• porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    i remember there was a diode and transistor that were literally completely seperated from the traces of the rest of the chip, and yet they were functional pieces and the chip wouldnt work if you removed them.

    If that was true they would be getting the Nobel in physics for discovering some incredible new quantum phenomenal, it would be front-page news everywhere. I highly doubt it’s true.

    Frustratingly, that article you linked doesn’t actually link to the paper. But it is in Nature Communications. That’s a respectable journal but not that prestigious, and it publishes a lot of over hyped stuff. Not that any journal doesn’t. But if they had really found new physics with AI chip design that would go to Science, Nature, or maybe PRL.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      Confidently incorrect about how fragile some circuits can be. Simple functionality is a convenient illusion we’ve beaten into various squiggles of metal. Electricity is secretly also a radio and a magnet, and even in wires it can’t know there’s nothing at the end until it gets there. Sometimes things just happen.

      • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
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        9 hours ago

        They’re fabricating micrometer components with a 90 nm process. That’s pretty well in the classical regime. If they’re seeing substantial tunneling at that scale it would be rather noteworthy to say the least.

          • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
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            8 hours ago

            A single diode a micrometer away from anything else is not suddenly a transformer without which a 400 um2 antenna stops working.