silicon
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Texas Instruments awarded $1.6 billion in CHIPS Act funding for domestic silicon production
Texas Instruments is the latest recipient of CHIPS Act funds. The 2022 law will award TI $1.6 billion in grants.
Will Shanklin08.16.2024
The Biden Administration opens $285 million funding for ‘digital twin’ chip research institute
The Biden Administration has opened applications for $285 million in CHIPS Act funding for an institute to develop digital twins for the chip manufacturing industry. The investment aims to speed up silicon design and engineering and bolster national security.
Will Shanklin05.06.2024
Hit cat game 'Stray' is coming to Macs
Feline-focused cyberpunk adventure ‘Stray’ is officially coming to Mac. The critically-acclaimed title will be available for all Apple silicon models, from the most powerful Mac Studio desktops to standard Macbook Air laptops. This release is only for silicon models, however, so older Intel-based Macs need not apply. There’s no release date yet.
Lawrence Bonk06.01.2023
Microsoft Teams has finally been optimized for Apple Silicon Macs
Microsoft has finally released a version of Teams optimized to run Apple Silicon Macs.
Steve Dent08.04.2022
How are camera sensors still improving?
In the latest episode of our Upscaled series, we explain how camera sensors work, and how they'll improve in the near future.
Christopher Schodt09.09.2021
Lawmakers propose 25 percent tax credit to incentivize domestic chip production
A group of bipartisan lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee have introduced legislation that seeks to incentivize chipmakers to manufacture their silicon in the US.
Igor Bonifacic06.17.2021
Apple's next-gen 'M2' Mac processor has reportedly gone into production
Apple's successor to its M1 Apple Silicon chip could arrive in MacBook computers by the second half of this year, according to a report from Nikkei.
Steve Dent04.27.2021
Apple will build another US campus in North Carolina
Apple plans to invest $430 billion in the US economy over five years after exceeding its previous domestic target.
Saqib Shah04.26.2021
Recommended Reading: NFTs before the hype took over
Recommended Reading highlights the week's best long-form writing on technology and more.
Billy Steele04.03.2021
Apple to invest over $1 billion in new Munich silicon facility
Apple is investing a billion euros over the next three years in a German research and development project that will see it build a European Silicon Design Center for 5G tech in Munich.
Saqib Shah03.10.2021
Here's everything Apple announced at its WWDC 2020 keynote
Here's everything you need to know from Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference today.
Christine Fisher06.22.2020
Light-emitting silicon overcomes a major obstacle to denser, faster chips
Light-emitting silicon nanowires are finally a reality, opening the door to a new wave of denser and faster chips.
Jon Fingas04.12.2020
AI-guided material changes could lead to diamond CPUs
Scientists know that you can dramatically alter a crystalline material's properties by applying a bit of strain to it, but finding the right strain is another matter when there are virtually limitless possibilities. There may a straightforward solution, though: let AI do the heavy lifting. An international team of researchers has devised a way for machine learning to find strains that will achieve the best results. Their neural network algorithm predicts how the direction and degree of strain will affect a key property governing the efficiency of semiconductors, making them far more efficient without requiring educated guesses from humans.
Jon Fingas02.12.2019
Super-thin semiconductors delay the 'death' of silicon
Silicon has been the backbone of processors for decades, but it's rapidly approaching its physical limits: making a chip on a process smaller than 5 nanometers is usually impossible without introducing problems. How is Moore's Law for chip complexity going to survive? Stanford researchers have a solution: augment it with materials that outdo silicon where it counts. They've pinpointed two semiconductors, hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide, that can be made extremely thin (just three atoms thick) while self-insulating far more effectively than silicon. You could get transistors that are 10 times smaller than the smallest you get from silicon alone -- 5nm chips would seem bloated compared to what's possible with these diselenides.
Jon Fingas08.13.2017
Scientists built a chip without semiconductors
Remember those old-timey room-sized vacuum-tube-powered computers with less processing power than your smartphone? That tech might be making a comeback, thanks to work from scientists from UC San Diego. They've built the first semiconductor-free, laser-controlled microelectronics device that uses free electrons, much as vacuum tubes do. The research could result in better solar panels and faster microelectronic devices that can carry more power.
Steve Dent11.08.2016
Samsung's vision of the mobile future is 4K-and-VR ready RAM
While Samsung's customers (and stock price) are still reeling from the Galaxy Note 7 immolation debacle, the tech giant is focusing on the future. As such, the company has introduced a new type of memory that should "greatly improve mobile user experiences, especially for those using Ultra HD, large-screen devices," according to a statement. Specifically, it's 8GB LPDDR4 (low power, double data rate 4) that takes advantage of 16Gb LPDDR4 chips working in concert with 10-nanometer class process technology. Now, note that's not 10nm proper, but somewhere between 10-and-20 nanometers. It seems 1-nm is too far in the future for now.
Timothy J. Seppala10.20.2016
Intel to manufacture ARM chips in a bid for mobile domination
Intel is flexing its manufacturing muscle in an attempt to get inside your next phone. To do that, it has entered a licensing deal with ARM, according to a report from Bloomberg. Without this license, excess manufacturing space goes to waste. But with it, Intel can make processors for Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung -- the biggest players in smartphones. This gives Intel a much-needed boost in the mobile space that it couldn't achieve on its own.
Timothy J. Seppala08.16.2016
Army scientists build smaller, tougher, cheaper solar cells
Army researchers at the Redstone Arsenal have announced a significant breakthrough in solar energy production. They've created a photovoltaic solar panel that is smaller, more robust and less expensive to build and operate than any other panel currently available. Virtually every solar panel currently in existence relies on a pure silicon construction, however the band gap (the wavelength of light that it can actually be absorbed and converted into electricity) of single crystal silicon is exceedingly narrow compared to the full spectrum shining down from the Sun. Not only does this mean that conventional panels are missing out on potential power, the ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths actively damage the panels by causing them to heat, warp and crack.
Andrew Tarantola07.06.2015
Super-efficient solar cells can power homes in unforgiving areas
Scientists have long talked about black silicon (that is, silicon with nano-sized structures) having the potential to trump conventional solar power, and there's now some proof that this is happening. Aalto University researchers have developed black silicon solar cells that achieve a record 22.1 percent efficiency when turning the Sun's rays into usable energy. That's a 4 percent absolute boost over the previous best in black silicon, and good enough that the technology could finally be ready to reach the market and replace existing solar panels. Black silicon is far better suited to collecting sunlight at low angles, which is common in northern regions -- you wouldn't have to live in a sunny, forgiving part of the world to get the most out of clean energy. It should be cheaper, too. So long as these black cells translate well to mass production, you may have an easier time ditching the conventional power grid.
Jon Fingas05.25.2015
Entangled photons on a chip could lead to super-fast computers
Photon entanglement is one of the odder properties of quantum physics, but it promises a lot for computing -- if one photon can instantly affect another no matter how far away it is, you could make super-speedy computers and communications that aren't easily limited by physical distances. It hasn't been easy to get entanglement tech down to a manageable size, however, and that's where Italy's Università degli Studi di Pavia might just come to the rescue. Its researchers have developed a tiny emitter that could pump out entangled photons as part of an otherwise ordinary silicon chip. The device, which uses a ring shape to both rope in and emit light, measures just 20 microns across. That's hundreds of times smaller than existing devices, which are comparatively gigantic at a few millimeters wide.
Jon Fingas02.01.2015