https://techxplore.com/hardware-news/ en-us The latest news on consumer electronic hardware, electronic gadgets, hardware and electronics. A technology for the three-dimensional integration of processing units and memory, as reported by researchers from Tokyo Tech, has achieved the highest attainable performance in the whole world, paving the way to faster and more efficient computing. Named "BBCube 3D," this innovative stacked architecture achieves higher data bandwidths than state-of-the-art memory technologies, while also minimizing the energy needed for bit access. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-06-bbcube-3d-cpugpu-memory-hybrid.html Hardware Thu, 29 Jun 2023 09:49:03 EDT news607250941 Researchers have developed a new design for computer memory that could both greatly improve performance and reduce the energy demands of internet and communications technologies, which are predicted to consume nearly a third of global electricity within the next ten years. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-06-memory-greatly-energy.html Hardware Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:16:04 EDT news606734161 Researchers have created a small device that "sees" and creates memories in a similar way to humans, in a promising step towards one day having applications that can make rapid, complex decisions such as in self-driving cars. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-06-tiny-device-mimics-human-vision.html Hardware Wed, 14 Jun 2023 10:00:01 EDT news605951993 The never-ending quest for faster, smaller computers that can do more has led manufacturers to design ever tinier transistors that are now packed into computer chips by the tens of billions. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-06-photonic-power-artificial-life.html Hardware Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:33:39 EDT news605352807 In recent years, electronics engineers have been trying to develop new brain-inspired hardware that can run artificial intelligence (AI) models more efficiently. While most existing hardware is specialized in either sensing, processing or storing data, some teams have been exploring the possibility of combining these three functionalities in a single device. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-electrochemical-transistor-sensor-processor.html Hardware Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:30:01 EDT news604748492 A team of security researchers at Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan and Ruhr University Bochum in Germany has reported a new form of side-channel attack that capitalizes on power and speed management methods used by graphics processing units and systems on a chip (SoCs). https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-hot-pixels-cpu.html Hardware Wed, 31 May 2023 09:30:03 EDT news604727043 Researchers at Oregon State University and Baylor University have made a breakthrough toward reducing the energy consumption of the photonic chips used in data centers and supercomputers. The paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-breakthrough-chip-energy-efficiency-center.html Hardware Wed, 24 May 2023 10:21:58 EDT news604142516 Researchers have created atomically thin artificial neurons capable of processing both light and electric signals for computing. The material enables the simultaneous existence of separate feedforward and feedback paths within a neural network, boosting the ability to solve complex problems. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-artificial-neurons-mimic-complex-brain.html Hardware Fri, 05 May 2023 13:05:42 EDT news602510739 Researchers at the Technical University of Berlin say they uncovered a new vulnerability in AMD's Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The flaw exposes firmware TPMs, or fTPMs, to attack. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-amd-ftpm-vulnerability-uncovered.html Hardware Wed, 03 May 2023 17:00:01 EDT news602351146 Neural networks are distributed computing structures inspired by the structure of a biological brain and aim to achieve cognitive performance comparable to that of humans but in a much shorter time. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-neural-networks-photonic-chips-harnessing.html Hardware Tue, 02 May 2023 11:20:38 EDT news602245229 Researchers have developed a new light-based computing scheme that uses a photonic integrated circuit to reduce the energy necessary for cryptocurrency and blockchain applications. Mining cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin—a process of verifying transactions and adding new cryptocurrency to the blockchain—consumes up to 1% of the world's energy. This energy expenditure is expected to grow as cryptocurrency and blockchain applications become increasingly mainstream. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-light-based-scheme-power-cryptocurrencies.html Hardware Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:05:51 EDT news601823147 Researchers from the College of Electronic Information and Optical Engineering at Nankai University have used flexible artificial synapse devices to develop a neuromorphic motion perception system that realizes the brain's multisensory functions at the hardware level and exhibits excellent motion perception performance. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-team-brain-sensory-functions-artificial.html Hardware Wed, 26 Apr 2023 09:19:03 EDT news601719541 Mass spectrometers are extremely precise chemical analyzers that have many applications, from evaluating the safety of drinking water to detecting toxins in a patient's blood. But building an inexpensive, portable mass spectrometer that could be deployed in remote locations remains a challenge, partly due to the difficulty of miniaturizing the vacuum pump it needs to operate at a low cost. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-3d-miniature-vacuum.html Hardware Tue, 25 Apr 2023 09:19:21 EDT news601633156 Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) have designed a system that makes an off-the-shelf quadruped robot nimble enough to walk a narrow balance beam—a feat that is likely the first of its kind. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-team-four-legged-robotic.html Hardware Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:44:29 EDT news600968551 Everyone is talking about the newest AI and the power of neural networks, forgetting that software is limited by the hardware on which it runs. But it is hardware, says USC Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Joshua Yang, that has become "the bottleneck." Now, Yang's new research with collaborators might change that. They believe that they have developed a new type of chip with the best memory of any chip thus far for edge AI (AI in portable devices). https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-chip-greatest-precision-memory-date.html Hardware Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:49:03 EDT news599320141 Graph neural networks (GNNs) are promising machine learning architectures designed to analyze data that can be represented as graphs. These architectures achieved very promising results on a variety of real-world applications, including drug discovery, social network design, and recommender systems. