Month: September 2020

On February 7 this year, President Donald Trump admitted in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward that the coronavirus was far more deadly than the flu even as Trump continued misleading the public about the pandemic's severity. In another interview on March 19, Trump told Woodward that he was intentionally downplaying the virus's severity. "I wanted to always play it down," Trump said.

Woodward's new book, Rage, is scheduled for release next week, but excerpts of the book along with recordings of Trump's interviews with Woodward became public today. This CNN article contains several audio clips from the interviews.

The audio excerpts came from 18 interviews between December 5, 2019, and July 21, 2020, that "were recorded by Woodward with Trump's permission," CNN wrote. In the February 7 interview, Trump noted that the flu kills 25,000 or 30,000 people a year in the United States. "This is more deadly," Trump then told Woodward, referring to the coronavirus. (So far, about 190,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Tighter US restrictions against Huawei are going into effect September 15, and companies around the world are being forced to pick a side. We've already seen the world's largest foundry, TSMC, say it will no longer do business with Huawei, even though Huawei was crowned the world's largest smartphone manufacturer last quarter. The next companies to drop out are Samsung, LG, and SK Hynix, according to a pair of reports from Korean site Chosun Ilbo.

First up, Chosun Ilbo reports that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have both said they will stop selling chips to Huawei. Samsung is the world's No.1 memory maker, and SK Hynix is No.2, so Huawei will have to source NAND flash and DRAM memory from somewhere else. The No.3 memory manufacturer is American company Micron, which has already shunned Huawei. In the RAM market, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the "big three" manufacturers and combined have around 94-percent market share. All three are also major players in the NAND flash-memory market, which, according to Statista, goes Samsung (35.5 percent), Kioxia (18.7 percent, formerly Toshiba Memory), Western Digital (14.7 percent), Micron (11.3 percent), Intel (9.7 percent), and SK Hynix (9.6 percent). Those manufacturers, covering 99.5 percent of the market, all reside in the United States, Japan, or South Korea, so no one seems likely to sell to Huawei. Things are looking grim.

Chosun Ilbo says that Huawei is the world's third-largest purchaser of semiconductors, and the company accounts for 6 percent of Samsung Electronics semiconductor sales and 15 percent of sales for SK Hynix. Huawei has known this ban has been coming for a long time, though, and the report says the company has "a two-year inventory."

Enlarge / A volunteer receives an injection of AZD1222 from a medical worker during the country's first human clinical trial for a potential vaccine against COVID-19 at the Baragwanath Hospital on June 28, 2020 in Soweto, South Africa. It is reported that Africa's first COVID-19 vaccine trial began on June 24 in South Africa. (credit: Getty | Felix Dlangamandla)

With the coronavirus crisis gripping the globe, all eyes are on every bump and dip on the path to the pandemic’s end. So, of course, news that researchers triggered a common pause to the clinical trials of a leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate made swift and alarming headlines late Tuesday.

The global, phase II trials for the vaccine AZD1222 (formerly ChAdOx1)—developed by the University of Oxford and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca—were put on a “temporary” and “voluntary” pause for a “standard review process,” AstraZeneca said in a statement Wednesday.

According the company, the pause was triggered by a “potentially unexplained illness” in one of thousands of participants involved in its trials. Per standard protocol, researchers must pause the trial to investigate whether the illness is related to exposure to the experimental vaccine or not.

Enlarge / A hierarchy of channels keeps coolant flowing without requiring high pressures.

As desktop processors were first crossing the Gigahertz level, it seemed for a while that there was nowhere to go but up. But clock speed progress eventually ground to a halt, not because of anything to do with the speed itself but rather because of the power requirements and the heat all that power generated. Even with the now-common fans and massive heatsinks, along with some sporadic water cooling, heat remains a limiting factor that often throttles current processors.

Part of the problem with liquid cooling solutions is that they're limited by having to get the heat out of the chip and into the water in the first place. That has led some researchers to consider running the liquid through the chip itself. Now, some researchers from Switzerland have designed the chip and cooling system as a single unit, with on-chip liquid channels placed next to the hottest parts of the chip. The results are an impressive boost in heat-limited performance.

Feeling the heat

Part of our issue with getting heat out of a chip is that it usually involves multiple connections: from the chip to the chip packaging and the chip packaging to a heat sink. While steps can be made to improve these connections, there's an inefficiency to them, which adds up to limit the heat we can extract from the chip. This is true for the liquid cooling systems in current use, which use the liquid to replace the metal heat sink. While it might be possible to place the chip directly into a heat-conductive liquid, that liquid has to be an insulator and not undergo any chemical reactions with electronics components—both hurdles that water fails to clear.