Samuel K. Moore

1 month ago | evdriven.com | Samuel K. Moore

A long-awaited, emerging computer network component may finally be having its moment. At Nvidia’s GTC event last week in San Jose, the company announced that it will produce an optical network switch designed to drastically cut the power consumption of AI data centers. The system—called a co-packaged optics, or CPO, switch—can route tens of terabits per second from computers in one rack to computers in another.

1 month ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Samuel K. Moore

Although they’re a staple of sci-fi movies and conspiracy theories, in real life, tiny flying microbots—weighed down by batteries and electronics—have struggled to get very far. But a new combination of circuits and lightweight solid-state batteries called a “flying batteries” topology could let these bots really take off, potentially powering microbots for hours from a system that weighs milligrams.

1 month ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Samuel K. Moore

Last week at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference, two of the biggest rivals in advanced chipmaking, Intel and TSMC, detailed the capabilities of the key memory circuits, SRAM, built using their newest technologies, Intel 18a and TSMC N2. Chipmakers’ ability to keep scaling down circuits has slowed over the years—but it’s been particularly difficult to shrink SRAM, which is made up of large arrays of memory cells and supporting circuits.

2 months ago | spectrum.ieee.org | Samuel K. Moore

It says something about your career at a company that makes hundreds of trillions of transistors every day when your nickname is “Mr. Transistor.” That’s what colleagues often call Tahir Ghani, a senior fellow and the director of process pathfinding in Intel’s technology development group. Ghani’s career spans three decades at the company and has resulted in more than a thousand patent filings. He’s had a hand in every major change to the CMOS transistor during that time period.

Dec 30, 2024 | spectrum.ieee.org | Samuel K. Moore

I like to think I can learn something about our readers from the list of most read semiconductor articles. What I think I’ve learned from this year’s list is that you are as obsessed as I am with packing more and more computing power into less and less space. That’s good, because it’s the main goal of a huge chunk of the industry as well. Not all of this list fits neatly into that mold, but hey, who doesn’t love a millimeter-scale laser chip that can slice through steel? 1.