Silicon Feeds
I step into the warm moist air among the columns of the pines, their net of twigs and roots complex as any lines of code. The trees purify and anchor. Their branches balance my restlessness. Their calling is to be present, mine to develop apps. Our tasks verge toward a common logic: living filaments of root, of…
Whether voters are alive or dead is of vital interest to democracies. Yet unscrupulous political operators have long voted on behalf of the dead or absent and otherwise committed electoral frauds exploiting the weaknesses of paper identification systems. So some 50 countries now use biometric technologies, such as…
Many engineers are more comfortable working behind the scenes developing technology than speaking to consumers about products. But Preethi Ashwath has learned to take center stage, talking about the “hearable” and wearable devices she has had a hand in developing as an analog integrated circuit designer in the…
When San Antonio–based software engineer Nikhil Jathar first went to Washington, D.C., to advocate for federal support for technology education and research funding, he was in awe of the opportunity. It was spring of 2025, not long after Jathar settled in the United States from India, when he got an invitation to join…
The U.S. semiconductor industry is booming but industry watchers fear the country’s workforce is unprepared. By 2030, investments in manufacturing, design, materials, and packaging facilities in the United States will create demand for 189,000 new full-time semiconductor jobs. But the supply of such workers will only…
This white paper explains how edge AI and physical AI help cities move beyond passive monitoring. It shows how urban infrastructure can sense, reason, and act on real-time conditions across public safety, mobility, and infrastructure management. What you will learn about: How the shift from smart cities to cognitive…
The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to…
This White Paper shows RF and microwave engineers and technicians how compact analog signal generators support core amplifier and receiver test tasks, from gain and distortion measurements to blocker rejection, power calibration, and local oscillator substitution. What you will learn about: How to measure amplifier…
On 12 October, Applied Materials unveiled a multibillion-dollar research facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. The company first announced in 2023 plans to invest US $4 billion in its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center, but now says it will invest even more:…
This White Paper provides roboticists and control engineers with a comprehensive overview of how motion planning and motion tracking can be decoupled to preserve professional athletic style in humanoid robots, and why adaptive, speed-aware control is essential for closing the gap between simulation and real-world…
The U.S. Department of Commerce has finalized a CHIPS and Science Act R&D award of up to $1 billion for Anderon, a quantum foundry IBM established earlier this year. The 16 September announcement backs a manufacturing service for IBM and other quantum-hardware developers. IBM is matching the award with US $1 billion…
Dielectric metasurfaces have moved to the forefront of nanophotonics, offering flat, low-loss alternatives to conventional bulk optical elements for controlling the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light. These structures are of growing interest to researchers and engineers working on sensing, energy harvesting,…
Financial markets have always relied on timely information, and the drive for timeliness has always adapted to the latest technology. From clipper ships transiting the oceans to telegraph wires connecting cities to fiber-optic cables conducting trades in microseconds, traders have embraced any advantage to get the…
Learn how engineers can shift from manually managing tools and handoffs to defining objectives and supervising AI-driven execution across the silicon development lifecycle. Key Takeaways Explore four critical technologies enabling silicon design autonomy Understand how autonomous AI accelerates complex engineering…
My job is to translate dry and unrelenting code into a user interface of surpassing beauty. With my mouse, I roll one pixel after another up the vast anthill of the internet. My dream is to translate the visions of the holy ones into a communication protocol of universal wonderment. I want to launch shreds of light…
Several startups see a big opportunity to build the next generation of ultrafast lasers, a crucial component in high-end chip manufacturing, in Europe. In June 2026, the European Commission proposed legislation and strategies to reinforce Europe’s competitiveness and independence in the semiconductor and AI…
This article is brought to you by CoolIT, an Ecolab Company. Beyond 250 kW a server rack can no longer be cooled by a hybrid approach of liquid and air. At this density a 70/30 liquid-air split leaves 75 kW of air load. The air cooling system needed to move it brings cost and complexity few operators will accept. The…
On 1 September, Nvidia launched a new generative AI approach to rendering video game graphics that CEO Jensen Huang has previously hailed as a “GPT moment for graphics.” Instead of forcing graphics processors to calculate the material physics and lighting of virtual surfaces pixel-by-pixel to achieve high levels of…
This White Paper gives data engineers and architects a practical overview of how parallel partitioned reads, write-path optimization, and cloud-native bulk loading reduce large-table replication times, and why replication speed has become a business concern as data volumes grow. Download this free whitepaper now!