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-echo-state-graph-neural-networks-1.html Hardware Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:17:50 EDT news598090655 Ultrathin phosphorus semiconductors that become metallic when stacked can tackle resistance issues and boost transistor performance. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-phosphorus-pace-high-performance-transistors.html Hardware Mon, 13 Mar 2023 11:23:10 EDT news597925386 As the evolution of standard microchips is coming to an end, scientists are looking for a revolution. The big challenges are to design chips that are more energy efficient and to design devices that combine memory and logic (memristors). Materials scientists from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, describe in two papers how complex oxides can be used to create very energy-efficient magneto-electric spin-orbit (MESO) devices and memristive devices with reduced dimensions. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-complex-oxides-power-future.html Hardware Tue, 07 Mar 2023 11:06:33 EST news597409589 MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-augmented-reality-headset-enables-users.html Hardware Mon, 27 Feb 2023 13:07:25 EST news596725640 With an eye toward a not-so-distant future where some people spend most or all of their working hours in extended reality, researchers from Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and Meta Reality Labs have found a hands-free way to deliver believable tactile experiences in virtual environments. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-hands-free-tech-realistic-reality.html Hardware Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:42:36 EST news596295749 Imagine using an online banking app to deposit money into your account. Like all information sent over the internet, those communications could be corrupted by noise that inserts errors into the data. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-chip-decoding-transmissions-record-breaking-energy.html Hardware Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:34:16 EST news596295252 In modern electronics, a large amount of heat is produced as waste during usage—this is why devices such as laptops and mobile phones become warm during use, and require cooling solutions. In the last decade, the concept of managing this heat using electricity has been tested, leading to the development of electrochemical thermal transistors—devices that can be used to control heat flow with electrical signals. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-scientists-solid-state-electrochemical-thermal-transistor.html Hardware Tue, 21 Feb 2023 12:33:02 EST news596205181 Amsterdam is one of the most bike-friendly major cities in the world. That also means the city is a happy hunting ground for thieves, who steal tens of thousands of bikes per year—a substantial chunk of the estimated 850,000 or so that Amsterdam residents own. Which raises some questions. Where do all the stolen bikes go? Are they shipped elsewhere and sold? Tossed in canals? Or just reused in the city by other people? https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-stolen-bikes.html Hardware Wed, 15 Feb 2023 14:00:05 EST news595673303 A computing device that uses tiny magnetic swirls to process data has been trained to recognize handwritten numbers. Developed by RIKEN researchers, the device shows that miniature magnetic whirlpools could be useful for realizing low-energy computing systems inspired by the brain. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-brain-inspired-based-skyrmions.html Hardware Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:21:03 EST news595164061 A pair of engineers at Delft University of Technology, working with a colleague at Aix-Marseille University, reports that applying ultrasound to the surface of a glass plate can mimic the feel of pressed button. Laurence Willemet, Michaël Wiertlewski and Jocelyn Monnoyer have published a paper in Journal of The Royal Society Interface describing the device they built to test the idea of using ultrasound as a haptic screen enhancer. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-ultrasound-mimic-button-glass-plate.html Hardware Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:07:24 EST news595076838 A new technological development by Tel Aviv University has made it possible for a robot to smell using a biological sensor. The sensor sends electrical signals as a response to the presence of a nearby odor, which the robot can detect and interpret. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-robot-biological-sensor.html Hardware Tue, 17 Jan 2023 10:05:04 EST news593172302 A Tokyo University of Science research team has developed an AI device with high information processing performance. This was achieved by recreating the so-called "edge-of-chaos" state occurring in the brain using ion–electron-coupled dynamics at the solid electrolyte/diamond interface. This technology may be used to develop energy-efficient edge AI devices with a wide range of applications, including pattern recognition in images (including facial recognition), voices and odors. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-ionic-device-capable-brain-like.html Hardware Thu, 12 Jan 2023 08:43:02 EST news592735381 While artificial intelligence (AI) models are becoming increasingly advanced, training and running these models on conventional computer hardware is very energy consuming. Engineers worldwide have thus been trying to create alternative, brain-inspired hardware that could better support the high computational load of AI systems. https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-deep-belief-neural-network-based.html Hardware Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:30:01 EST news592571449 Enhancing the virtual experience with the touch sensation has become a hot topic, but today's haptic devices remain typically bulky and tangled with wires. A team led by the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) researchers recently developed an advanced wireless haptic interface system, called WeTac, worn on the hand, which has soft, ultrathin soft features, and collects personalized tactile sensation data to provide a vivid touch experience in the metaverse. https://techxplore.com/news/2022-12-wireless-ultrathin-skin-vr-vivid.html Hardware Thu, 15 Dec 2022 11:18:48 EST news590325519 Research led by Monash University, RMIT and the University of Adelaide has developed an accurate method of controlling optical circuits on fingernail-sized photonic integrated circuits. https://techxplore.com/news/2022-12-years-advanced-chip-ultrafast-tech.html Hardware Tue, 13 Dec 2022 12:04:03 EST news590155441