Research Bits: March 26


Skyrmion switches Researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and National University of Singapore harnessed skyrmions to build a switch that has the potential to process data faster while using significantly less energy. Skyrmions are magnetic whirls that form in very thin metal layers and can be efficiently moved between magnetic regions. Using a magnetic tun... » read more

Superconducting Qubits Made Using Industry-Standard, Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (imec, KU Leuven)


A new technical paper titled "High-coherence superconducting qubits made using industry-standard, advanced semiconductor manufacturing" was published by researchers at imec and KU Leuven. Abstract: "The development of superconducting qubit technology has shown great potential for the construction of practical quantum computers. As the complexity of quantum processors continues to grow, the ... » read more

Designing AI Hardware To Deal With Increasingly Challenging Memory Wall (UC Berkeley)


A new technical paper titled "AI and Memory Wall" was published by researchers at UC Berkeley, ICSI, and LBNL. Abstract "The availability of unprecedented unsupervised training data, along with neural scaling laws, has resulted in an unprecedented surge in model size and compute requirements for serving/training LLMs. However, the main performance bottleneck is increasingly shifting to memo... » read more

Optimizing Quantum Gates For Error Correction in Superconducting Qubits (Google AI)


A new technical paper titled "Optimizing quantum gates towards the scale of logical qubits" was published by researchers at Google AI and UC Riverside. Abstract "A foundational assumption of quantum error correction theory is that quantum gates can be scaled to large processors without exceeding the error-threshold for fault tolerance. Two major challenges that could become fundamental road... » read more

Early STEM Education Key To Growing Future Chip Workforce


A key factor in building a domestic workforce for the chip industry is attracting kids to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects at a younger age. That way they are more likely to follow through and attain the skills and degrees needed to enter the semiconductor job market. Industry and government are partnering with schools and community organizations to address the chal... » read more

HW Implementation of Memristive ANNs


A new technical paper titled "Hardware implementation of memristor-based artificial neural networks" was published by KAUST, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, IBM Research, USC, University of Michigan and others. Abstract: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently experiencing a bloom driven by deep learning (DL) techniques, which rely on networks of connected simple computing units oper... » read more

Hardware Trojans: CPU-Oriented Trojan Trigger Circuits (Georgia Tech)


A new technical paper titled "Towards Practical Fabrication Stage Attacks Using Interrupt-Resilient Hardware Trojans" was published by researchers at Georgia Tech. The paper states: "We introduce a new class of hardware trojans called interrupt-resilient trojans (IRTs). Our work is motivated by the observation that hardware trojan attacks on CPUs, even under favorable attack scenarios (e.g.... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Adam Kovac, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan. The U.S. government released a 61-page report, titled "National Strategy on Microelectronics Research,” by the Subcommittee On Microelectronics Leadership. It provides a framework for government, industry, academia, and international allies to address four major goals. Synopsys  acquired Intrinsic ID, which develops physical unclonable func... » read more

Digital Twins Target IC Tool And Fab Efficiency


Digital twins have emerged as the hot "new" semiconductor manufacturing technology, enabling fabs to create a virtual representation of a physical system on which to experiment and optimize what's going on inside the real fab. While digital twin technology has been in use for some time in other industries, its use has been limited in semiconductor manufacturing. What's changing is the breadt... » read more

Silicon Photonics Manufacturing Ramps Up


Circuit scaling is starting to hit a wall as the laws of physics clash with exponential increases in the volume of data, forcing chipmakers to take a much closer look at silicon photonics as a way of moving data from where it is collected to where it is processed and stored. The laws of physics are immutable. Put simply, there are limits to how fast an electron can travel through copper. The... » read more

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