Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

[wjfox]

Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

Published 1 hour ago

Toyota is to slash worldwide vehicle production by 40% in September because of the global microchip shortage.

The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles.

Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further.

The Covid pandemic boosted demand for appliances that use chips, such as phones, TVs and games consoles.

On Thursday, German firm Volkswagen, which cut output earlier in the year, told Reuters: "We currently expect supply of chips in the third quarter to be very volatile and tight.

"We can't rule out further changes to production."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58266794

[weatheriscool]

World's Largest Chip Maker to Raise Prices, Threatening Costlier Electronics
Source: Wall Street Journal

TSMC to increase prices of most advanced chips by roughly 10%; less advanced chips will cost about 20% more

The world’s largest contract chip maker is raising prices by as much as 20%, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that could result in consumers paying more for electronics.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to increase the prices of its most advanced chips by roughly 10%, while less advanced chips used by customers like auto makers will cost about 20% more, these people said. The higher prices will generally take effect late this year or next year, the people said.

Apple Inc. is one of TSMC’s largest customers and its iPhones use advanced microprocessors made in TSMC foundries. It couldn’t be determined how much more Apple would pay.

A TSMC spokeswoman declined to comment on prices but said the company works closely with customers. An Apple spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-lar ... 1629978308

[caltrek]

China Proposes Strict Control of Algorithms
by Manish Singh
August 27, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/27/china ... lgorithms/

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) China is not done with curbing the influence local internet services have assumed in the world’s largest populous market. Following a widening series of regulatory crackdowns in recent months, the nation on Friday issued draft guidelines on regulating the algorithms firms run to make recommendations to users.

In a 30-point draft guidelines published on Friday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) proposed forbidding companies from deploying algorithms that “encourage addiction or high consumption” and endanger national security or disrupt the public order.

The services must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness and their algorithms must not be used to create fake user accounts or create other false impressions, said the guidelines from the internet watchdog, which reports to a central leadership group chaired by President Xi Jinping. The watchdog said it will be taking public feedback on the new guidelines for a month (until September 26).

The guidelines also propose that users should be provided with the ability to easily turn off algorithm recommendations. Algorithm providers who have the power to influence public opinion or mobilize the citizens need to get an approval from the CAC.

Friday’s proposal comes at a time when Beijing is increasingly targeting companies for the way they have handled consumer data and the monopolistic positions they have assumed in the nation.

[Tadasuke]

Samsung showed three segment smartphone that folds:

Smartphones like this might get popular later this decade.

[weatheriscool]

AMD Leading Exascale Supercomputers with 2 Exaflop El Capitan Supercomputer in 2023
August 31, 2021 by Brian Wang

El Capitan will drive unprecedented advancements in HPC and AI, powered by the next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs. It will be a 2 exaflop supercomputer for Lawrence Livermore Labs.

It is expected in 2023 and is costing $600 million.

This and the Frontier 1.5 exaflop supercomputer are huge victories for AMD. Intel has dominated the chips used in supercomputers for decades. Nvidia GPUs became key for high performance computing starting about two decades ago. AMD has stepped up to the leading edge of supercomputer performance.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/08/a ... -2023.html

[weatheriscool]

Stanford discovery could pave the way to ultrafast, energy-efficient computing
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-09-sta ... cient.html
by Mark Shwartz, Stanford University

Scientists have spent decades searching for faster, more energy-efficient memory technologies for everything from large data centers to mobile sensors and other flexible electronics. Among the most promising data storage technologies is phase-change memory, which is thousands of times faster than conventional hard drives but uses a lot of electricity.

Now, Stanford University engineers have overcome a key obstacle that has limited widespread adoption of phase-change memory. The results are published in a Sept. 10 study in Science.

"People have long expected phase-change memory to replace much of the memory in our phones and laptops," said Eric Pop, a professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the study. "One reason it hasn't been adopted is that it requires more power to operate than competing memory technologies. In our study, we've shown that phase-change memory can be both fast and energy efficient."

[weatheriscool]

Apple Issues Emergency Security Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw
Source: New York Times

Apple issued emergency software updates for a critical vulnerability in its products on Monday after security researchers uncovered a flaw that allows highly invasive spyware from Israel’s NSO Group to infect anyone’s iPhone, Apple Watch or Mac computer without so much as a click.

Apple’s security team has been working around the clock to develop a fix since Tuesday, after researchers at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization at the University of Toronto, discovered that a Saudi activist’s iPhone had been infected with spyware from NSO Group. The spyware, called Pegasus, used a novel method to invisibly infect an Apple device without the victim’s knowledge for as long as six months.

