The future of the semiconductor industry, + The Mechanical Universe

 Three items of interest:

• This article is a nice review of present semiconductor memory technology.  The electron micrographs in Fig. 1 and the scaling history in Fig. 3 are impressive.
• This article in IEEE Spectrum is a very interesting look at how some people think we will get to chips for AI applications that contain a trillion (\(10^{12}\)) transistors.  For perspective, the processor in my laptop used to write this has about 40 billion transistors.  (The article is nice, though the first figure commits the terrible sin of having no y-axis number or label; clearly it's supposed to represent exponential growth as a function of time in several different parameters.)
• Caltech announced the passing of David Goodstein, renowned author of States of Matter and several books about the energy transition.  I'd written about my encounter with him, and I wanted to take this opportunity to pass along a working link to the youtube playlist for The Mechanical Universe.  While the animation can look a little dated, it's worth noting that when this was made in the 1980s, the CGI was cutting edge stuff that was presented at siggraph.

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