All posts tagged: semiconductors

Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed

Sanctioned Chinese AI Firm SenseTime Releases Image Model Built for Speed

Published by skeptic

SenseTime, a Chinese AI company best known for its facial recognition technology, released a new open source model on Tuesday that it claims can both generate and interpret images far faster than top models developed by US competitors. SenseNova U1 could help the company reclaim lost ground after it slipped from its place among the leading players in China’s AI development race. The model’s secret sauce is its ability to “read” images without translating them to text first, speeding up the process and reducing the amount of computing power required. “The model’s entire reasoning process is no longer limited to text. It can reason with images as well,” Dahua Lin, cofounder and chief scientist at SenseTime, said in an interview with WIRED. Lin, who is also a professor of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says that models capable of processing images directly will enable robots to better understand the physical world in the future. Like DeepSeek’s latest flagship model, SenseTime says U1 can be powered by Chinese-made chips. “Several Chinese domestic …

Molecular add-on helps chiral perovskite semiconductors detect visible light

Molecular add-on helps chiral perovskite semiconductors detect visible light

Published by Jenni Sidey

A material built to tell left-handed light from right-handed light has long had a frustrating weakness. It mostly ignored visible light. That limitation may now be easing. A University at Buffalo-led team reports that it paired a chiral semiconductor with a non-chiral molecule that absorbs visible light more readily, producing a hybrid system that not only responds to visible wavelengths but also keeps the optical handedness that makes chiral materials unusual in the first place. The work, published in Nature Communications, centers on chiral perovskites, a class of semiconductors whose structures come in left- and right-handed forms. Those materials can respond differently to left- and right-circularly polarized light, making them attractive for polarized-light detection, optical communication systems and other optoelectronic uses. The problem is that many chiral semiconductors work best under higher-energy ultraviolet light, not the visible wavelengths used in many practical devices. “We were able to transfer the properties of chirality to a non-chiral molecule,” said Wanyi Nie, associate professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Physics and the study’s corresponding author. “The …

Innovation in semiconductors depends on new measurement methods, and the UK can take a leading role

Innovation in semiconductors depends on new measurement methods, and the UK can take a leading role

Published by skeptic

Sebastian Wood, Principal Scientist at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), stresses the importance of measurement standards when accelerating semiconductor technology The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is running into a physical wall. As AI models become exponentially more powerful, the hardware underpinning them is struggling to keep up. The semiconductor industry, which has been driven by the miniaturisation of silicon chips, is now facing fundamental limits in power consumption, thermal management, and data transfer speeds. Hardware innovation was once the key enabler of breakthroughs, but it has become increasingly challenging to pioneer further as the technology has become more complex. To continue to push innovation, measurement has become the critical driver. This challenge has ignited a wave of innovation. Across research labs and industry, new materials and architectures are fast emerging to fill the gap. 3D-stacked chiplets, high-bandwidth interconnects, and neuromorphic designs that mimic the human brain are no longer just theoretical concepts. Even emerging technologies such as 2D materials as transistor channels, and diamond heatsinks are increasingly seen as essential next steps. But as the …

AI Could Democratize One of Tech’s Most Valuable Resources

AI Could Democratize One of Tech’s Most Valuable Resources

Published by skeptic

Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI it helped build, the champ could soon face growing competition. Modern AI runs on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has propelled the company to a market cap of well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chip allows companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that it provides software to help program each new generation of chip. That may soon not be such a differentiated skill. A startup called Wafer is training AI models to do one of the most difficult and important jobs in AI—optimizing code so that it runs as efficiently as possible on a particular silicon chip. Emilio Andere, cofounder and CEO of Wafer, says the company performs reinforcement learning on open source models to teach them to write kernel code, or software that interacts directly with hardware in an operating system. Andere says Wafer also adds “agentic harnesses” to …

5 Burning Questions About Elon Musk’s Terafab Chip Partnership with Intel

5 Burning Questions About Elon Musk’s Terafab Chip Partnership with Intel

Published by skeptic

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Tuesday that the chipmaker will “work closely” with Elon Musk to support the billionaire entrepreneur’s Terafab project, a potentially massive chip development and fabrication operation that will be jointly developed by SpaceX and Tesla. A photo posted by Intel’s official X account shows the two executives shaking hands last weekend in front of a large Intel sign. Musk’s 1-terawatt, ultra-high performance chip fabrication facility, which may span multiple locations, could cost billions of dollars. “Terafab represents a step change in how silicon logic, memory and packaging will get built in the future,” Tan said in a social media post. “Intel is proud to be a partner and work closely with Elon on this highly strategic project.” Exactly how Tan and Musk plan to execute such an ambitious venture remains unclear. Musk has been talking about the need to develop a so-called Terafab for months, viewing the endeavor as a way to produce the vast number of chips his companies will need for cars, robots, and data centers. Some chip industry …

