System Bits: Oct. 4


Light deflection through fog In a development that could lead to computer vision systems that work in fog or drizzle, which have been a major obstacle to self-driving cars, MIT researchers have developed a technique for recovering visual information from light that has scattered because of interactions with the environment — such as passing through human tissue. This technology — called... » read more

Making Manufacturing Sustainable For Chips


There is widespread agreement that fabs and manufacturers in general should operate in a sustainable way, but what exactly does that mean? And what concrete steps can fabs take toward that goal? Once we get past the simplistic “more sustainable is better,” things tend to get pretty fuzzy. Consider the definition of sustainability itself. Corporate responsibility reports and similar docum... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 27


Memory management scheme accommodates commercial chips In an improvement to a memory management scheme presented last year in which MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researchers unveiled what they said was a fundamentally new way of managing memory on computer chips — one that would use circuit space much more efficiently as chips continue to comprise more and more... » read more

Joint R&D Has Its Ups And Downs


As corporate spending on research and development dwindles, enterprises are reaching out to colleges and universities to supplement their R&D. And they often are finding eager partners in those endeavors, as professors and their graduate students look for help, financial and technical, in addressing long-term research projects. “Pure research is just a luxury no one can afford anymore,... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 6


How might AI affect urban life in 2030? In an ongoing project hosted by Stanford University to inform societal deliberation and provide guidance on the ethical development of smart software, sensors and machines, a panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city. Th... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 30


Probing photon-electron interactions According to Rice University researchers, where light and matter intersect, the world illuminates; where they interact so strongly that they become one, they illuminate a world of new physics. Here, the team is closing in on a way to create a new condensed matter state in which all the electrons in a material act as one by manipulating them with light and a... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 16


Record-breaking quantum logic gate Reaching the benchmark required theoretically to build a quantum computer, University of Oxford researchers have achieved a quantum logic gate with record-breaking 99.9% precision. They reminded that quantum computers, which function according to the laws of quantum physics, have the potential to dwarf the processing power of today's computers, able to pro... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 9


Using trapped ions as quantum bits MIT researchers reminded that quantum computers are largely hypothetical devices that could perform some calculations much more rapidly than conventional computers can, and instead of the bits of classical computation — which can represent 0 or 1 — quantum computers consist of quantum bits, or qubits, which can, in some sense, represent 0 and 1 simultaneo... » read more

System Bits: July 26


Mixing topology, spin MIT researchers are studying new compounds, such as topological insulators (TIs), which support protected electron states on the surfaces of crystals that silicon-based technologies cannot as part of the pursuit of material platforms for the next generation of electronics. They report new physical phenomena being realized by combining this field of TIs with the subfiel... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 26


Flexible MRAM Researchers from the National University of Singapore, Yonsei University, Ghent University and Singapore's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering embedded a magnetic memory chip on a plastic material, flexible enough to be bent into a tube. The new device operates on magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), which uses a magnesium oxide (MgO)-based magnetic tunn... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →