Lifeboat Foundation

Canon is moving ahead with a plan to build a new factory in Japan to double the production of its semiconductor lithography equipment.

The planned facility will produce both the standard KrF and i-line machines that constitute the bulk of the division’s sales and the nanoimprint tools that Canon hopes will open a new era in semiconductor manufacturing.

Addressing investors after the announcement of third-quarter results in late October, Canon’s management referred to “our leading-edge nanoimprint lithography equipment.”

Their existence will no longer mystify us. Identified in Namibia, fairy circles are circular regions of land devoid of vegetation that range in diameter from 7 to 49 feet (2 to 15 meters) and are frequently surrounded by a ring of promoted grass growth.

Alan Turing has few equals in the 20th century for sheer brilliance and lasting impact, but the great genius’s life was cut tragically short after being betrayed by the country he helped save from the Nazis.

Continue reading “Alan Turing: The Nazi-Fighting Computer Genius Betrayed by His Country” »

To show how computer chips are improving a bit, my first computer, an Apple II+ based on the 6,502 chip, had 7 bytes of memory on the chip. Nvidia’s H100 chip has 85,986,377,728 bytes of memory on it!

The 6,502 was a very successful chip and is still made today, with over 6 billion units sold!

Continue reading “MOS Technology 6502” »

Since the isolation of graphene, we’ve identified a number of materials that form atomically thin sheets. Like graphene, some of these sheets are made of a single element; others form from chemicals where the atomic bonds naturally create a sheet-like structure. Many of these materials have distinct properties. While graphene is an excellent conductor of electricity, a number of others are semiconductors. And it’s possible to tune their properties further based on how you arrange the layers of a multi-sheet stack.

Given all those options, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that researchers have figured out how to make electronics out of these materials, including flash memory and the smallest transistors ever made, by some measures. Most of these, however, are demonstrations of the ability to make the hardware—they’re not integrated into a useful device. But a team of researchers has now demonstrated that it’s possible to go beyond simple demonstrations by building a 900-pixel imaging sensor using an atomically thin material.

Circa 2013 face_with_colon_three

“IMAGINE printing out a paper computer and tearing off a corner so someone else can use part of it.” So says Steve Hodges of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. The idea sounds fantastical, but it could become an everyday event thanks in part to a technique he helped develop.

Hodges, along with Yoshihiro Kawahara and his team at the University of Tokyo, Japan, have found a way to print the fine, silvery lines of electronic circuit boards onto paper. What’s more, they can do it using ordinary inkjet printers, loaded with ink containing silver nanoparticles. Last month Kawahara demonstrated a paper-based moisture sensor at the Ubicomp conference in Zurich, Switzerland.

Continue reading “Print a working paper computer on an $80 inkjet” »

Quantum researchers require access to different types of quantum hardware from digital, also known as gate-based, quantum processing units (QPUs) to analog devices that are capable of addressing specific problems that are hard to solve using classical computers. Today, Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, continues to deliver on its commitment to provide that choice by launching Aquila, pictured in Figure 1 below, a new neutral-atom QPU from QuEra Computing with up to 256 qubits. As a special purpose device designed for solving optimization problems and simulating quantum phenomena in nature, it enables researchers to explore a new analog paradigm of quantum computing.

“We do not use any ancilla qubits,” Yan says. “Instead, we use ancilla states.”

In the new study, the scientists implemented quantum AND gates on a superconducting quantum processor with tunable-coupling architecture. Google also employs this architecture with its quantum computers, and IBM plans to start using it in 2023.

“We think that our scheme is well-suited for superconducting qubit systems where ancilla states are abundant and easy to access,” Yan says.

DNA — nicknamed “nature’s storage medium” — has accurately stored the instruction sets for all life on Earth for billions of years. But it also may hold the keys to managing explosive data growth and storing archival data for generations to come.

The idea of storing digital data in DNA dates back more than a half century, but making it a reality has accelerated in recent years with advances in biotechnology and declining costs of genome sequencing.

Dave Landsman is the senior director of industry standards and a distinguished engineer at Western Digital. For the past two years, he’s been one of the principals in the company’s exploration of DNA data storage.

Error-prone qubits mean quantum systems do not yet surpass classical methods.

In a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, Richard Feynman spoke about ‘simulating physics with computers’. This was already being done at the time, but Feynman said he wanted to talk ‘about the possibility that there is to be an exact simulation, that the computer will do exactly the same as nature.’ But as nature is quantum-mechanical, he pointed out, what you need for that is a quantum computer.

The rest is history – but history still in the making. When I recently asked David Deutsch, the visionary physicist who in 1985 laid out what quantum computing might look like, whether he was surprised at how quickly the idea became a practical technology, he replied with characteristic terseness: ‘It hasn’t.’ You can see his point. Sure, in October President Joe Biden visited IBM’s new quantum data centre in Poughkeepsie, New York, to see an entire room filled with the company’s quantum computers. And on 9 November IBM announced its 433-quantum-bit (qubit) Osprey processor, although it seems only yesterday that we were getting excited at Google’s 53-qubit Sycamore chip – with which the Google team claimed in 2016 to demonstrate ‘quantum supremacy’, meaning that it could perform a calculation in a few days that would take the best classical computer many millennia.¹ This claim has since been disputed.