#computer chips

A cross made from computer circuits spotted in the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania. (Kryžių kalnas)

Artist unknown.

thoughts on joke here because I think it is. great

HAHAHAHAHHAHA. I don’t get it.

What’s so funny? It’s just fish and chips.

Jonathan Nicholson at HuffPost:

President Donald Trump said Monday he intended to put tariffs on a wide swath of products and basic materials in American life, a prospect that could lead to prices shooting higher for U.S. consumers. “In particular, in the very near future, we’re going to be placing tariffs on foreign production of computer chips, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, to return production of these essential goods to the United States of America,” Trump said during an appearance before House Republicans holding their annual party retreat in Doral, Florida. “We’re going to look at chips, semiconductors, and we’re going to look at steel and some other industries. You’re going to see things happening.” Trump also listed aluminum and copper as potential tariff targets as “things that we need for our military.” If he follows through, the tariffs could have a big impact on Americans’ costs of living. Trump has often incorrectly said tariffs — charges put on goods imported into the U.S. — are paid by the country the goods originate from. Companies that bring in the goods actually pay the tariffs.

BYTE November 1994

Why is the World So Short of Computer Chips? What Will This Mean Going Forward?

Carmakers from Tokyo to Detroit are slashing production. PlayStations are getting harder to find in stores. Even aluminum producers warn of a potential downturn ahead. All have one thing in common: an abrupt and cascading global shortage of semiconductors. Semiconductors, also known as integrated circuits or more commonly just chips, may be the tiniest yet most exacting product ever manufactured…

Microscopic switches that route light signals between computer chips like tiny traffic conductors could help make faster, more efficient electronics.

Light waves can carry information more easily than the electric current used in traditional circuitry, because particles of light called photons zip through materials without interacting with their surroundings as much as electrons. But so far, mechanical switches designed to manipulate such data-carrying light waves have run relatively slowly and required impractically high electric voltages to work.

Now, newly designed switches redirect light in less than a millionth of a second using just about one volt of electricity — comparable to the voltages used in ordinary electronics, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Science. Electronics outfitted with the new switch design to process data with light rather than electricity could help self-driving cars scan their surroundings for traffic and pedestrians or read out information from quantum computers.

When the gold plate of the switch is curved upward, light flowing along a light-conducting channel called a waveguide (running top right to bottom left) continues uninterrupted (shown). But when a small electric voltage forces the gold plate to bend downward, the switch stops light traveling down the wave guide in its tracks.

CREDIT: S. KELLEY/NIST

Each switch comprises an ultrathin gold disk suspended above a silicon plate. Applying a small voltage across the switch forces the gold disk to bend upward like a bowl, or bow downward like an umbrella. The gold disk’s orientation at any given time controls whether light flowing through a nearby wirelike structure called a waveguide continues uninterrupted or gets rerouted.

As light in the waveguide passes by the switch, some light leaks into a racetrack-shaped gap between the gold disk and the silicon plate, whips around the track and recombines with light in the waveguide. If the gold plate is curved upward, the peaks and valleys of light waves that exit the track align with those in the waveguide — reinforcing the light along its original path.

But if the gold plate is bent down toward the silicon plate, interactions with electrons in the gold delay light as it travels around the racetrack. That causes the valleys of light waves exiting the track to coincide with the peaks of waves flowing through the waveguide, canceling each other out and blocking the flow of light along its original course.

A second waveguide placed on another side of the silicon plate can provide an exit ramp for some light to escape the racetrack and start down a new path. Many interconnected switches choreographing the travel of various light signals between different electronic components could help a computer perform sophisticated operations.

The new switches redirect light waves in tens of nanoseconds, compared with the microseconds-long switching times of similar devices. Such high speeds are possible because the gold plate is more lightweight and easy to manipulate than the bulky components in other switches, says study coauthor Christian Haffner, a nanophotonics researcher at ETH Zurich and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. “It’s like [driving] a sports car compared with a truck.”

Leonardo Midolo, a physicist at the University of Copenhagen not involved in the work, is impressed with the new design, which requires only 1.4 volts of electricity to flip a 10-square-micrometer switch. Other designs would require around 10 volts. “It shows the potential for this particular class of devices” to enter real-world use, he says.