Intel signs on to Elon Musk’s Terafab chips project

Intel signs on to Elon Musk’s Terafab chips project

Published by skeptic

Intel will join SpaceX and Tesla in an effort to build a new U.S. semiconductor factory in Texas, although the scope of its contributions are unclear. “Our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale will help accelerate Terafab’s aim to produce 1 TW/year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics,” Intel said in a corporate post on X. Intel hasn’t shared any more information. Elon Musk announced in March a team-up between the two tech companies he leads to develop chips for AI compute, satellites, and SpaceX’s mooted space data center and to support the possibility of autonomous Tesla vehicles and robots. However, building a chip fab is one of the most difficult and expensive corporate infrastructure projects out there, typically requiring years of time and more than $20 billion to create a facility with a huge clean room for thousands of ultra-precise machines to carve silicon. It wasn’t obvious how SpaceX and Tesla, two companies with no experience in the sector, could team up to execute the project …

The Ridiculously Nerdy Intel Bet That Could Rake in Billions

The Ridiculously Nerdy Intel Bet That Could Rake in Billions

Published by skeptic

It’s still an extremely challenging proposition. “Packaging is not as easy as saying, ‘I want to run 100,000 wafers per month,’” says Jim McGregor, a longtime chip industry analyst and the founder of Tirias Research, referring to a continuous flow of chips in various stages of production. “It really comes down to whether Intel’s [packaging] fabs can make deals. If we see them expanding those operations more, that’s an indicator that they have.” Last month, Anwar Ibrahim, the prime minister of Malaysia, revealed in a post on Facebook that Intel is expanding its Malaysian chip-making facilities, which were first established back in the 1970s. Ibrahim said the head of Intel’s Foundry, Naga Chandrasekaran, had “outlined plans to commence the first phase” of expansion, which would include advanced packaging. “I welcome Intel’s decision to begin operations for the complex later this year,” a translated version of Ibrahim’s post read. An Intel spokesperson, John Hipsher, confirmed that it’s building out additional chip assembly and test capacity in Penang, “amid rising global demand for Intel Foundry packaging solutions.” …

Arm’s CEO Insists the Market Needs His New CPU. It Could Piss Everyone Off

Arm’s CEO Insists the Market Needs His New CPU. It Could Piss Everyone Off

Published by skeptic

Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to him immediately: “People are going to say ‘Arm’s CEO sleeps on the job,’” he says. Still, Haas obliges. He gives us 46 minutes of his time, then shoos us out so he can hop on a call with Masayoshi Son, the Softbank CEO and chairman of Arm’s board. I’m meeting with Haas just days before the chip firm’s momentous announcement that it’s launching its own silicon. For a company that’s made its fortunes licensing its architectures to other chip companies and never fabricating its own, the move is a huge bet. Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Qualcomm all make or sell chips based on Arm, either licensing the chip designs or paying royalties to the firm. It’s been estimated that there are three Arm chips ​​for every human on Earth. Seen another …

Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

Published by skeptic

Arm, one of the world’s leading chip design firms, announced Tuesday that it is producing its own semiconductors. The move is a departure from its long-standing model of licensing intellectual property to companies that manufacture and sell chips themselves. Speaking to a live audience in San Francisco, Arm CEO Rene Haas made his pitch for how the new Arm CPU could benefit the tech industry and why this is the right time for the company to step outside of its lane and go head-to-head with other chipmakers. Arm’s in-house chip efforts were rumored for years. Now, as artificial intelligence proliferates throughout the economy and demand for computing resources skyrockets, Arm is trying to capture a sliver of the market for central processing units (CPUs) optimized to handle AI workloads. The new chip is called the Arm AGI CPU, a nod to artificial general intelligence, an often-invoked but still hypothetical form of AI that could match human performance across domains. It’s designed to be coupled with other chips in high-performance servers inside data centers and to …

Fuelling defence goals with compound semiconductors

Fuelling defence goals with compound semiconductors

Published by skeptic

Dr Wyn Metedith, chair of CSconnected, discusses the UK government’s vision for compound semiconductors and how this fuels the goal of a sovereign defence capability. In September 2024, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) purchased a semiconductor foundry in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham. This unusual step was not a move to expand capacity, but to prevent collapse of a critical sovereign supply chain. The facility, Octric Semiconductors UK, was the only site in the UK capable of manufacturing gallium arsenide chips for military platforms, including fighter jet avionics. Its previous owners had been looking to sell or close it. The government intervened because losing it was deemed a national security risk. This highly reactive move was a reminder of how exposed the UK’s defence industrial base has become to the loss of critical semiconductor capability. The question the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS), published in 2025, now has to answer is how Britain moves from reactive crisis management to proactive sovereign resilience. Goals of the Defence Industrial Strategy The DIS sets out an ambitious answer. Its vision …