When NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists’ first close glimpse of this ice-giant planet.

The post Voyager 2’s Flyby of Uranus in 1986 was During Anomalous Solar Event, New Study Suggests appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

The standard model predicted that the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies.

The post New Research Questions Standard Theory of How Galaxies Formed in Early Universe appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

When the fever, pains and pus-filled lesions of an mpox infection strike, how dangerous is it and how can it be treated?

Stem cells made in the lab may one day aid cancer treatment by reducing our reliance on donors

Loneliness was long thought to cause health conditions ranging from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, but new research paints a more nuanced picture

Dopamine was long thought to play a part in the placebo effect for pain relief, but a new study is questioning its true role

A flurry of studies has found microplastics in nearly every organ in the human body, from the brain to the testicles. But very few have revealed whether these tiny bits of plastic impact our health

The compound creatine, a popular exercise supplement that only occurs naturally in animal products, could one day be produced in edible plants

A monkey that performed poorly on vision tests did much better after having a stem cell transplant to patch up holes in its retina

Two more people in the US have tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus, highlighting the need for expanded influenza surveillance to prevent a potential pandemic

A vaccination campaign targeting ducks, the farm birds most at risk of getting and spreading bird flu, succeeded in greatly reducing outbreaks of the virus on poultry farms in France

Filters on commercial flights seem to stop peanut particles from circulating around aircraft, making the risk of a serious allergic reaction from inhaling the allergens very low

Recent research shows that anti-inflammatory diets are not as faddish as they might sound, with the power to reduce the risk of heart attacks and some cancers

Diets that claim to control excess oestrogen or stress hormones are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. They could be good for us, just not for the reasons claimed

A massive undertaking to map cancer tumours is providing new insights into how the disease forms, evolves and develops resistance to treatments

From the benefits of fermented foods to diets that promise a better hormone balance, there is a confusing array of dietary advice out there

The Renaissance artist Michelangelo had carried out human dissections, which may have led him to include women with breast cancer in some of his pieces

The British Heart Foundation’s Reflections of Research competition showcases beautiful images captured by researchers studying heart and circulatory disease

Speculation has already run rampant on who Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will appoint to replace Sen. Marco Rubio if Rubio becomes President-elect Trump's secretary of state.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched a "Nominees for the People" forum to crowdsource 4,000 positions in the Trump administration to Make America Healthy Again.

Despite his own isolationist musings, the first picks of President-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration hail from a decidedly more traditionalist wing of the Republican Party.

Trump would face little to no resistance in confirming his picks for Supreme Court justices in the majority-GOP Congress, but Alito has no plans to step down.

Social media commentators claimed Jill Biden refused to look at Vice President Harris as they were seated together at Arlington Cemetery for a Veterans' Day Remembrance.

Various Cook Children’s locations are experiencing a spike in cases of salmonella, but the Texas Department of State Health Services has not reported an outbreak.     Since July, the Emergency Department at Cook Children’s Medical Center – Fort Worth has also reported increased numbers of patients with salmonella.   “In... Continue Reading

An in-depth analysis in the United States, covering 2002 to 2023, reveals that biological contamination and allergens are the leading causes of food recalls. The study, recently published in the Journal of Food Protection, examined more than 35,000 food and beverage recalls overseen by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration... Continue Reading

Israel has proposed a revised system of food business licensing to ease the regulatory burden on industry and improve sanitary conditions. The Ministry of Health said the current regulation, regarding business licensing in general and food businesses in particular, is outdated and places a heavy regulatory burden on companies. This... Continue Reading

The Food and Drug Administration uses import alerts to enforce U.S. food safety regulations for food from foreign countries. The agency updates and modifies the alerts as needed. Recent modifications to FDA’s import alerts, as posted by the agency, are listed below. Use the chart below to view import alerts.... Continue Reading

Australians have been urged to look before they cook and read the safety advice on food labels. The Food Safety Information Council (FSIC) issued the call ahead of Australian Food Safety week from Nov. 9 to 16. Lydia Buchtmann, FSIC CEO, said the charity’s research shows that only 3 in... Continue Reading

