Aiming to jump-start the stalled market for wireless power systems, chip maker Efficient Power Conversion this week announced the launch of a new line of semiconductors made from gallium nitride, a material that’s 10 times faster than silicon and that many believe represents the future of the semiconductor industry. The new chips are designed specifically to support wireless power systems such as those produced by WiTricity.
Biodegradable, wood-based computer chips can perform just as well as chips commonly used for wireless communication, according to new research.
The inventors argue that the new chips could help address the global problem of rapidly accumulating electronic waste, some of which contains potentially toxic materials. The results also show that a transparent, wood-derived material called nanocellulose paper is an attractive alternative to plastic as a surface for flexible electronics.
Many of the devices around us may soon acquire powerful new abilities to understand images and video, thanks to hardware designed for the machine-learning technique called deep learning.
Companies like Google have made breakthroughs in image and face recognition through deep learning, using giant data sets and powerful computers (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). Now two leading chip companies and the Chinese search giant Baidu say hardware is coming that will bring the technique to phones, cars, and more.
Memristors, exotic electronic devices only confirmed to exist in 2008, have been used to create a chip that borrows design points from the brain. The prototype chip did not learn to do anything more difficult than recognize extremely simple black-and-white patterns. But larger, more complex versions might make computers better at understanding speech, images, and the world around them.
