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Category: computing

In the dark, dank depths of your home basement hangs a drab gray box that guards the building’s electrical circuits. The circuit breakers inside switch off current flow when there is risk of an overload or short circuit, keeping you safe from fires or electrocution. It’s a critical job, and one that breakers have been doing with a fairly simple, 140-year-old electromechanical technology.

But circuit breakers are about to get a digital overhaul. New semiconductor breakers that combine computing power and wireless connectivity could become the hub of smart, energy-efficient buildings of the future.

“It’s like going from a telephone that just makes calls to a smartphone with capabilities we’d never imagined before,” says Ryan Kennedy, CEO and co-founder of Atom Power in Charlotte, North Carolina. “This is a platform that changes everything in power systems.”

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The idea of “liquid silicon” conjures images from a Terminator film. Fittingly, it is a nascent ’80s computing concept brought to life with modern fabrication techniques, with the potential to alter the course of the future for computer hardware.

“Liquid Si,” with its delicate layers of mono-crystalline silicon and stacked transistors, have real-world implications in the post-Moore semiconductor landscape.

Building unified computer hardware that incorporates system memory, I/O logic, and disk storage into the same module represents a long-standing goal for microchip architects, and attainment is closer now than ever. Using a process called monolithic 3D integration, modern fabrication machines can execute chip designs with silicon and semiconductor circuitry layered on the bottom, solid-state memory arrays on top, and a dense metal-to-metal bus sandwiched in between.

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Nearly 50 years ago, The New York Times—widely considered America’s paper of record—changed the media industry by creating the first modern Op-Ed page. Since then, their Opinion section has arguably become the most important voice for many public ideas that enter and change the world. Everyone from Heads of State to the globe’s most powerful business people to Nobel Prize winners to everyday citizens have written there when they had something essential to say about the times we live in. I’m super excited to share my first Op-Ed for The New York Times on #biohacking and the growing concern of legalizing implants. It’s a happy professional day for me, and an important step forward for the growing #transhumanism movement as we begin to enter mainstream culture.

Implant technology can change the world — unless politicians give in to the hysteria against it.

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Is the future finally here? The arrival of 5G (fifth generation mobile networks) has been keenly anticipated and long discussed. And if you attended the latest Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona in February, you would have seen plenty to suggest that 5G will take off in 2019. Smartphone manufacturers are busy preparing their 5G models, the wireless networks on which they will run are being planned, and there is no shortage of visionary use cases highlighting how virtual reality and other technologies will harness 5G’s amazing power and connectivity. In short, our lives are about to change.

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“The nanometer process deals with the space between the transistors mounted on a substrate at a nanometer level,” said Pulse.

“The narrower the distance, the more chips can be squeezed in to boost computing power and energy efficiency. One nanometer corresponds to one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.”

At the Samsung Foundry Forum in Santa Clara, California, the company recently sought to impress advancements it has made in 3nm gate-all-around (GAA) process development.

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Semiconductors, which are the basic building blocks of transistors, microprocessors, lasers, and LEDs, have driven advances in computing, memory, communications, and lighting technologies since the mid-20th century. Recently discovered two-dimensional materials, which feature many superlative properties, have the potential to advance these technologies, but creating 2-D devices with both good electrical contacts and stable performance has proved challenging.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have demonstrated a nearly ideal transistor made from a two-dimensional (2-D) material stack—with only a two-atom-thick semiconducting layer—by developing a completely clean and damage-free process. Their method shows vastly improved performance compared to 2-D semiconductors fabricated with a conventional process, and could provide a scalable platform for creating ultra-clean devices in the future. The study was published today in Nature Electronics.

“Making devices out of 2-D materials is a messy business,” says James Teherani, assistant professor of electrical engineering. “Devices vary wildly from run to run and often degrade so fast that you see performance diminish while you’re still measuring them.”

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Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners have demonstrated an experimental, next-generation atomic clock—ticking at high “optical” frequencies—that is much smaller than usual, made of just three small chips plus supporting electronics and optics.

Described in Optica, the chip-scale clock is based on the vibrations, or “ticks,” of confined in a tiny glass container, called a vapor cell, on a chip. Two frequency combs on chips act like gears to link the atoms’ high-frequency optical ticks to a lower, widely used microwave frequency that can be used in applications.

The chip-based heart of the new clock requires very little power (just 275 milliwatts) and, with additional technology advances, could potentially be made small enough to be handheld. Chip-scale optical clocks like this could eventually replace traditional oscillators in applications such as navigation systems and telecommunications networks and serve as backup clocks on satellites.

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Silicon transistors and the brain don’t mix.

At least not optimally. As scientists and companies are increasingly exploring ways to interface your brain with computers, fashioning new hardware that conforms to and compliments our biological wetware becomes increasingly important.

To be fair, silicon transistors, when made into electrode arrays, can perform the basics: record neural signals, process and analyze them with increasingly sophisticated programs that detect patterns, which in turn can be used to stimulate the brain or control smart prosthetics.

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