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have uncovered critical links between socioeconomic factors — such as income, education level, and poverty — and an increased risk of Salmonella infections linked to ground beef consumption.  In a study published in the Journal of Food Protection, CDC researchers reported... Continue Reading

An investigation into a Salmonella outbreak in Sweden has been restarted after more people fell sick. From August to October, 81 people from 18 regions contracted Salmonella Typhimurium with sequence type (ST) 36. Where information about the country of infection is available, all cases were infected in Sweden. Folkhälsomyndigheten (the Public... Continue Reading

Scientists have shared details of how they are going about updating foodborne infection figures that will be published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2025. As part of the process to update estimates on the burden of foodborne diseases published in 2015, WHO is conducting a global source attribution... Continue Reading

Montana public health officials are investigating an outbreak of infections caused by Salmonella. The Cascade City-County Health Department in Great Falls is reporting that six students at Sacajawea and Valley View elementary schools have tested positive for the pathogen. A staff member at another school has also tested positive. There... Continue Reading

A multi-country Salmonella outbreak in Europe linked to tomatoes from Italy has sickened more than 250 people. From January 2023 to November 2024, 266 confirmed cases of Salmonella Strathcona have been identified in 16 European countries and the United Kingdom. Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the... Continue Reading

Atlantic Canadians say the region has room to grow, but is facing a shrinking labour pool

Dispute risks damage to Canada's reputation as reliable trade partner, says Steven Mackinnon

Canada Post workers might soon be putting down their mailbags and grabbing picket signs

Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban returned to the Bluesky social media platform with a post after weeks of contentious X posts.

Just like Eli Manning in 2004, Deion Sanders said he would tell NFL teams his son, Shedeur Sanders, won't play for them if it's not the right fit.

Georgia's loss to Ole Miss Saturday brought a wild shakeup to the college football rankings, and the Bulldogs find themselves out of the playoff picture.

Authorities arrested a man accused of strangling a woman outside a Times Square hotel who later died from her injuries, police said Tuesday.

President-elect Trump announced on Tuesday that Kristi Noem is his pick for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Incumbent Republican David Valadao is projected to emerge victorious in California's 22nd Congressional District. The highly contested race was considered to be a tossup.

Senator-elect Jim Justice's office has clarified reports that his famous pooch Babydog was banned from the Senate floor, saying Justice never intended to bring the dog onto the floor.

In the first quarter of Monday's Dolphins-Rams game, ESPN reported that Tyreek Hill said a torn ligament in his wrist became worst after he was detained by police.

The New Zealand Commerce Commission has outlined its key areas of interest in relation to the proposed Fairfax-APN deal.

In this upcoming webinar, explore how to leverage the state-of-the-art high-frequency simulation capabilities of Ansys HFSS to innovate and develop advanced multiband antenna systems.

Overview

This webinar will explore how to leverage the state-of-the-art high-frequency simulation capabilities of Ansys HFSS to innovate and develop advanced multiband antenna systems. Attendees will learn how to optimize antenna performance and analyze installed performance within wireless networks. The session will also demonstrate how this approach enables users to extract valuable wireless and network KPIs, providing a comprehensive toolset for enhancing antenna design, optimizing multiband communication, and improving overall network performance. Join us to discover how Ansys HFSS can transform wireless system design and network efficiency approach.

What Attendees will Learn

• How to design interleaved multiband antenna systems using the latest capabilities in HFSS
• How to extract Network Key Performance Indicators
• How to run and extract RF Channels for the dynamic environment

Who Should Attend

This webinar is valuable to anyone involved in antenna, R&D, product design, and wireless networks.

Register now for this free webinar!

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

We’re hoping to get more on this from Boston Dynamics, but if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s electric Atlas doing something productive (and autonomous!).

And why not do it in a hot dog costume for Halloween, too?

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Ooh, this is exciting! Aldebaran is getting ready to release a seventh generation of NAO!

[ Aldebaran ]

Okay I found this actually somewhat scary, but Happy Halloween from ANYbotics!

[ ANYbotics ]

Happy Halloween from the Clearpath!

[ Clearpath Robotics Inc. ]

Another genuinely freaky Happy Halloween, from Boston Dynamics!

