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Category: computing – Page 435

Uneven Circuit Aging Becoming A Bigger Problem

The industry is gaining ground in understanding how aging affects reliability, but more variables make it harder to fix.

Circuit aging is emerging as a first-order design challenge as engineering teams look for new ways to improve reliability and ensure the functionality of chips throughout their expected lifetimes.

The need for reliability is obvious in data centers and automobiles, where a chip failure could result in downtime or injury. It also is increasingly important in mobile and consumer electronics, which are being used for applications such as in-home health monitoring or for navigation, and where the cost of the devices has been steadily rising. But aging also needs to be assessed in the context of variation models from the foundries, different use cases that may stress various components in different ways, and different power and thermal profiles, all of which makes it harder to accurately predict how a chip will behave over time.

Designing for Data Flow

Processing more data in more places while minimizing its movement becomes a requirement and a challenge.

Movement and management of data inside and outside of chips is becoming a central theme for a growing number of electronic systems, and a huge challenge for all of them.

Entirely new architectures and techniques are being developed to reduce the movement of data and to accomplish more per compute cycle, and to speed the transfer of data between various components on a chip and between chips in a package. Alongside of that, new materials are being developed to increase electron mobility and to reduce resistance and capacitance.

Immersive Virtual Reality From The Humble Webcam

[Russ Maschmeyer] and Spatial Commerce Projects developed WonkaVision to demonstrate how 3D eye tracking from a single webcam can support rendering a graphical virtual reality (VR) display with realistic depth and space. Spatial Commerce Projects is a Shopify lab working to provide concepts, prototypes, and tools to explore the crossroads of spatial computing and commerce.

The graphical output provides a real sense of depth and three-dimensional space using an optical illusion that reacts to the viewer’s eye position. The eye position is used to render view-dependent images. The computer screen is made to feel like a window into a realistic 3D virtual space where objects beyond the window appear to have depth and objects before the window appear to project out into the space in front of the screen. The resulting experience is like a 3D view into a virtual space. The downside is that the experience only works for one viewer.

Eye tracking is performed using Google’s MediaPipe Iris library, which relies on the fact that the iris diameter of the human eye is almost exactly 11.7 mm for most humans. Computer vision algorithms in the library use this geometrical fact to efficiently locate and track human irises with high accuracy.

Aluminum-based low-loss interconnects for superconducting quantum processors

Quantum processors are computing systems that process information and perform computations by exploiting quantum mechanical phenomena. These systems could significantly outperform conventional processors on certain tasks, both in terms of speed and computational capabilities.

While engineers have developed several promising quantum computing systems over the past decade or so, scaling these systems and ensuring that they can be deployed on a large-scale remains an ongoing challenge. One proposed strategy to increase the scalability of entails the creation of modular systems containing multiple smaller quantum modules, which can be individually calibrated and then arranged into a bigger architecture. This, however, would require suitable and effective interconnects (i.e., devices for connecting these smaller modules).

Researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology, the International Quantum Academy and other institutes in China have recently developed low-loss interconnects for linking the individual modules in modular superconducting quantum processors. These interconnects, introduced in Nature Electronics, are based on pure cables and on-chip impendence transformers.

The Future of Computing Includes Biology: AI Computers Powered by Human Brain Cells

The future of computing includes biology says an international team of scientists.

The time has come to create a new kind of computer, say researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, who recently led development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learned to play Pong.

In an article published on February 27 in the journal Frontiers in Science, the team outlines how biological computers could surpass today’s electronic computers for certain applications while using a small fraction of the electricity required by today’s computers and server farms.

This Giant Scorpion Gaming Chair is a Zero-Gravity Computer Workstation That Cocoons You

Working from home has many of us wondering how we can make this new experience more comfortable and accommodating. lately we’ve seen brands like established & sons collaborate with french designers erwan and ronan bouroullec to create flexible pieces of furniture that really work for these changing times. but this new chair got us both excited and confused as we can’t decide if it’s genius or just borderline crazy. developed by cluvens, the cluvens IW-SK zero-gravity esports gaming chair boast a scorpion shape that cocoons you — if that’s what you like.

‘Revolutionary’ blue crystal resurrects hope of room temperature superconductivity

Has the quest for room temperature superconductivity finally succeeded? Researchers at the University of Rochester (U of R), who previously were forced to retract a controversial claim of room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, are back with an even more spectacular claim. This week in they report a new material that superconducts at room temperature—and not much more than ambient pressures.

“If this is correct, it’s completely revolutionary,” says James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the work. A room temperature superconductor would usher in a century-long dream. Existing superconductors require expensive and bulky chilling systems to conduct electricity frictionlessly, but room temperature materials could lead to hyperefficient electricity grids and computer chips, as well as the ultrapowerful magnets needed for levitating trains and fusion power.

But given the U of R group’s recent retraction, many physicists won’t be easily convinced. “I think they will have to do some real work and be really open for people to believe it,” Hamlin says. Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a vociferous critic of the earlier work, is even more blunt. “I doubt [the new result], because I don’t trust these authors.”

Perovskite nanocrystal computer components inspired by brain cells

Researchers at Empa, ETH Zurich and the Politecnico di Milano are developing a new type of computer component that is more powerful and easier to manufacture than its predecessors. Inspired by the human brain, it is designed to process large amounts of data fast and in an energy-efficient way.

In many respects, the is still superior to modern computers. Although most people can’t do math as fast as a , we can effortlessly process complex sensory information and learn from experiences, while a computer cannot—at least not yet. And, the brain does all this by consuming less than half as much energy as a laptop.

One of the reasons for the brain’s energy efficiency is its structure. The individual brain cells—the neurons and their connections, the synapses—can both store and process information. In computers, however, the memory is separate from the processor, and data must be transported back and forth between these two components. The speed of this transfer is limited, which can slow down the whole computer when working with large amounts of data.

Viable superconducting material created at low temperature and low pressure

In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit (20.5 degrees Celsius) and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.

Although 145,000 psi might still seem extraordinarily high (pressure at sea level is about 15 psi), strain engineering techniques routinely used in chip manufacturing, for example, incorporate materials held together by internal chemical pressures that are even higher.

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