A quantum computer can be an ungainly thing, because even the most elegant qubit-housing cryostat usually sprouts a thicket of control cables. Most qubits don’t work above a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, but the conventional electronics that control the qubits don’t work in the cryogenic cold. Hence…
This article is brought to you by VicOne. Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong? Physical AI raises a harder question: Can a machine remain safe when an attacker changes what it sees, decides, or does even when nothing appears to have failed? As AI and robotics…
Since about 2020, AI has largely focused on training bigger and better models. Large language models (LLMs) ballooned from millions of parameters to trillions. This proved effective: The largest version of OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, correctly answered just 43.9 percent of questions on a popular…
On 25 August, OpenAI fully unveiled Jalapeño, the company’s debut AI accelerator chip. Jalapeño delivers up to 13.4 petaflops of 4-bit compute and accesses 232 gigabytes of the most advanced memory available, linking to it at a blazing 15.4 terabytes per second. Benchmarks cited by OpenAI show that Jalapeño can reduce…
In the art of transforming data into easily interpretable displays, visualization is usually the go-to option. But sight isn’t the only sense we can use to make sense of numeric information. Sonification is visualization’s lesser-known cousin: the practice of translating data into sounds. While we may not think of it…
If you own an at-home server, a gaming computer, or just a laptop that doesn’t get much love, listen up. You can now put that spare computing power to use and earn some passive income in the process. AI companies are hungry for more compute to run AI inference—the process of using a pretrained model to respond to…
This story was originally published by Tech Policy Press. The European Union’s push for technological sovereignty faces an uncomfortable contradiction. As the E.U. rolls out AI factories, gigafactories, and new data centers, it is creating a surge in demand for the advanced semiconductors that underpin artificial…
On 6 August, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on the state of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, a bipartisan federal law passed under the Biden administration to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and R&D. While manufacturing projects funded by the act are making notable progress,…
There are 17 rare earth elements. While almost all of them have vital industrial uses, you could be forgiven for believing, based on news coverage, that there are only four that matter: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. To be sure, those are the essential ingredients in the powerful permanent-magnet…
At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn’t know it existed. It ran its jobs up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency’s main cryptographic processor in operation from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in…
This article is brought to you by Emerson. I’ve spent much of my career as an engineer, including years in the semiconductor industry. And one lesson has stayed with me through every major technology shift: innovation always creates new complexity. In semiconductors, we have seen that repeatedly. Every generation has…
How do I touch you across the ocean, across cold depths where light travels through glass. Not copper—fibers. Optical. Through liquid glass, through flickering light that carries you in fragments. Light broken into pulses. You say: it’s easier this way. What are we missing like this? You smile. Safe distance. I say:…
The impact of AI on software development has been both profound and ever-evolving. Last year, I wrote about AMD’s plans to use AI not just for generating new lines of code, but also for other steps in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), such as triaging problems, debugging code, and testing the software. At the…
Representing a significant milestone in AI-assisted mathematical research, a team at Axiom Math has automatically verified the proof of a theorem relating to prime numbers—colloquially referred to as the “246 theorem”—for the first time using the company’s AI system AxiomProver. In formal verification, mathematicians…
Supply chains in many industries are full of tangles, but for semiconductor tech, that’s putting it lightly. Many chip components are location-constrained and can easily be throttled by geopolitical factors. Chipmaking is also tied up with social and environmental concerns, and if any seemingly small strand gives way,…
Learn how full-wave simulation predicts very low antenna coupling on aircraft-sized platforms, and which three modeling techniques deliver accurate results with fewer computational resources. Download this free whitepaper now!
