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Transportation Insider posted an episode of Cars Insider.
This computer technician built a life-size remote-controlled Corvette.
Watch more from Discover:.
What you want to know about cars. A section of Insider.
A new theory explains the seemingly irreversible arrow of time while yielding insights into entropy, quantum computers, black holes, and the past-future divide.
Not everything that is true can be proven. This discovery transformed infinity, changed the course of a world war and led to the modern computer. This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The first 200 people to sign up via https://brilliant.org/veritasium get 20% off a yearly subscription.
Special thanks to Prof. Asaf Karagila for consultation on set theory and specific rewrites, to Prof. Alex Kontorovich for reviews of earlier drafts, Prof. Toby ‘Qubit’ Cubitt for the help with the spectral gap, to Henry Reich for the helpful feedback and comments on the video.
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References:
Dunham, W. (2013, July). A Note on the Origin of the Twin Prime Conjecture. In Notices of the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 63-65). International Press of Boston. — https://ve42.co/Dunham2013
Conway, J. (1970). The game of life. Scientific American, 223, 4. — https://ve42.co/Conway1970
Churchill, A., Biderman, S., Herrick, A. (2019). Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete. ArXiv. — https://ve42.co/Churchill2019
Micron pops the parachute.
Micron announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Lehi, Utah fab to Texas Instruments for $900 million in cash. In March, Micron announced that it planned to sell off the fab, bringing an end to its production of the radical new 3D XPoint (Optane) memory technology that it developed with Intel. Texas Instruments plans to deploy its own technologies at the site, meaning that it will not be used for 3D XPoint production. Intel currently doesn’t have any known high-volume production of the strategically important storage/memory media. However, it is known to produce a small amount of the media for research and validation at its New Mexico facility. As a result, Intel will likely have to establish its own production lines to ensure the supply of its Optane based SSDs and persistent memory DIMMs for its data center clients, though demand has seemed tepid.
Micron chose to exit 3D XPoint manufacturing due to lackluster demand that the company said had “insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialize 3D XPoint at scale.” The company recently divulged that it lost $400 million this year alone due to the lack of demand for 3D XPoint.
Micron has an agreement to produce 3D XPoint (which Intel brands as ‘Optane’) for Intel until the end of 2021. However, Intel’s own efforts to productize Optane, which uses the 3D XPoint media, have met with slow but steady uptake in the data center but fizzled in the consumer market. As such, Intel ceased production of all Optane devices for desktop PCs in January 2021.
Fortunately, automakers, suppliers and government leaders are examining things like electric vehicles and where batteries and other parts come from as they push for North American production. The Department of Energy has released a National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries, and a plan to support the domestic battery production to meet growing needs as people go back to work and school in the fall.
It is tempting to see the chip storage problem as just a technology story. But it also has real-world implications for our national security as so much of defense relies on computers and communications in the era of modern warfare.
As Americans celebrate our independence, we have to re-commit to being independent when it comes to reliance on others for goods and services that fuel our lives. We can’t make everything at home, but we can make more and ensure that disruptions abroad don’t reverberate, negatively, at home. As Congress continues to debate infrastructure and other major legislation, and the COVID-19 pandemic retreats, we will need to work together to ensure that we are prepared for whatever 2022 might bring.
It’s a problem that few of us will likely ever face: once you’ve built your first homemade integrated circuit, what do you do next? If you’re [Sam Zeloof], the answer is clear: build better integrated circuits.
At least that’s [Sam]’s plan, which his new reactive-ion etching setup aims to make possible. While his Z1 dual differential amplifier chip was a huge success, the photolithography process he used to create the chip had its limitations. The chemical etching process he used is a bit fussy, and prone to undercutting of the mask if the etchant seeps underneath it. As its name implies, RIE uses a plasma of highly reactive ions to do the etching instead, resulting in finer details and opening the door to using more advanced materials.
[Sam]’s RIE rig looks like a plumber’s stainless steel nightmare, in the middle of which sits a vacuum chamber for the wafer to be etched. After evacuating the air, a small amount of fluorinated gas — either carbon tetrafluoride or the always entertaining sulfur hexafluoride — is added to the chamber. A high-voltage feedthrough provides the RF energy needed to create a plasma, which knocks fluorine ions out of the process gas. The negatively charged and extremely reactive fluorine ions are attracted to the wafer, where they attack and etch away the surfaces that aren’t protected by a photoresist layer.
Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found a missing piece in the puzzle of optical quantum computing.
Jung-Tsung Shen, associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has developed a deterministic, high-fidelity two-bit quantum logic gate that takes advantage of a new form of light. This new logic gate is orders of magnitude more efficient than the current technology.
“In the ideal case, the fidelity can be as high as 97%,” Shen said.
Russian scientists have experimentally proved the existence of a new type of quasiparticle—previously unknown excitations of coupled pairs of photons in qubit chains. This discovery could be a step towards disorder-robust quantum metamaterials. The study was published in Physical Review B.
Superconducting qubits are a leading qubit modality today that is currently being pursued by industry and academia for quantum computing applications. However, the performance of quantum computers is largely affected by decoherence that contributes to a qubit’s extremely short lifespan and causes computational errors. Another major challenge is low controllability of large qubit arrays.
Metamaterial quantum simulators provide an alternative approach to quantum computing, as they do not require a large amount of control electronics. The idea behind this approach is to create artificial matter out of qubits, the physics of which will obey the same equations as for some real matter. Conversely, you can program the simulator in such a way as to embody matter with properties that have not yet been discovered in nature.
A quantum-computing startup announced Tuesday that its future quantum processor designs will differ significantly from its current offerings. Rather than building a monolithic processor as everyone else has, Rigetti Computing will build smaller collections of qubits on chips that can be physically linked together into a single functional processor. This isn’t multiprocessing so much as modular chip design.
The move is consequential for both Rigetti processors and quantum computing more generally.
The money was awarded through DoE’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.
