Lifeboat Foundation

The company’s journey to make its modem has been long and frustrating.

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As per a Bloomberg report, the iPhone maker, which had planned to launch its chip by next year, will likely miss its target of shipping the component by the spring of 2025, people familiar with the matter said. The chip may debut at the end of 2025 or early 2026, the last year of Apple’s extended contract with Qualcomm.

Continue reading “Apple’s modem chip project fails to match Qualcomm’s modem technology” »

Scientists from the UK and South Korea have discovered a way to create laser pulses 1,000 times stronger than currently possible. Using computer simulations, they have discovered that a new way of compressing the light can drastically increase its intensity to such an extent that it can extract particles from a vacuum. This new technique could open up doors for important discoveries into the very nature of matter.

Uncover the nature of matter

Continue reading “Scientists find new way to supercharge lasers by a million times” »

Swooping magnetic fields that confine plasma in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks could help improve the efficiency of complex machines that produce microchips. This innovation could lead to more powerful computers and smart phones, near-essential devices that make modern society possible.

Engineers use high-energy light emitted by plasma, the electrically charged fourth state of matter, to create small structures on the surfaces of silicon wafers during their transformation into microchips. These tiny components enable a range of devices, including consumer electronics, video games, medical machinery, and telecommunications. Improving the generation of this light could extend the life of vital parts within the machines and make the manufacture of microchips more efficient.

“These findings could change the microchip industry,” said Ben Israeli, lead author of the paper publishing the results in Applied Physics Letters. Israeli is a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which is managed by Princeton University.

Metamaterials are products of engineering wizardry. They are made from everyday polymers, ceramics, and metals. And when constructed precisely at the microscale, in intricate architectures, these ordinary materials can take on extraordinary properties.

With the help of computer simulations, engineers can play with any combination of microstructures to see how certain materials can transform, for instance, into sound-focusing acoustic lenses or lightweight, bulletproof films.

But simulations can only take a design so far. To know for sure whether a metamaterial will stand up to expectation, physically testing them is a must. But there’s been no reliable way to push and pull on metamaterials at the microscale, and to know how they will respond, without contacting and physically damaging the structures in the process.

A new method of creating laser pulses, more than 1,000 times as powerful as those currently in existence, has been proposed by scientists in the UK and South Korea.

The scientists have used computer simulations in joint research to demonstrate a new way of compressing light to increase its intensity sufficiently to extract particles from vacuum and study the nature of matter. To achieve this the three groups have come together to produce a very special type of mirror—one that not only reflects pulses of light but compresses them in time by a factor of more than two hundred times, with further compression possible.

The groups from the University of Strathclyde, UNIST and GIST propose a simple idea—to use the gradient in the density of plasma, which is fully ionized matter, to cause photons to “bunch,” analogous to the way a stretched-out group of cars bunch up as they encounter a steep hill. This could revolutionize the next generation of lasers to enable their powers to increase by more than one million times from what is achievable now.

Summary: Researchers developed an experimental computing system, resembling a biological brain, that successfully identified handwritten numbers with a 93.4% accuracy rate.

This breakthrough was achieved using a novel training algorithm providing continuous real-time feedback, outperforming traditional batch data processing methods which yielded 91.4% accuracy.

The system’s design features a self-organizing network of nanowires on electrodes, with memory and processing capabilities interwoven, unlike conventional computers with separate modules.

As cars become computers on wheels, the former BlackBerry and Dyson executive is approaching Volvo’s EV transformation with a consumer electronics mindset.

Today, I’m talking to Jim Rowan, the CEO of Volvo Cars.

Volvo’s Jim Rowan, now more than 18 months on the job, has strong opinions on EVs, car software, and autonomy.

Continue reading “Volvo CEO Jim Rowan thinks dropping Apple CarPlay is a mistake” »

As information and communication technologies (ICT) process data, they convert electricity into heat. Already today, the global ICT ecosystem’s CO₂ footprint rivals that of aviation. It turns out, however, that a big part of the energy consumed by computer processors doesn’t go into performing calculations. Instead, the bulk of the energy used to process data is spent shuttling bytes between the memory to the processor.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Electronics, researchers from EPFL’s School of Engineering in the Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) present a new processor that tackles this inefficiency by integrating data processing and storage onto a single device, a so-called in-memory processor.

They broke new ground by creating the first in-memory processor based on a two-dimensional semiconductor material to comprise more than 1,000 transistors, a key milestone on the path to industrial production.

Made using molybdenum disulfide, the processor has over 1,000 transistors but works in two dimensions.

2023 EPFL / Alan Herzog.

Modern-day information technology systems are well known for producing large amounts of heat. Heat reduction is a more efficient way of using energy and will also help the world reduce carbon emissions, as it aims to go greener in the coming few decades. To minimize this unwanted heat, one must go to the root of the problem, the von Neumann architecture.