Known as a “zero click remote exploit,” it is considered the Holy Grail of surveillance because it allows governments, mercenaries and criminals to secretly break into a victim’s device without tipping the victim off. Using the zero-click infection method, Pegasus can turn on a user’s camera and microphone, record messages, texts, emails, calls — even those sent via encrypted messaging and phone apps like Signal — and send them back to NSO’s clients at governments around the world.

“This spyware can do everything an iPhone user can do on their device and more,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, who teamed up with Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, on the finding. In the past, victims learned their devices were infected by spyware only after receiving a suspicious link texted to their phone or email. But NSO Group’s zero-click capability gives the victim no such prompt, and enables full access to a person’s digital life. These abilities can fetch millions of dollars on the underground market for hacking tools.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/tech ... group.html

[Yuli Ban]

Physicists develop miniature terahertz sources

Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Freie Universität Berlin have developed a new, simple approach for generating terahertz radiation. Strong optical laser pulses enable terahertz electromagnetic fields to be generated directly at a specific point.
The team has published its findings in the journal ACS Applied Nano Materials ("On-Chip Generation of Ultrafast Current Pulses by Nanolayered Spintronic Terahertz Emitters"). Potential applications for terahertz radiation are wide ranging - from materials testing to communications and security technology.

[weatheriscool]

Apple Unveils New iPhone 13, iPad mini, and Watch 7

By Ryan Whitwam on September 14, 2021 at 3:41 pm
https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/3269 ... le-watch-7

Apple has just wrapped up its fall 2021 announcements, and there were no major surprises. There are new iPhones, an updated Apple Watch, and redesigned iPad Mini. That new pocket-sized iPad is the biggest departure from the last-gen device, and the others have just a few small tweaks and improvements. Apple will no doubt sell a boatload of them, though. Let’s recap.
iPhone 13 lineup

Just like last year, there are four iPhone models in Apple’s lineup. That’s actually one of the more surprising parts of the announcement — Apple didn’t kill the Mini variant of the iPhone 13. The phones have slimmed-down display notches, and the battery life is just a bit better, amounting to 1.5-2.5 hours of additional usage per charge in Apple’s testing. That’s true even with the more powerful A15 processor, which powers improved photography features in tandem with the dual cameras. You get some of the same camera hardware from last year’s Pro Max iPhone, too.

[caltrek]

Beijing is Tearing Down the Digital "Walled Gardens"
by Rita Liao
September 18, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/18/china ... d-gardens/

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.

This week, China gets serious about breaking down the walled gardens that its internet giants have formed for decades. Two major funding rounds were announced, from the newly established autonomous driving unicorn Deeproute.ai and fast-growing, cross-border financial service provider XTransfer.

Tear down the walls

The Chinese internet is infamously siloed, with a handful of “super apps” each occupying a cushy, protective territory that tries to lock users in and keep rivals out. On Tencent’s WeChat messenger, for instance, links to Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace and ByteDance’s Douyin short video service can’t be viewed or even redirected. That’s unlike WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal that offer friendly URL previews within chats.

E-commerce platforms fend off competition in different ways. Taobao uses Alibaba’s affiliate Alipay as a default payments option, omitting its arch rival WeChat Pay. Tencent-backed JD.com, a rival to Alibaba, encourages its users to pay through its own payments system or WeChat Pay.

But changes are underway. “Ensuring normal access to legal URLs is the basic requirement for developing the internet,” a senior official from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said at a press conference this week. He added that unjustified blockages of web links “affect users’ experience, undermine users’ rights, and disrupt market orders.”

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

Integrated Electronics Trends to Drive IME Market to $1.5bn by 2032

Sep 21, 2021

In-mold electronics enables electronic functionality to be embedded within molded and thermoformed plastic components. With the integration of capacitive touch, lighting, and even haptics alongside size and weight reductions of up to 70%, IME is an efficient approach to making curved touch-sensitive interfaces. Given these benefits, IDTechEx forecasts IME to be a $1.5 billion market by 2032, with applications mainly within the automotive and consumer goods sectors.

