPUs, resulting in the loss of another major client for the former. At this rate, Samsung might just throw in the towel even before its 3nm node begins mass production.