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This design can either double the performance of chips or reduce power use by 85%.

In May of 2021, we brought you a breakthrough in semiconductor materials that saw the creation of a chip that could push back the “end” of Moore’s Law and further widen the capability gap between China and U.S.-adjacent efforts in the field of 1-nanometer chips.

The breakthrough was accomplished in a joint effort, involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), National Taiwan University (NTU), and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), which is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of advanced chips. At the core of the breakthrough was a process that employs semi-metal bismuth to allow for the manufacture of semiconductors below the 1-nanometer (nm) level.

Now, IBM and Samsung claim they have also made a breakthrough in semiconductor design, revealing a new concept for stacking transistors vertically on a chip, according to a press release acquired by IE. It’s called Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) and it sees transistors lie perpendicular to one another while current flows vertically.

This is a drastic change from today’s models where transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side to side. By doing this, IBM and Samsung hope to extend Moore’s Law beyond the nanosheet threshold and waste less energy.

Continue reading “Samsung and IBM Could Break the Nanosheet Threshold in Chips With ‘Vertically Stacked Transistors’” | >

Microsoft’s attempts to steer Windows users toward the Edge browser are attracting notice. Can the Third Browser War around the corner?

Users of Microsoft’s Windows 10 and 11 operating systems have recently reported seeing unusual prompts when they attempt to download Google’s Chrome browser to their device, according to The Verge.

If Microsoft is indeed launching a third Browser War, can the mid-1990s be far behind? Men, put on your flat-front chinos or straight-leg jeans, women, put on a mini-skirt and knee socks, pop a disc with “The Macarena” into your car’s sound system, and head for the mall. There, Toy Story or Braveheart is playing, and you can stop by Starbucks for their new frozen Frappuccino.

If you’re lucky enough to have a home computer, a new company called eBay is selling Pez dispensers, and another new company named Amazon has just sold its first book: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter.

Full Story:

Continue reading “Is Microsoft Launching a New Browser War?” | >

While 1% of anything doesn’t sound like much, with light, that’s still really fast — close to 7 million miles per hour! At 1% the speed of light, it would take a little over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.

Bullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 km/h), more than three times the speed of sound. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane 0, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 km/h). That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001% the speed of light.

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(PhysOrg.com) — By greatly amplifying one photon from an entangled photon pair, physicists have theoretically shown that human eyes can be used as detectors to observe quantum effects. Usually, detecting quantum phenomena requires sensitive photon detectors or similar technology, keeping the quantum world far removed from our everyday experience. By showing that it’s possible to perform quantum optics experiments with human eyes as detectors, the physicists can bring quantum phenomena closer to the macroscopic level and to everyday life.

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“The industry will see normalization and balance by the middle of 2022, with a potential for overcapacity in 2023 as larger scale capacity expansions begin to come online towards the end of 2022,” the research firm predicts.

Indeed, major semiconductor makers—including Intel, TSMC and Samsung—have all boosted investment in expanding chip capacity amid the current shortage. At the same time, the US government wants to spur more domestic chip manufacturing with billions in potential funding.

The big question is which sectors will see the semiconductor supplies improve to the point of overcapacity. Current shortage have ensnared a wide range of products, including PCs, graphics cards, video game consoles, in addition to cars, smartphones, and smart home devices.

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(PhysOrg.com) — By greatly amplifying one photon from an entangled photon pair, physicists have theoretically shown that human eyes can be used as detectors to observe quantum effects. Usually, detecting quantum phenomena requires sensitive photon detectors or similar technology, keeping the quantum world far removed from our everyday experience. By showing that it’s possible to perform quantum optics experiments with human eyes as detectors, the physicists can bring quantum phenomena closer to the macroscopic level and to everyday life.

The group of physicists is from the University of Geneva, and includes Pavel Sekatski, Nicolas Brunner (also from the University of Bristol), Cyril Branciard, Nicolas Gisin, and Christoph Simon. In their study published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the scientists theoretically show how human eyes can be used to detect a large Bell inequality violation, which proves the existence of .

As the physicists explain, the key to achieving detection of quantum effects is to use the process of quantum cloning by stimulated emission. Recently, using quantum cloning, researchers in Rome have experimentally created tens of thousands of clones starting from a single-photon. Then, by amplifying one photon of an entangled pair, the researchers managed to demonstrate entanglement. In order to do this, specific detectors are required, which can distinguish two orthogonal amplified states with a high success rate.

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Amprius Technologies announced that its lithium-ion battery cells with silicon anode (Si-Nanowire platform) achieved a breakthrough fast charging capability of 0–80% state-of-charge (SOC) in just 6 minutes (10C current).

The capability of extreme fast charging has been validated and confirmed by Mobile Power Solutions for three 2.75 Ah sample pouch cells (see report here). It actually took less than 6 minutes to achieve 80% SOC.

0–70% charging takes less than 5 minutes, and 0–90% is usually above 8 minutes. Then, the charging rate is much slower, so 100% is achieved after 25–27 minutes (90–100% takes 17–19 minutes).

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The price of the batteries that power electric vehicles has fallen by about 90 percent since 2010, a continuing trend that will soon make EVs less expensive than gasoline vehicles.

This week, with battery pricing figures for 2021 now available, I wanted to get a better idea of what the near future will look like.

First, the numbers: The average price of lithium-ion battery packs fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021, down 6 percent from $140 per kilowatt-hour the previous year, according to the annual battery price survey from BloombergNEF. The new average is a step closer to the benchmark of $100 per kilowatt-hour, which researchers say is the approximate point where EVs will cost about the same as gasoline-powered vehicles.

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