Greater integration of electronics within 3D structures is an ever-increasing trend, representing a more sophisticated solution compared to the current approach of encasing rigid printed circuit boards. In-mold electronics (IME) facilitates this trend, by enabling multiple integrated functionalities to be incorporated into components with thermoformed 3D surfaces.

https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-ar ... 2032/24803

[weatheriscool]

New optical 'transistor' speeds up computation up to 1,000 times, at lowest switching energy possible

by Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-optical-t ... nergy.html

An international research team led by Skoltech and IBM has created an extremely energy-efficient optical switch that could replace electronic transistors in a new generation of computers manipulating photons rather than electrons. In addition to direct power saving, the switch requires no cooling and is really fast: At 1 trillion operations per second, it is between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's top-notch commercial transistors. The study comes out Wednesday in Nature.

"What makes the new device so energy-efficient is that it only takes a few photons to switch," the first author of the study, Dr. Anton Zasedatelev commented. "In fact, in our Skoltech labs we achieved switching with just one photon at room temperature. That said, there is a long way to go before such proof-of-principle demonstration is utilized in an all-optical co-processor," added Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis, who heads the Hybrid Photonics Labs at Skoltech.

Since a photon is the smallest particle of light that exists in nature, there is really not much room for improvement beyond that as far as power consumption goes. Most modern electrical transistors take tens of times more energy to switch, and the ones that use single electrons to achieve comparable efficiencies are way slower.

Besides performance issues the competing power-saving electronic transistors also tend to require bulky cooling equipment, which in turn consumes power and factors into the operating costs. The new switch conveniently works at room temperature and therefore circumvents all these problems.

[weatheriscool]

Researchers say 'unusual' metamaterial could double capacity of wireless networks
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-09-unu ... works.html
by Matthew Tierney, University of Toronto

Your office wall may play a part in the next generation of wireless communications.

University of Toronto researchers George Eleftheriades and Sajjad Taravati have shown that reflectors made of metamaterials can channel light to enable more wireless data to be transmitted over a single frequency.

They believe this newly realized property—called "full-duplex nonreciprocity"—could double the capacity of existing wireless networks. Their research is published in a paper in Nature Communications.

"This is happening," says Eleftheriades, a professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

"Within the next three to five years this technology will be adopted."

The intellectual property for the team's proof of concept was recently transferred to the Montreal-based startup LATYS Intelligence Inc., which was co-founded by U of T Engineering alumnus Gursimran Singh Sethi.

Metamaterials are synthetic structures composed of building blocks that are smaller than the wavelengths of light they are designed to manipulate.

The material used by the team is composed of repeating unit cells about 20 millimeters in size. They appear to form one homogenous object—a metasurface—for larger wavelengths of light such as microwaves, which are used to carry cell phone signals and reflect off the metasurface exhibiting a property known as nonreciprocity.

Eleftheriades uses a car's rear-view mirror to illustrate how it works.

"When you're driving and look in the rear-view mirror, you see the driver behind you. That driver can also see you because light bounces off the mirror and follows the same path backwards," he says.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Record Data Speed – 319 Terabits per Second Over 3,001 km
September 27, 2021 by Brian Wang

Researchers constructed a transmission system that makes full use of wavelength division multiplexing technology by combining different amplifier technologies, to achieve a transmission demonstration with date-rate of 319 terabits per second, over a distance of 3,001 km. Using a common comparison metric of optical fiber transmission the data-rate and distance produce of 957 petabits per second x km, is a world record for optical fibers with standard outer diameter. Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology developed an experimental optical fiber with four cores, instead of just one.

In addition to the C and L-bands, typically used for high-data-rate, long-haul transmission, we utilize the transmission bandwidth of the S-band, which has not yet been used for further than single span transmission. The combined >120nm transmission bandwidth allowed 552 wavelength-division multiplexed channels by adopting 2 kinds of doped-fiber amplifier together with distributed Raman amplification, to enable recirculating transmission of the wideband signal. The standard cladding diameter, 4-core optical fiber can be cabled with existing equipment, and it is hoped that such fibers can enable practical high data-rate transmission in the near-term, contributing to the realization of the backbone communications system, necessary for the spread of new communication services Beyond 5G.

This could be used to upgrade the global interent backbone.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/r ... 01-km.html

[weatheriscool]

Using optical beaming to power a portable 5G base station

by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-opt ... -base.html

Telecommunications company Ericsson has teamed up with a company called PowerLight Technologies to send power through the air to run a 5G base station. Both companies have posted the details on their respective websites.

Consumers have already seen through-the-air power exchange in the form of wireless charging stations—such stations have used a form of technology to transfer electricity short distances, a type of energy transfer that is not expected to work over long distances. In this new effort, the two companies took a different approach—they developed a system called optical beaming in which a sending station converts electricity to a powerful beam of light that is sent through the air to a receiving station.