[ Boston Dynamics ]

This “urban opera” by Compagnie La Machine took place last weekend in Toulouse, featuring some truly enormous fantastical robots.

[ Compagnie La Machine ]

Thanks, Thomas!

Impressive dismount from Deep Robotics’ DR01.

[ Deep Robotics ]

Cobot juggling from Daniel Simu.

[ Daniel Simu ]

Adaptive-morphology multirotors exhibit superior versatility and task-specific performance compared to traditional multirotors owing to their functional morphological adaptability. However, a notable challenge lies in the contrasting requirements of locking each morphology for flight controllability and efficiency while permitting low-energy reconfiguration. A novel design approach is proposed for reconfigurable multirotors utilizing soft multistable composite laminate airframes.

[ Environmental Robotics Lab paper ]

This is a pitching demonstration of new Torobo. New Torobo is lighter than the older version, enabling faster motion such as throwing a ball. The new model will be available in Japan in March 2025 and overseas from October 2025 onward.

[ Tokyo Robotics ]

I’m not sure what makes this “the world’s best robotic hand for manipulation research,” but it seems solid enough.

[ Robot Era ]

And now, picking a micro cat.

[ RoCogMan Lab ]

When Arvato’s Louisville, Ky. staff wanted a robotics system that could unload freight with greater speed and safety, Boston Dynamics’ Stretch robot stood out. Stretch is a first of its kind mobile robot designed specifically to unload boxes from trailers and shipping containers, freeing up employees to focus on more meaningful tasks in the warehouse. Arvato acquired its first Stretch system this year and the robot’s impact was immediate.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera to capture the silhouette of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, as it passed in front of the Sun on Sept. 30, 2024, the 1,285th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

[ NASA ]

Students from Howard University, Moorehouse College, and Berea College joined University of Michigan robotics students in online Robotics 102 courses for the fall ‘23 and winter ‘24 semesters. The class is part of the distributed teaching collaborative, a co-teaching initiative started in 2020 aimed at providing cutting edge robotics courses for students who would normally not have access to at their current university.

[ University of Michigan Robotics ]

Discover the groundbreaking projects and cutting-edge technology at the Robotics and Automation Summer School (RASS) hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory. In this exclusive behind-the-scenes video, students from top universities work on advanced robotics in disciplines such as AI, automation, machine learning, and autonomous systems.

[ Los Alamos National Laboratory ]

This week’s Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute Seminar is from Princeton University’s Anirudha Majumdar, on “Robots That Know When They Don’t Know.”

Foundation models from machine learning have enabled rapid advances in perception, planning, and natural language understanding for robots. However, current systems lack any rigorous assurances when required to generalize to novel scenarios. For example, perception systems can fail to identify or localize unfamiliar objects, and large language model (LLM)-based planners can hallucinate outputs that lead to unsafe outcomes when executed by robots. How can we rigorously quantify the uncertainty of machine learning components such that robots know when they don’t know and can act accordingly?

[ Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute ]

Boston Dynamics is the master of dropping amazing robot videos with no warning, and last week, we got a surprise look at the new electric Atlas going “hands on” with a practical factory task.

This video is notable because it’s the first real look we’ve had at the new Atlas doing something useful—or doing anything at all, really, as the introductory video from back in April (the first time we saw the robot) was less than a minute long. And the amount of progress that Boston Dynamics has made is immediately obvious, with the video showing a blend of autonomous perception, full body motion, and manipulation in a practical task.

We sent over some quick questions as soon as we saw the video, and we’ve got some extra detail from Scott Kuindersma, senior director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, what kind of robotics person are you, and also here you go:

Atlas is autonomously moving engine covers between supplier containers and a mobile sequencing dolly. The robot receives as input a list of bin locations to move parts between.

Atlas uses a machine learning (ML) vision model to detect and localize the environment fixtures and individual bins [0:36]. The robot uses a specialized grasping policy and continuously estimates the state of manipulated objects to achieve the task.

There are no prescribed or teleoperated movements; all motions are generated autonomously online. The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e.g., moving fixtures) and action failures (e.g., failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collisions [1:24]) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors.

Eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed that this task is very similar to what we saw hydraulic Atlas (Atlas classic?) working on just before it retired. We probably don’t need to read too much into the differences between how each robot performs that task, but it’s an interesting comparison to make.

For more details, here’s our Q&A with Kuindersma:

How many takes did this take?

Kuindersma: We ran this sequence a couple times that day, but typically we’re always filming as we continue developing and testing Atlas. Today we’re able to run that engine cover demo with high reliability, and we’re working to expand the scope and duration of tasks like these.

Is this a task that humans currently do?

Kuindersma: Yes.

What kind of world knowledge does Atlas have while doing this task?

Kuindersma: The robot has access to a CAD model of the engine cover that is used for object pose prediction from RGB images. Fixtures are represented more abstractly using a learned keypoint prediction model. The robot builds a map of the workcell at startup which is updated on the fly when changes are detected (e.g., moving fixture).

Does Atlas’s torso have a front or back in a meaningful way when it comes to how it operates?

Kuindersma: Its head/torso/pelvis/legs do have “forward” and “backward” directions, but the robot is able to rotate all of these relative to one another. The robot always knows which way is which, but sometimes the humans watching lose track.

Are the head and torso capable of unlimited rotation?

Kuindersma: Yes, many of Atlas’s joints are continuous.

How long did it take you folks to get used to the way Atlas moves?

Kuindersma: Atlas’s motions still surprise and delight the team.

OSHA recommends against squatting because it can lead to workplace injuries. How does Atlas feel about that?

Kuindersma: As might be evident by some of Atlas’s other motions, the kinds of behaviors that might be injurious for humans might be perfectly fine for robots.

Can you describe exactly what process Atlas goes through at 1:22?

Kuindersma: The engine cover gets caught on the fabric bins and triggers a learned failure detector on the robot. Right now this transitions into a general-purpose recovery controller, which results in a somewhat jarring motion (we will improve this). After recovery, the robot retries the insertion using visual feedback to estimate the state of both the part and fixture.

Were there other costume options you considered before going with the hot dog?

Kuindersma: Yes, but marketing wants to save them for next year.

How many important sensors does the hot dog costume occlude?

Kuindersma: None. The robot is using cameras in the head, proprioceptive sensors, IMU, and force sensors in the wrists and feet. We did have to cut the costume at the top so the head could still spin around.

Why are pickles always causing problems?

Kuindersma: Because pickles are pesky, polarizing pests.

Like many innovators, Hagit Messer-Yaron had a life-changing idea while doing something mundane: Talking with a colleague over a cup of coffee. The IEEE Life Fellow, who in 2006 was head of Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of Environmental Studies, was at the school’s cafeteria with a meteorological researcher. He shared his struggles with finding high-resolution weather data for his climate models, which are used to forecast and track flash floods.

Predicting floods is crucial for quickly evacuating residents in affected areas and protecting homes and businesses against damage.

Hagit Messer-Yaron

Employer Tel Aviv University

Title Professor emerita

Member grade Life Fellow

Her colleague “said researchers in the field had limited measurements because the equipment meteorologists used to collect weather data—including radar satellites—is expensive to purchase and maintain, especially in developing countries,” Messer-Yaron says.

Because of that, she says, high-resolution data about temperature, air quality, wind speed, and precipitation levels is often inconsistent—which is a problem when trying to produce accurate models and predictions.

An expert in signal processing and cellular communication, Messer-Yaron came up with the idea of using existing wireless communication signals to collect weather data, as communication networks are spread across the globe.

In 2006 she and her research team developed algorithms that process and analyze data collected by communication networks to monitor rainfall. They measure the difference in amplitude of the signals transmitted and received by the systems to extract data needed to predict flash floods.

The method was first demonstrated in Israel. Messer-Yaron is working to integrate it into communication networks worldwide.

For her work, she received this year’s IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies for “contributions to sensing of the environment using wireless communication networks.” The award is sponsored by Toyota.

“Receiving an IEEE medal, which is the highest-level award you can get within the organization, was really a surprise, and I was extremely happy to [receive] it,” she says. “I was proud that IEEE was able to evaluate and see the potential in our technology for public good and to reward it.”

