Lifeboat Foundation

TSMC is mulling setting up more fabs overseas, apart from its exsiting facility in Nanjing, China and the one being built in the US. TSMC is looking at building new fabs in Japan and Germany for 28nm and 12/16nm chip output. Apple is keen on adopting miniLED backlighting for its devices, and is likely to add China-based Luxshare as a second supplier of SMT services for miniLED BLUs. Meanwhile, notebook component suppliers are turning cautious about building up inventory amid mixed signals about the notebook market’s outlook.

TSMC mulls 28nm, 12/16nm process capacity expansion overseas: TSMC will soon disclose plans to build additional 28nm and 12/16nm process fabrication lines at new fabs, in addition to its Nanjing fab expansion, according to industry sources.

Luxshare to become second SMT service provider for miniLED backlighting for Apple: Taiwan Surface Mounting Technology (SMT) is currently the only provider of SMT services for Apple’s miniLED backlighting applications, but China-based Luxshare Precision Industry is expected to become a second provider in fourth-quarter 2021 at the earliest, according to industry sources.

Intel wants in on this, and hopes to expand its presence on the continent. It hopes to build in Europe at least one factory for manufacturing and another for advanced packaging, Greg Slater, VP of global regulatory affairs, told the Financial Times over the weekend. France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands are being considered as hosts for these facilities, and Intel is expected to name locations by the end of the year.

Chipzilla is, we’re told, prepared to blow as much as $20bn on these factories over the next decade, with an eye on building up to eight fabs on a 1000-acre site somewhere with the necessary infrastructure around it. Intel teased it could spend up to $100bn during the lifetime of these Euro plants.

“We are well placed to make this an ecosystem-wide project, not just a couple of isolated paths in one member state,” Slater said. “We do believe that this is a project that will benefit Europe at large.”

Scientists from the Division of Physics at the University of Tsukuba used the quantum effect called ‘spin-locking’ to significantly enhance the resolution when performing radio-frequency imaging of nitrogen-vacancy defects in diamond. This work may lead to faster and more accurate material analysis, as well as a path towards practical quantum computers.

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers have long been studied for their potential use in quantum computers. A NV center is a type of defect in the lattice of a diamond, in which two adjacent carbon atoms have been replaced with a nitrogen atom and a void. This leaves an unpaired electron, which can be detected using radio-frequency waves, because its probability of emitting a photon depends on its spin state. However, the spatial resolution of radio wave detection using conventional radio-frequency techniques has remained less than optimal.

Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have pushed the resolution to its limit by employing a technique called ‘spin-locking’. Microwave pulses are used to put the electron’s spin in a quantum superposition of up and down simultaneously. Then, a driving electromagnetic field causes the direction of the spin to precess around, like a wobbling top. The end result is an electron spin that is shielded from random noise but strongly coupled to the detection equipment. “Spin-locking ensures high accuracy and sensitivity of the electromagnetic field imaging,” first author Professor Shintaro Nomura explains. Due to the high density of NV centers in the diamond samples used, the collective signal they produced could be easily picked up with this method. This permitted the sensing of collections of NV centers at the micrometer scale.

Manufactured on tsmc’s 180 nm process.

Libre-SOC developers sent the first test ASIC to TSMC’s manufacturing facilities.

Infinity Cache is one of the headline features found in AMD’s RDNA 2 – the GPU architecture behind the next generation of gaming graphics, including the PS5, the Xbox Series X and, of course, AMD’s own Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards. But, what is Infinity Cache?

Read on to learn more about Infinity Cache, how it works and where you can find it.

Continue reading “What is AMD Infinity Cache?” »

Early in its history, computing was dominated by time-sharing systems. These systems were powerful machines (for their time, at least) that multiple users connected to in order to perform computing tasks. To an extent, quantum computing has repeated this history, with companies like Honeywell, IBM, and Rigetti making their machines available to users via cloud services. Companies pay based on the amount of time they spend executing algorithms on the hardware.

For the most part, time-sharing works out well, saving companies the expenses involved in maintaining the machine and its associated hardware, which often includes a system that chills the processor down to nearly absolute zero. But there are several customers—companies developing support hardware, academic researchers, etc.—for whom access to the actual hardware could be essential.

The fact that companies aren’t shipping out processors suggests that the market isn’t big enough to make production worthwhile. But a startup from the Netherlands is betting that the size of the market is about to change. On Monday, a company called QuantWare announced that it will start selling quantum processors based on transmons, superconducting loops of wire that form the basis of similar machines used by Google, IBM, and Rigetti.

Future chips may feature watercooling integrated into the silicon.

TSMC is in the process of testing and designing water cooling delivery straight to the heart of your future chips — a mandatory exploration in wake of vertically-integrated silicon.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China, working at the University of Science and Technology of China, has achieved another milestone in the development of a usable quantum computer. The group has written a paper describing its latest efforts and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

Back in 2019, a team at Google announced that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” with their Sycamore machine—a 54 qubit processor that carried out a calculation that would have taken a traditional computer approximately 10000 years to complete. But that achievement was soon surpassed by other teams from Honeywell and a team in China. The team in China used a different technique, one that involved the use of photonic qubits—but it was also a one-trick pony. In this new effort, the new team in China, which has been led by Jian-Wei Pan, who also led the prior team at the University of Science and Technology has achieved another milestone.

The new effort was conducted with a 2D programable computer called Zuchongzhi—one equipped to run with 66 qubits. In their demonstration, the researchers used only 56 of those qubits to tackle a well-known computer problem—sampling the output distribution of random quantum circuits. The task requires a variety of computer abilities that involve mathematical analysis, matrix theory, the complexity of certain computations and probability theory—a task approximately 100 times more challenging than the one carried out by Sycamore just two years ago. Prior research has suggested the task set before the Chinese machine would take a conventional computer approximately eight years to complete. Zuchongzhi completed the task in less than an hour and a half. The achievement by the team showed that the Zuchongzhi machine is capable of tackling more than just one kind of task.

In 2015, after 85 years of searching, researchers confirmed the existence of a massless particle called the Weyl fermion. With the unique ability to behave as both matter and anti-matter inside a crystal, this quasiparticle is like an electron with no mass. The story begun in 1928 when Dirac proposed an equation for the foundational unification of quantum mechanics and special relativity in describing the nature of the electron. This new equation suggested three distinct forms of relativistic particles: the Dirac, the Majorana, and the Weyl fermions. And recently, an analog of Weyl fermions has been discovered in certain electronic materials exhibiting a strong spin orbit coupling and topological behavior. Just as Dirac fermions emerge as signatures of topological insulators, in certain types of semimetals, electrons can behave like Weyl fermions.

These Weyl fermions are what can be called quasiparticles, which means they can only exist in a solid such as a crystal, and not as standalone particles. However, as complex as quasiparticles sound, their behavior is actually much simpler than that of fundamental particles, because their properties allow them to shrug off the same forces that knock their counterparts around. This discovery of Weyl fermions is huge, not just because there is finally a proof that these elusive particles exist, but because it paves the way for far more efficient electronics, and new types of quantum computing. Weyl fermions could be used to solve the traffic jams with electrons in electronics. In fact, Weyl electrons can carry charges at least 1000 times faster than electrons in ordinary semiconductors, and twice as fast as inside graphene. This could lead to a whole new type of electronics called ‘Weyltronics’.