Lifeboat Foundation

Year after year, the explosive growth of computing power relies on manufacturers’ ability to fit more and more components into the same amount of space on a silicon chip. That progress, however, is now approaching the limits of the laws of physics, and new materials are being explored as potential replacements for the silicon semiconductors long at the heart of the computer industry.

New materials may also enable entirely new paradigms for individual chip components and their overall design. One long-promised advance is the ferroelectric field-effect transistor, or FE-FET. Such devices could switch states rapidly enough to perform computation, but also be able to hold those states without being powered, enabling them to function as long-term memory storage. Serving double duty as both RAM and ROM, FE-FET devices would make chips more space efficient and powerful.

The hurdle for making practical FE-FET devices has always been in manufacturing; the materials that best exhibit the necessary ferroelectric effect aren’t compatible with techniques for mass-producing silicon components due the high temperature requirements of the ferroelectric materials.

Nothing now obstructing development of revolutionary computers, key figure says.

Protocol for performing two-qubit entangling gates trades laser power for speed with little loss of fidelity.

Rigetti Computing, a California-based developer of quantum integrated circuits, has announced it is launching the world’s first multi-chip quantum processor.

The processor incorporates a proprietary modular architecture that accelerates the path to commercialization and solves key scaling challenges toward fault-tolerant quantum computers.

“We’ve developed a fundamentally new approach to scaling quantum computers,” says Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing. “Our proprietary innovations in chip design and manufacturing have unlocked what we believe is the fastest path to building the systems needed to run practical applications and error correction.”

Quantum computing is coming on leaps and bounds. Now there’s an operating system available on a chip thanks to a Cambridge University-led consortia with a vision is make quantum computers as transparent and well known as RaspberryPi.

This “sensational breakthrough” is likened by the Cambridge Independent Press to the moment during the 1960s when computers shrunk from being room-sized to being sat on top of a desk.

Around 50 quantum computers have been built to date, and they all use different software – there is no quantum equivalent of Windows, IOS or Linux. The new project will deliver an OS that allows the same quantum software to run on different types of quantum computing hardware.

LONDON – Newport Wafer Fab, the U.K.’s largest chip producer, is set to be acquired by Chinese-owned semiconductor company Nexperia for around £63 million ($87 million) next week, according to two sources close to the deal who asked to remain anonymous because the information is not yet public.

Nexperia, a Dutch firm that is 100%-owned by China’s Wingtech Technology, told CNBC on Friday that the deal talks are ongoing.

Located in Newport, South Wales, privately-held NWF’s chip plant dates back to 1982 and it is one of just a handful of semiconductor fabricators in the U.K.

Sorry, we’re having trouble playing this video.

Learn More.

Transportation Insider posted an episode of Cars Insider.

Continue reading “Cars Insider on Snapchat” »

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.

Continue reading “Math Has a Fatal Flaw” »