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takyon writes:

China Develops High Capacity QLC 3D NAND: YMTC at 1.33 Tb

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) has announced that it's developed its new 128-layer 1.33 Tb QLC 3D NAND memory chip, the X2-6070. The new chip is based on its Xtacking architecture which enables it to run with super high I/O while maximising the density of its memory arrays. YMTC has also unveiled its plan for a 128-layer 512 Gb TLC chip, the X2-9060, designed to meet more diverse application requirements.

[...] The QLC based X2-6070 has 128-layers and more than 366 billion effective charge-trap memory cells. Each memory cell has 4-bit of data, which equates to 1.33 Tb of storage capacity. Everything is proportionate to cost, and it seems like YMTC, which is newer than most to 3D NAND stacking, could again improve its Xtacking architecture in the future.

Xtacking is not a typo.

Related:
Western Digital Samples 96-Layer 3D QLC NAND with 1.33 Tb Per Die
'Unstoppable' Chinese NAND fabber YMTC to unleash 64-layer flash flood before skipping ahead to 128 – analyst
SK Hynix Finishes 128-Layer 3D NAND, Plans 176-Layer 3D NAND
Report: China-Based Yangtze Memory Starts 64-Layer NAND Production
YMTC Starts Volume Production of 64-Layer 3D NAND

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Report: TSMC CoWoS Production Line at Full Capacity as Demand Increases

Despite the downturn of events around the world, TSMC is witnessing a significant increase in demand for its Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging, according to DigiTimes' unnamed industry sources. The Taiwanese silicon manufacturer is purportedly running its CoWoS production lines at full capacity.

CoWoS as is a 2.5D method of packaging multiple individual dies side-by-side on a single silicon interposer. The benefits are the ability to increase the density in small devices as you run into the limits of how big individual dies can be produced, better interconnectivity between dies and lower power consumption.

According to DigiTimes, AMD, Nvidia, HiSilicon, Xilinx and Broadcom have placed orders for the tech, with demand for high-performance computing chips, high bandwidth memory (HBM)-powered AI accelerators and ASICs during the past two weeks.

Examples of CoWoS packaged silicon are [...] AMD's Vega VII graphics cards, as well as Nvidia's V100 cards, which have HBM on the same silicon interposer where the GPU is. With the GPU and memory so close together, memory bandwidth is significantly higher on these chips compared to those using GDDR6 memory located elsewhere on the graphics card's PCB. Additionally, the PCB becomes much smaller.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: TSMC Shows Off Gigantic Silicon Interposer
TSMC's Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) Connects Multiple Interposers

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Light sources and detectors are key components of countless technological devices on the market today. For instance, light emitting diodes (LEDs) are often used as a source of light in displays and other technologies, while photodiodes are used to detect light in sensors, imaging and fiber optic communication tools.

[...] Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden, Shenzhen University and several other universities in China have recently fabricated an efficient diode capable of both emitting and detecting light. This new device, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was built using a solution-processed perovskite material.

[...] The perovskite material that Gao, Bao and their colleagues used to build their diode has several unique photoelectrical properties. In addition to a high photoluminescence quantum efficiency (PLQE), which is ideal for the development of high-performance LEDs, the material has a high absorption coefficient, enabling photodetection.

The material also exhibits a high carrier mobility and can thus be used to fabricate films of a variety of thicknesses. Finally, the researchers observed a large overlap between the perovskite's absorption and photoluminescence spectra. This means that the material can also absorb the light emitted by itself.

Combined, all of these properties enable the creation of highly performing LEDs and photodetectors, based on the same planar junction structure. In other words, these properties are what ultimately allowed Gao, Bao and their colleagues to create a single device that can both emit and detect light.

[...] "We now plan to further improve the device's response speed and operation lifetime and study the detection performance of visible light perovskite LED to extend the application to visible light range," Bao said.

Wikipedia's entry for Perovskite.

More information: Chunxiong Bao et al. Bidirectional optical signal transmission between two identical devices using perovskite diodes, Nature Electronics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-020-0382-3

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Ross Anderson, a researcher at the Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, has written about contact tracing in the real world enumerating in detail some of the many shortcomings with and false assumptions about contact tracing as means of fighting a pandemic.

