This fully automated Xiaomi smartphone factory operates with the lights off because no one works on the assembly line, thanks to AI and robotics.
Category: mobile phones
Apple’s Historic Quarter Doesn’t Change the Need for AI Reckoning
Apple’s blockbuster holiday quarter was impressive — but it shouldn’t give cover to avoid an AI reckoning. Also: A new MacBook Pro is planned for the macOS 26.3 release cycle; the company explores a clamshell follow-up to its upcoming foldable phone; and an updated AirTag finally rolls out.
Last week in Power On: Inside Apple’s AI shake-up and its plans for two new versions of Siri powered by Gemini.
Quantis QRNG Chips
Quantum smartphone chip.
IDQ’s QRNG chip is available in six models, depending on size, performance, power consumption and certifications, in order to fit various industry-specific needs. All IDQ QRNG chips have received NIST Entropy Source Validation (ESV) certification on the independently and identically distributed (IID) entropy estimation track SP 800-90B.
ID Quantique is the first company to achieve an ESV certificate with a quantum entropy source and IID estimation track. Such randomness provides the most trusted random keys for encryption. Since October 2022 it has been mandatory for cryptographic modules aiming for FIPS 140–3 certification to have an ESV validated entropy source. This ESV IID Certificate #63 will also facilitate IDQ’s customers who integrate IDQ’s Chips into their own devices to go through the NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP).
Quantum mechanical effects help overcome a fundamental limitation of optical microscopy
Researchers from Regensburg and Birmingham have overcome a fundamental limitation of optical microscopy. With the help of quantum mechanical effects, they succeeded for the first time in performing optical measurements with atomic resolution. Their work is published in the journal Nano Letters.
From smartphone cameras to space telescopes, the desire to see ever finer detail has driven technological progress. Yet as we probe smaller and smaller length scales, we encounter a fundamental boundary set by light itself. Because light behaves as a wave, it cannot be focused arbitrarily sharply due to an effect called diffraction. As a result, conventional optical microscopes are unable to resolve structures much smaller than the wavelength of light, placing the very building blocks of matter beyond direct optical observation.
Now, researchers at the Regensburg Center for Ultrafast Nanoscopy, together with colleagues at the University of Birmingham, have found a novel way to overcome this limitation. Using standard continuous-wave lasers, they have achieved optical measurements at distances comparable to the spacing between individual atoms.
‘Thermal diode’ design promises to improve heat regulation, prolonging battery life
New technology from University of Houston researchers could improve the way devices manage heat, thanks to a technique that allows heat to flow in only one direction. The innovation is known as thermal rectification, and was developed by Bo Zhao, an award-winning and internationally recognized engineering professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, and his doctoral student Sina Jafari Ghalekohneh. The work is published in Physical Review Research.
A new way to steer heat
This new technology gives engineers a new way to control radiative heat with the same precision that electronic diodes control electrical currents, which means longer-lasting batteries for cell phones, electric vehicles and even satellites. It also has the potential to change our approach to AI data centers.
New study unveils ultra-high sensitivity broadband flexible photodetectors
A research team, affiliated with UNIST, has unveiled a flexible photodetector, capable of converting light across a broad spectrum—from visible to near-infrared—into electrical signals. This innovation promises significant advancements in technologies that require simultaneous detection of object colors and internal structures or materials.
Led by Professor Changduk Yang from the Department of Energy & Chemical Engineering, the research team developed perovskite-organic heterojunction photodetectors (POH-PDs) that combine high sensitivity with exceptional accuracy in the near-infrared (NIR) region. The findings have been published in Advanced Functional Materials.
Photodetectors are essential components in numerous applications, including smartphone displays that automatically adjust brightness and security systems that utilize vein recognition.
A groundbreaking new strategy makes cancer cells visible, allowing the immune system to detect and attack them more effectively
The nurse dimmed the lights and checked the drip, a quiet beep keeping time in the corner of the oncology ward. On the bed, a young man in a faded band T‑shirt scrolled his phone, pretending not to notice his mother’s eyes darting between the monitor and the doctor at the door. Cancer, once again, was a ghost in the room – everywhere and nowhere, invisible yet controlling every breath.
The doctor took a breath of his own before speaking. This time, he said, they had something different. Not a bigger hammer. A smarter trick.
A way to make the ghost show its face.
$99,000 smart observatory captures the cosmos with Canon optics
One would think that a US$99,000 telescope requires specialist training and a thick instruction manual. But the new Hyperia from French company Vaonis flips that assumption on its head. It’s powerful enough for professional observatories yet runs entirely from a simple smartphone app.
Vaonis has been bringing astrophotography to the masses for years now. The company has stripped away the complexity, allowing anyone to snap spectacular images of galaxies and nebulae hundreds of light-years away without wrestling with multi-component setups requiring serious technical chops – all wrapped in Vaonis’s trademark minimalist design.
The Hyperia started as a custom build for the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, which needed a next-gen digital observatory. After wrapping up the installation, Vaonis saw the bigger picture and decided to sell the system commercially.
Software allows scientists to simulate nanodevices on a supercomputer
From computers to smartphones, from smart appliances to the internet itself, the technology we use every day only exists thanks to decades of improvements in the semiconductor industry, that have allowed engineers to keep miniaturizing transistors and fitting more and more of them onto integrated circuits, or microchips. It’s the famous Moore’s scaling law, the observation—rather than an actual law—that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit tends to double roughly every two years.
The current growth of artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud computing calls for more powerful chips made with even smaller transistors, which at this point means creating components that are only a few nanometers (or millionths of millimeters) in size. At that scale, classical physics is no longer enough to predict how the device will function, because, among other effects, electrons get so close to each other that quantum interactions between them can hugely affect the performance of the device.