A survey of over 700 professionals examines how visual and physical AI teams build systems, why models fail, and where data work drives production. Download this free whitepaper now!
Countries around the world are trying to find their place in a world of new and powerful quantum computing possibilities. China and the U.S. are investing tens of millions of U.S. dollars to build individual quantum computers for their national laboratories as part of a wider investment of tens of billions of dollars…
This article is brought to you by COMSOL. In pursuit of improved range, greater reliability, and faster charging, electric vehicles are driving the demand for high-voltage electronics. Other applications driving this demand include wind farms, data centers, and server farms, to name a few. As the interest for…
When I started at Spectrum 25 years ago, a senior editor suggested that I find a “rabbi,” by which he meant someone who could mentor me in how EEs approach problems and evaluate potential solutions. I didn’t find one right away. Then in 2005 we decided to do a special report, focusing on the challenges of enterprise…
Quantum computers promise to solve problems beyond the most powerful classical supercomputers. But this raises a fundamental challenge: How do you prove the validity of answers that can’t be calculated any other way? In a trio of papers released yesterday, IBM and collaborators say they have demonstrated several…
Physicists have been trying to measure the fundamental gravitational constant for well over two centuries. The current accepted value of big G, as it’s known, is 6.67430 × 10-11 cubic meters per kilogram per square second. It also has an uncertainty of ±0.00015 × 10-11 m3/(kg s2). As far as constants of the universe…
Interconnects, the wires that string transistors together into circuits on microchips, have long been built from copper due to its high conductivity. However, as electronics continue to shrink, copper becomes a dramatically worse conductor. Now scientists find that a new class of materials containing exotic…
Atop a lab bench, Cornell Tech postdoctoral researcher Yifan He positions the lens of an optical receiver almost a meter away from an LED emitting a beam of red light. The computer monitor attached to the receiver takes a beat to refresh, then displays an array of squares that resemble a QR code. When you hold your…
When you get a good night’s sleep, you aren’t just giving your brain a chance to rest. Sleep activates a system only discovered in 2012 that washes out brain waste. Called the glymphatic system, it’s comparable to the better-known lymphatic system that moves and filters fluids throughout your body. A healthy…
Discover how the ZEISS Crossbeam 750 FIBSEM sets a new benchmark for precise TEM lamella prep, tomography, and advanced nanofabrication. This delivers better resolution, better SNR, larger usable FOV, and shorter acquisition times. Learn how uninterrupted FIB milling will reduce damage and rework, accelerate time to…
In the chill of a London spring night, under overcast skies, iconic Trafalgar Square opens around me. Admiral Nelson rises on his pedestal, the National Gallery rests behind, the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields sits nearby. From the 13th century, the site served as the Royal Mews for hawks and then horses. By 1844,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) demand immense amounts of memory, and the more people use them, the more memory is required. Memory makers responded by accelerating plans to build new memory fabs, with a focus on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and DRAM, the first of which is scheduled to start production in 2027. But the…
GPUs and other big AI chips just can’t get enough memory. Today’s data center computers stack DRAM 12 dies high. But as memory makers try to build higher stacks to pack in more bits and bandwidth, experts worry this high bandwidth-memory (HBM) will trap enough heat to cook itself into oblivion. That will be especially…
A new type of imaging sensor inspired by the functioning of the human brain can detect light and store data at the same time. What’s more, the device can forget the data it no longer needs, paving the way for future breakthroughs in robotic-vision efficiency. Today’s digital cameras rely on complementary…
Semiconductor companies and universities are trying to shorten their feedback loop to meet the challenges of the AI era. In recent years, National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan; the University of California, Berkeley; Arizona State University; Virginia Tech; and others have been building closer links with…