There are also real systems being built by governments. Singapore has already deployed and open-sourced one that uses contact tracing based on bluetooth beacons. Most of the academic and tech industry proposals follow this strategy, as the “obvious” way to tell who’s been within a few metres of you and for how long. The UK’s National Health Service is working on one too, and I’m one of a group of people being consulted on the privacy and security.

But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.

First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.

He is not alone in pointing out that claims of being able to anonymize personal data have largely been proven to be bunk. The rules we set in place now will be with us for a long time and have far-reaching effects. The need to be given an appropriate level of consideration.

Security researcher Bruce Schneier posted his concerns on the same contract tracing story.

Previously:
(2020-04-11) Apple and Google are Launching a Joint COVID-19 Tracing Tool for IOS and Android
(2020-04-08) Senators Raise Privacy Questions About Google's COVID-19 Tracker
(2014-10-16) How Nigeria Stopped Ebola

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The head of Russia's space agency on Saturday accused Elon Musk's SpaceX of predatory pricing for space launches, which is pushing Russia to cut its own prices. "Instead of honest competition on the market for space launches, they are lobbying for sanctions against us and use price dumping with impunity," Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.

Rogozin, who is often outspoken on Twitter and previously engaged in online banter with Elon Musk, on Friday raised the issue during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

He said the Roscosmos space agency "is working to lower prices by more than 30 percent on launch services to increase our share on the international markets." "This is our answer to dumping by American companies financed by the US budget," he said. The market price of a SpaceX launch is $60 million, but NASA pays up to four times that amount, he said.

Musk responded to the criticism Saturday by saying on Twitter: "SpaceX rockets are 80% reusable, theirs are 0%. This is the actual problem."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Firefox 75.0 has been released. From the Release Notes:

With today's release, a number of improvements will help you search smarter, faster. Type less and find more with Firefox's revamped address bar:

• Focused, clean search experience that's optimized for smaller laptop screens
• Top sites now appear when you select the address
• Improved readability of search suggestions with a focus on new search terms
• Suggestions include solutions to common Firefox issues
• On Linux, the behavior when clicking on the Address Bar and the Search Bar now matches other desktop platforms: a single click selects all without primary selection, a double click selects a word, and a triple click selects all with primary selection

Security Fixes:

[...] #CVE-2020-6821: Uninitialized memory could be read when using the WebGL copyTexSubImage method
[...] When reading from areas partially or fully outside the source resource with WebGL's copyTexSubImage method, the specification requires the returned values be zero. Previously, this memory was uninitialized, leading to potentially sensitive data disclosure.

[...] CVE-2020-6822: Out of bounds write in GMPDecodeData when processing large images
[...] On 32-bit builds, an out of bounds write could have occurred when processing an image larger than 4 GB in GMPDecodeData. It is possible that with enough effort this could have been exploited to run arbitrary code.

[...] CVE-2020-6823: Malicious Extension could obtain auth codes from OAuth login flows
[...] A malicious extension could have called browser.identity.launchWebAuthFlow, controlling the redirect_uri, and through the Promise returned, obtain the Auth code and gain access to the user's account at the service provider.

[...] CVE-2020-6824: Generated passwords may be identical on the same site between separate private browsing sessions
[...] Initially, a user opens a Private Browsing Window and generates a password for a site, then closes the Private Browsing Window but leaves Firefox open. Subsequently, if the user had opened a new Private Browsing Window, revisited the same site, and generated a new password - the generated passwords would have been identical, rather than independent.

[...] CVE-2020-6825: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 75 and Firefox ESR 68.7
[...] Mozilla developers and community members Tyson Smith and Christian Holler reported memory safety bugs present in Firefox 74 and Firefox ESR 68.6. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code.

[...] CVE-2020-6826: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 75
[...] Mozilla developers Tyson Smith, Bob Clary, and Alexandru Michis reported memory safety bugs present in Firefox 74. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

90 years ago, the physicist Hans Bethe postulated that unusual patterns, so-called Bethe strings, appear in certain magnetic solids. Now an international team has succeeded in experimentally detecting such Bethe strings for the first time. They used neutron scattering experiments at various neutron facilities including the unique high-field magnet of BER II* at HZB. The experimental data are in excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction of Bethe and prove once again the power of quantum physics.

