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Industrial Electronics

Growth in 2.5D and 3D packaging solutions has accelerated off-the-board technology and the components which leverage it, both in terms of the fastest digital processors but also in proprietary ASICs and application processors. As high-bandwidth digital channels approach the practical limits of copper interconnects, silicon photonics and on-PCB/in-package optical interconnects may emerge as the next transformative wave of off-the-board technology.

This opinion is shared by insiders within the PCB and packaging side of the industry.

“Off the board technology is growing at an amazing rate, and isn’t being replaced by optical solutions, it’s enabling more optical solutions,” said Joe Dickson, senior VP chip-to-chip reliability and innovation at WUS PCB International. “They are not competition, they are tools to go much farther than we can today.”

“These Students Just Built the Future”: Stanford Team Unleashes Mini AI Robot Dog Created From Scratch, Stuns Experts With Breakthrough DIY Engineering

IN A NUTSHELL 🤖 Stanford University‘s course teaches students to build AI-powered robot dogs, blending education with technology. 🔧 Students learn hands-on robotics skills, from motor control to AI programming, using the “Pupper” quadruped kit. 🧠 The course shifts focus to AI, with students training neural networks to enhance Pupper‘s capabilities. 🌟 The program aims

Zombie fabs plague China’s chipmaking ambitions, failures burning tens of billions of dollars

Many Chinese semiconductor fab projects failed due to a lack of technical expertise amid overambitious goals: some startups aimed at advanced nodes like 14nm and 7nm without having experienced R&D teams or access to necessary wafer fab equipment. These efforts were often heavily reliant on provincial government funding, with little oversight or industry knowledge, which lead to collapse when finances dried up or scandals emerged. Some fab ventures were plagued by fraud or mismanagement, with executives vanishing or being arrested, sometimes with local officials involved.

To add to problems, U.S. export restrictions since 2019 blocked access of Chinese entities to critical chipmaking equipment required to make chips at 10nm-class nodes and below, effectively halting progress on advanced fabs. In addition, worsening U.S.-China tensions and global market shifts further undercut the viability of many of these projects.

So, let’s go over some of China’s most ambitious fab projects, many of which have fallen into oblivion, or have become a dreaded zombie fab.

DunedinPACNI estimates the longitudinal Pace of Aging from a single brain image to track health and disease

Differences in the Pace of Aging are important for many health outcomes but difficult to measure. Here the authors describe the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging measure, an approach that uses a single brain image to measure how fast a person is aging and can help predict mortality or the risk of developing chronic disease.

AI-assisted technique can measure and track aging cells

A combination of high-resolution imaging and machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence (AI), can track cells damaged from injury, aging, or disease, and that no longer grow and reproduce normally, a new study shows.

These senescent cells are known to play a key role in wound repair and aging-related diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, so tracking their progress, researchers say, could lead to a better understanding of how tissues gradually lose their ability to regenerate over time or how they fuel disease. The tool could also provide insight into therapies for reversing the damage.

The study included training a computer system to help analyze animal cells damaged by increasing concentrations of chemicals over time to replicate human aging. Cells continuously confronted with environmental or biological stress are known to senesce, meaning they stop reproducing and start to release telltale molecules indicating that they have suffered injury.

Leadership Skills: Managing AI Agents vs. Humans

Leadership quality has a significant impact on firm productivity and can even affect national prosperity, but measuring individual leadership skills is difficult. Existing methods require observing prospective leaders working with multiple randomly assigned groups, an undertaking that can be both logistically complex and expensive.

Permanent retention of exceptional trees can improve ecosystem integrity in managed forests

Even-aged forest management is geared towards timber production with ecosystem health as a lesser consideration. This creates a dichotomy where forests are treated either as plantations or reserves. Uneven-aged management can bring compromise to conflicting land uses by reducing ecosystem impacts while still allowing timber extraction. Whereas selection forestry focuses on which trees are taken, retention forestry focuses on protecting features that will remain after logging. These biological legacies provide ecosystem continuity.

Retained trees are often chosen based on their habitat value. Snags and living trees that are diseased, damaged, or dying provide cavities, decaying wood, and other microhabitats for a diversity of biota. Defects that make high-quality habitat trees tend to cause the collapse of large and , so it’s important to designate healthy recruitment trees for the future. Retention forestry that focuses only on habitat trees may be inconsistent with the goals of long-term carbon storage and ecosystem resilience.

An article just published in Forest Ecology and Management explores the idea of “exceptional trees” and why we might consider choosing a subset of the most robust trees for permanent retention in managed forests. We present methods for precisely estimating aboveground biomass across the landscape and assess the contribution of exceptional trees to biomass and productivity. Our study focuses on Sequoia sempervirens (redwood) in California’s Demonstration State Forests.