Illustration: Harry Campbell The need to make some hardware systems tinier and tinier and others bigger and bigger has been driving innovations in electronics for a long time. The former can be seen in the progression from laptops to smartphones to smart watches to hearables and other “invisible” electronics. The latter defines today’s commercial data centers—megawatt-devouring […]
Illustration: Chris Philpot Miguel Street is a winding, narrow route through the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Until a few years ago, only those living along the road traveled it, and they understood its challenges well. Now it’s packed with cars that use it as a shortcut from congested Mission Street to heavily traveled […]
There are a lot of different types of quantum computers. Arguably, none of them are ready to make a difference in the real world. But some startups are betting that they’re getting so close that it’s time to make it easy for regular software developers to take advantage of these machines. Boston-based Aliro Technologies is […]
Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be among the first organizations to install AI computers made from the largest silicon chip ever built. Last month, Cerebras Systems unveiled a 46,225-square millimeter chip with 1.2 trillion transistors designed to speed the training of neural networks. Today, such training is often done in large […]
Fiber-optic data rates on a single wavelength will take a big step up later this month. Acacia Communications says it will demonstrate a 1.2-terabit-per-second module at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) that is taking place from 22-26 September in Dublin. Transmission of up to 800 gigabits per second on a single wavelength was introduced for […]
Flexible electronics that could be worn on, stuck to, or even implanted in your body need to be able to twist, bend, or fold. And when it comes to that range of motion, nothing beats a single thread. “Threads are the ultimate in flexibility,” says Sameer Sonkusale, an electrical engineer at Tufts University. In 2016, Sonkusale […]
$(function () { $(‘.medium-top-ad’).hide(); }); $(function () { $(‘.medium-top-bottom’).hide(); }); Epoxy system EP30NG is a first rate thermal conductor as well as a low level electrical conductor. Master Bond EP30NG is a two component epoxy adhesive system developed for applications that require high thermal conductivity. It contains a specialty graphene filler which contributes not only […]
Neural networks shine for solving tough problems such as facial and voice recognition, but conventional electronic versions are limited in speed and hungry for power. In theory, optics could beat digital electronic computers in the matrix calculations used in neural networks. However, optics had been limited by their inability to do some complex calculations that had […]
Engineers at MIT and Analog Devices have created the first fully-programmable 16-bit carbon nanotube microprocessor. It’s the most complex integration of carbon nanotube-based CMOS logic so far, with nearly 15,000 transistors, and it was done using technologies that have already been proven to work in a commercial chip-manufacturing facility. The processor, called RV16X-NANO, is a […]
On Monday at the IEEE Hot Chips symposium at Stanford University, startup Cerebras unveiled the largest chip ever built. It is roughly a silicon wafer-size system meant to reduce AI training time from months to minutes. It is the first commercial attempt at a wafer-scale processor since Trilogy Systems failed at the task in the 1980s.