The regular arrangement of atoms in a crystal allows complex interactions that can lead to new states of matter. Some crystals have magnetic interactions in only one dimension, i.e. are they magnetically one-dimensional. If, in addition, successive magnetic moments are pointing in opposite directions , then we are dealing with a one-dimensional antiferromagnet. Hans Bethe first described this system theoretically in 1931, predicting also the presence of excitations of strings of two or more consecutive moments pointing in one direction, so called Bethe strings.

-- submitted from IRC

Journal Reference
Anup Kumar Bera, Jianda Wu, Wang Yang et al. Dispersions of many-body Bethe strings, Nature Physics (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41567-020-0835-7)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Company prioritizes $15k ventilators over cheaper model specified in contract:

The Dutch company that received millions of taxpayer dollars to develop an affordable ventilator for pandemics but never delivered them has struck a much more lucrative deal with the federal government to make 43,000 ventilators at four times the price.

The US Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday that it plans to pay Royal Philips N.V. $646.7 million for the new ventilators—paying more than $15,000 each. The first 2,500 units are to arrive before the end of May, HHS said, and the rest by the end of December.

Philips refused to say which model of ventilator the government was buying. But in response to questions from ProPublica, HHS officials said the government is purchasing the Trilogy EV300, the more expensive version of the ventilator that was developed with federal funds.

The deal is a striking departure from the federal contract Philips' Respironics division signed in September to produce 10,000 ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.

"This kind of profiteering—paying four times the negotiated price—is not only irresponsible to taxpayers but is particularly offensive when so many people are out of work," said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response during the Obama administration. "And besides, most of these ventilators will come too late to make a difference in this pandemic. We'll then 'replenish' the stockpile at a ridiculously high price."

"What else," she asked, "won't we be able to buy as a result?"

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

What Do the New Remdesivir Data Mean?:

A report has come out in the NEJM on the experience with "compassionate use" (off-label or not yet approved) of the Gilead drug remdesivir in the Covid-19 epidemic. Here are the inclusion criteria:

Patients were those with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection who had an oxygen saturation of 94% or less while they were breathing ambient air or who were receiving oxygen support. Patients received a 10-day course of remdesivir, consisting of 200 mg administered intravenously on day 1, followed by 100 mg daily for the remaining 9 days of treatment. This report is based on data from patients who received remdesivir during the period from January 25, 2020, through March 7, 2020, and have clinical data for at least 1 subsequent day.

Presented are data from 53 patients in the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. They were in bad shape – 30 of them were on ventilators and 4 were receiving ECMO treatment (blood oxygenation outside the lungs). At the time of the manuscript's preparation, 25 patients had been discharged from the hospital, and 7 had died (6 of whom had been on ventilation). Overall, clinical improvement was seen in 36 of the 53 patients.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Zoom admits data got routed through China - Business Insider:

In a statement late Friday, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan admitted to mistakenly routing calls via China.

"In our urgency to come to the aid of people around the world during this unprecedented pandemic, we added server capacity and deployed it quickly — starting in China, where the outbreak began," Yuan said. "In that process, we failed to fully implement our usual geo-fencing best practices. As a result, it is possible certain meetings were allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect."

He did not say how many users were affected.

During spells of heavy traffic, the video-conferencing service shifts traffic to the nearest data center with the largest available capacity – but Zoom's data centers in China aren't supposed to be used to reroute non-Chinese users' calls.

This is largely due to privacy concerns: China does not enforce strict data privacy laws and could conceivably demand that Zoom decrypt the contents of encrypted calls.

Separately, researchers at the University of Toronto also found  Zoom's encryption used keys issued via servers in China, even when call participants were outside of China.

[...] Zoom has faced multiple high-profile security issues in recent weeks as it struggles to cope with an unprecedented surge in traffic and new users.

