Manufacturing Bits: May 21


World’s loudest underwater sound A group of researchers hit tiny jets of water with a high-power X-ray laser, creating a record for the world’s loudest underwater sound. The intensity of the blast resulted in an underwater sound with an intensity greater than 270 decibels (dB). That’s greater than the intensity of a rocket launch or equivalent of creating electrical power for a city o... » read more

System Bits: May 21


Washable, wearable energy devices for clothing Researchers at the University of Cambridge collaborated with colleagues at China’s Jiangnan University to develop wearable electronic components that could be woven into fabrics for clothing, suitable for energy conversion, flexible circuits, health-care monitoring, and other applications. Graphene and other materials can be directly incorpor... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 21


More speculative vulnerabilities Security researchers at the Graz University of Technology, KU Leuven, Cyberus Technology, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute point to two new speculative execution vulnerabilities related to Meltdown and Spectre. The first, which they dubbed ZombieLoad, uses a similar approach to Meltdown. After preparing tasks in parallel, the processor needs to discard th... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 14


Radiation thermometers The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a thermometer that can measure radiation within a few thousandths of a degree Celsius. The so-called Ambient-Radiation Thermometer (ART) from NIST is a new type of radiation thermometer, which measures infrared radiation (IR) given off by objects without touching them. Measuring 60 centimeters ... » read more

System Bits: May 14


Faster U.S. supercomputers on the way The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a contract for more than $600 million to Cray for an exascale supercomputer to be installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during 2021. Cray will provide its Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect for what is dubbed the Frontier supercomputer. Advanced Micro Devices will have a key role in building the... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 14


Detecting malware with power monitoring Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin and North Carolina State University devised a way to detect malware in large-scale embedded computer systems by monitoring power usage and identifying unusual surges as a warning of potential infection. The method relies on an external piece of hardware that can be plugged into the system to observe and m... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 6


Ionic memory Sandia National Laboratories, Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have developed an ionic floating-gate memory array (IFG) for neuromorphic computing. For some time, the industry has been working on neuromorphic computing. The goal of neuromorphic computing is to replicate the brain in silicon. In a neuromorphic chip, the goal is to mimic the way ... » read more

System Bits: May 6


Transmitting data with a semiconductor laser Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences demonstrated a laser that can emit microwaves wirelessly, modulate them, and receive external radio frequency signals. “The research opens the door to new types of hybrid electronic-photonic devices and is the first step toward ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi,” said ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 6


Compressing objects Computer scientists at MIT propose a way to improve data compression in memory by focusing on objects rather than cache lines. "The motivation was trying to come up with a new memory hierarchy that could do object-based compression, instead of cache-line compression, because that's how most modern programming languages manage data," said Po-An Tsai, a graduate student at... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 30


Single-atom catalysts A group of researchers have captured the behavior of a single-atom catalyst, a move that could one day help design more efficient catalysts in systems. A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction. In vehicles, for example, platinum is used as a catalyst, which speeds up chemical reactions and cleans exhaust gases. Besides platinum, the indu... » read more

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