The light is captured at the receiving station using a special type of photovoltaic array and is then converted to electricity. The two companies have proven their concept viable by sending power from a sending station to an Ericsson 5G radio base station, which, they note, did not have any other source of power. The test system sent 48 watts over 300 meters. In its announcement, Ericsson claims that the system is capable of sending up to 1,000 watts up to distances of a kilometer. Noting that the power in the beam of light could present a hazard to both humans and wildlife, the team built a ring of protection around it—sensors formed in a ring around the beam that detect the presence of anything coming between the sending and receiving stations. In such circumstances, the beam is cut off and the base station operates temporarily on battery power.

[weatheriscool]

Enhanced touch screens could enable users to 'feel' objects
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-scr ... users.html
by Steve Kuhlmann, Texas A&M University College of Engineering

The next time you buy a new couch, you may not ever have to leave your old one to get a feel for the texture of the new material.

Dr. Cynthia Hipwell, Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. '45 Chair II Professor in the J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is leading a team working to better define how the finger interacts with a device with the hope of aiding in the further development of technology that goes beyond sensing and reacting to your touch.

The team's research was recently published and featured on the cover of the journal Advanced Materials.

The ultimate goal of furthering this human-machine interface is to give touch devices the ability to provide users with a richer touch-based experience by equipping the technology with the ability to mimic the feeling of physical objects. Hipwell shared examples of potential implementations ranging from a more immersive virtual reality platform to tactile display interfaces like those in a motor vehicle dashboard and a virtual shopping experience that would let the user feel the texture of materials before purchasing them.

"This could allow you to actually feel textures, buttons, slides and knobs on the screen," Hipwell said. "It can be used for interactive touchscreen-based displays, but one holy grail would certainly be being able to bring touch into shopping so that you could feel the texture of fabrics and other products while you're shopping online."

Hipwell explained that at its essence, the "touch" in current touch screen technology is more for the screen's benefit than the user. With the emergence and refinement of increasingly sophisticated haptic technology, that relationship between user and device can grow to be more reciprocal.

[weatheriscool]

Quantum-encrypted information transmitted over fiber more than 600 kilometers long

by The Optical Society
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-quantum-e ... eters.html

By implementing a new signal stabilization technique, researchers were able to achieve secure quantum communication over a record 605 kilometers of fiber using the twin-field quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol. The new demonstration paves the way for transmitting highly secure, quantum-encrypted information over long distances, such as between cities.

Mirko Pittaluga from Toshiba Europe Limited and the University of Leeds, both in the UK, will present the research at the Frontiers in Optics + Laser Science Conference (FiO LS) all-virtual meeting.

"This research extends the range of fiber-based quantum communications beyond 600km for the first time, and we think the techniques we have introduced here may be relevant for other phase-sensitive single-photon applications," said Mirko Pittaluga. "This will allow us to build national and continental scale fiber networks connecting major metropolitan areas. Together with satellite links, we can now envisage truly global quantum networks," continued Andrew Shields, head of the quantum technology division at Toshiba Europe.

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Enhanced touch screens could enable users to 'feel' objects
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-scr ... users.html
by Steve Kuhlmann, Texas A&M University College of Engineering

The next time you buy a new couch, you may not ever have to leave your old one to get a feel for the texture of the new material.

Dr. Cynthia Hipwell, Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. '45 Chair II Professor in the J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is leading a team working to better define how the finger interacts with a device with the hope of aiding in the further development of technology that goes beyond sensing and reacting to your touch.

The team's research was recently published and featured on the cover of the journal Advanced Materials.

The ultimate goal of furthering this human-machine interface is to give touch devices the ability to provide users with a richer touch-based experience by equipping the technology with the ability to mimic the feeling of physical objects. Hipwell shared examples of potential implementations ranging from a more immersive virtual reality platform to tactile display interfaces like those in a motor vehicle dashboard and a virtual shopping experience that would let the user feel the texture of materials before purchasing them.

"This could allow you to actually feel textures, buttons, slides and knobs on the screen," Hipwell said. "It can be used for interactive touchscreen-based displays, but one holy grail would certainly be being able to bring touch into shopping so that you could feel the texture of fabrics and other products while you're shopping online."

Hipwell explained that at its essence, the "touch" in current touch screen technology is more for the screen's benefit than the user. With the emergence and refinement of increasingly sophisticated haptic technology, that relationship between user and device can grow to be more reciprocal.

Next generation virtual reality gaming is going to be wild with this one. That is before the enhancement of augmented reality and other things with this!