Zoom did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment and clarification.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Looking out at a city with no cars and realizing they were unable to help out directly with the pandemic, some artists at a Detroit advertising agency found another way to help,

Originally found here, http://www.autoextremist.com/on-the-table1/2020/4/6/april-8-2020.html:

[Ed note: It is a long article and, sadly, there are no anchors to permit a direct link to the quoted text. Scroll down to about the mid-point to find it. Also, emphasis from the original article is retained here. --martyb]

Editor's Note: Kudos to metro Detroit-based ad agency Doner for their new ad, ""When the Motor Stops," promoting the resilience and determination of the Motor City as it fights the COVID-19 pandemic. As reported by Julie Hinds in the Detroit Free Press, "the idea came from a young brand strategist, Alex DeMuth, (who said) 'Our agency can't make ventilators or masks, but we can make content.'" The filming was done last Friday by one employee, who built a camera rig to fit on his car and drove through the city's deserted streets. He then edited it from home, while a copywriter recorded the narration from her closet. It is truly a great - and powerful - ad. -WG

The video, "When the Motor Stops", is available on you tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZG3-9IPJLs

Oh, and if you are too young to get the punch line, have a listen to some real classic Motown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JiS02O4fEk

Also at the ad agency's web site and Agency Spy.

Cue the car analogies!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Glowing silicon nanowire reveals how to put optics in your CPU:

The key term in integrated circuits is integrated. The ability of fabrication facilities to integrate things sets limits on what processes are available, and what materials can be safely used. As soon as you suggest a different material or process, the whole chain is broken, and anybody suggesting it should expect people questioning your suitability for your current position. "Compatibility" is why you will not find laser-powered integrated circuits in your laptop.

The ability to make lasers using integrated-circuit-compatible materials, however, may have gotten a boost, with a demonstration of glowing (but not yet lasing) silicon.

Optics and lasers are the backbone of high speed data transmission. You do not use copper wires to transport data at 1Tb/s. Instead you will use glass and some finely tuned and very expensive laser diodes. But laser diodes are made using processes and materials that are not compatible with those used to make integrated circuits. So, while it is possible to create, say, an optical interconnect between a RAM module and a CPU, you have to somehow glue the optics to the silicon chip in exactly the right location. Research labs are happy to sacrifice PhD students to such ventures, but PhD-bots don't scale well, are high maintenance, and their deployment leads to dark looks.

A better solution would be to get silicon to emit light, but it really doesn't like doing that. The reason is not that complicated, but does take a few words to explain.

[...] To get silicon glowing, the researchers turned to alloys. A cool thing about semiconductors is that their optical and electronic properties tend to smoothly change when you alloy them. If you add germanium to silicon, the resulting alloy will start showing some of the characteristics of germanium. However, while some properties can be adjusted continuously, others cannot. A band-gap is either direct or indirect, not a mixture. So, how much germanium does it take to make silicon glow?

The answer turns out to be about 65 percent.

Journal Reference:
Elham M. T. Fadaly, Alain Dijkstra, Jens Renè Suckert et al. Direct-bandgap emission from hexagonal Ge and SiGe alloys, Nature (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2150-y)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

The Latest Hydroxychloroquine Data, As of April 11:

We have new data on hydroxychloroquine therapy to discuss. The numbers will not clear anything up.

The good news is that the HCQ/sulfasalazine comparison does not show any real differences in adverse events over one-month courses of treatment. I should note that sulfasalazine is not the most side-effect-free medication in the whole pharmacopeia, but it has not been associated with (for example) QT prolongation, which is one of the things you worry about with hydroxychloroquine. The paper concludes that short-term HCQ monotherapy does appear to be safe, but notes that long-term HCQ dosing is indeed tied to increased cardiovascular mortality.

The trouble comes in with the azithromycin combination. Like many antibiotics (although not amoxicillin), AZM is in fact tied to QT prolongation in some patients, so what happens when it's given along with HCQ, which has the same problem?

Worryingly, significant risks are identified for combination users of HCQ+AZM even in the short-term as proposed for COVID19 management, with a 15-20% increased risk of angina/chest pain and heart failure, and a two-fold risk of cardiovascular mortality in the first month of treatment.

That isn't good. I am very glad to hear that the Raoult group has observed no cardiac events in their studies so far, but I wonder how they have managed to be so fortunate, given these numbers.

Update: here is another new preprint from a multinational team lead out of Brazil. It enrolled 81 patients in a trial of high-dose hydroxychloroquine  (600 mg b.i.d. over ten days, total dose 12g) or low-dose (450mg b.i.d. on the first day, qd thereafter for the next four, total dose 2.7g). All patients also received azithromycin and ceftriaxone (a cephalosporin antibiotic). The high-dose patients showed more severe QT prolongation and there a trend toward higher lethality compared to the low dose. The overall fatality rate across both arms of the study was 13.5% (so far), which they say overlaps with the historical fatality rate of patients not receiving hydroxychloroquine. The authors actually had to stop recruiting patients for the high-dose arm of the study due to the cardiovascular events, but they're continuing to enroll people in the low-dose group to look at overall mortality. The paper mentions that HCQ has been mandated as the standard therapy in Brazil, so there is no way to run a non-HCQ control group, though.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

The chemistry of cold-brew coffee is so hot right now:

Cold-brew coffee is so hot right now, and not just with hipster consumers. Scientists at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia have been taking a deeper look at the underlying chemistry to better understand how the cold-brew method alters coffee's chemical characteristics, with an eye toward pinpointing the best way to cold brew the perfect cup. They had originally planned to present their results last month at the American Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut that down. So instead, they presented the information in a virtual poster session.

[...] "It turned out that there is a lot of research on coffee but not much research on cold-brew coffee," said Rao. That's partly because the biggest coffee-brewing countries (Italy, Turkey, Brazil, Colombia, for example) are all devoted to hot-brew coffee, like espresso. The cold-brew trend is mostly centered in North America.

"There are a lot of studies on espresso," said Rao. "We thought it would be a good idea to put some information out there for consumers and enthusiasts like me who want to make their own cold-brew coffee."

In one paper, published in 2018, Rao and Fuller measured levels of acidity and antioxidants in batches of cold- and hot-brew coffee. But those experiments only used lightly roasted coffee beans. The degree of roasting (temperature) makes a significant difference when it comes to hot-brew coffee. Might the same be true for cold-brew coffee? To find out, the pair teamed up with one of their undergraduate students, Meghan Grim, to explore the extraction yields of light-, medium-, and dark-roast coffee beans during the cold-brew process.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

China's devious move under cover of virus

As outbreaks debilitate the US navy, there are fears China may be using the coronavirus pandemic as cover for asserting control over the South China Sea.

A Vietnamese fishing boat has been rammed and sunk. Military aircraft have landed at its artificial-island fortresses. And large-scale naval exercises has let everyone know China's navy is still pushing the boundaries, hard.

Meanwhile, the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier strike group has retreated from the contested waterway in an unscheduled return to Guam – with hundreds of cases of COVID-19 on board.

China's Peoples Liberation Army knows this presents an opportunity.

"The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly lowered the US Navy's warship deployment capability in the Asia-Pacific region," an article on its official website declares.

The website insists not a single one of its soldiers, sailors or pilots had contracted COVID-19. Instead, the crisis had served to strengthen the combat readiness and resolve of the Chinese military.

That has international affairs analysts worried that even a short-term withdrawal of US and international from the East and South China Seas could give Beijing the opportunity it has been waiting for.

"I think China is exploiting the US Navy's coronavirus challenges to improve its position in the South China Sea by giving the appearance it can and will operate there at will while the US is hamstrung," former Pacific Command Joint Intelligence Centre director Carl Schuster told CNN.

Previously:
(2020-01-09) China Initiates Conflict with Indonesia in the South China Sea
(2019-12-21) Malaysian Top Envoy: China's 'Nine-Dash Line' Claim 'Ridiculous'
(2019-11-22) US Warships Sail in Disputed South China Sea Amid Tensions
(2019-05-14) China Builds New Type 002 Mega Carrier as the Age of Sea Power Wanes
(2018-05-13) China Begins Sea Trials for its First Domestically Developed Aircraft Carrier
(2017-12-24) World's Largest Amphibious Plane in Production Takes Flight in China
(2017-05-25) US Warship Challenges China's Claims in South China Sea
(2017-04-26) China Launches Aircraft Carrier
(2017-03-14) Japan to Send its Biggest Warship to the South China Sea
(2017-01-13) Chinese State Media Boasts About its New Electronic Reconnaissance Ship
(2016-07-14) China's South China Sea Claims Rejected By "Binding" but Unenforceable Tribunal Ruling

Original Submission