A passion for teaching

Growing up in Israel, Messer-Yaron was interested in art, literature, and science. When it came time to choose a career, she found it difficult to decide, she says. Ultimately, she chose electrical engineering, figuring it would be easier to enjoy art and literature as hobbies.

After completing her mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces in 1973, she began her undergraduate studies at Tel Aviv University, where she found her passion: Signal processing.

“Electrical engineering is a very broad topic,” she says. “As an undergrad, you learn all the parts that make up electrical engineering, including applied physics and applied mathematics. I really enjoyed applied mathematics and soon discovered signal processing. I found it quite amazing how, by using algorithms, you can direct signals to extract information.”

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in EE in 1977 and continued her education there, earning master’s and doctoral degrees in 1979 and 1984. She moved to the United States for a postdoctoral position at Yale. There she worked with IEEE Life Fellow Peter Schultheiss, who was known for his research in using sensor array systems in underwater acoustics.

Inspired by Schultheiss’s passion for teaching, Messer-Yaron decided to pursue a career in academia. She was hired by Tel Aviv University as an electrical engineering professor in 1986. She was the first woman in Israel to become a full professor in the subject.

“Being a faculty member at a public university is the best job you can do. I didn’t make a lot of money, but at the end of each day, I looked back at what I did [with pride].”

For the next 14 years, she conducted research in statistical signal processing, time-delay estimation, and sensor array processing.

Her passion for teaching took her around the world as a visiting professor at Yale, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, and other schools. She collaborated with colleagues from the universities on research projects.

In 1999 she was promoted to director of Tel Aviv University’s undergraduate electrical engineering program.

A year later, she was offered an opportunity she couldn’t refuse: Serving as chief scientist for the Israeli Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sports. She took a sabbatical from teaching and for the next three years oversaw the country’s science policy.

“I believe [working in the public sector] is part of our duty as faculty members, especially in public universities, because that makes you a public intellectual,” she says. “Working for the government gave me a broad view of many things that you don’t see as a professor, even in a large university.”

When she returned to the university in 2004, Messer-Yaron was appointed as the director of the new school of environmental studies. She oversaw the allocation of research funding and spoke with researchers individually to better understand their needs. After having coffee with one researcher, she realized there was a need to develop better weather-monitoring technology.

Hagit Messer-Yaron proudly displays her IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies at this year’s IEEE Honors Ceremony. She is accompanied by IEEE President-Elect Kathleen Kramer and IEEE President Tom Couglin.Robb Cohen

Using signal processing to monitor weather

Because the planet is warming, the risk of flash floods is steadily increasing. Warmer air holds more water—which leads to heavier-than-usual rainfall and results in more flooding, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Data about rainfall is typically collected by satellite radar and ground-based rain gauges. However, radar images don’t provide researchers with precise readings of what’s happening on the ground, according to an Ensia article. Rain gauges are accurate but provide data from small areas only.

So Messer-Yaron set her sights on developing technology that connects to cellular networks close to the ground to provide more accurate measurements, she says. Using existing infrastructure eliminates the need to build new weather radars and weather stations.

Communication systems automatically record the transmitted signal level and the received signal level, but rain can alter otherwise smooth wave patterns. By measuring the difference in the amplitude, meteorologists could extract the data necessary to track rainfall using the signal processing algorithms.

In 2005 Messer-Yaron and her group successfully tested the technology. The following year, their “Environmental Monitoring by Wireless Communication Networks” paper was published in Science.

The algorithm is being used in Israel in partnership with all three of the country’s major cellular service providers. Messer-Yaron acknowledges, however, that negotiating deals with cellular service companies in other countries has been difficult.

To expand the technology’s use worldwide, Messer-Yaron launched a research network through the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), called an opportunistic precipitation sensing network known as OPENSENSE. The group connects researchers, meteorologists, and other experts around the world to collaborate on integrating the technology in members’ communities.

Monitoring the effects of climate change

Since developing the technology, Messer-Yaron has held a number of jobs including president of the Open University of Israel and vice chair of the country’s Council for Higher Education, which accredits academic institutions.

She is maintaining her link with Tel Aviv University today as a professor emerita.

“Being a faculty member at a public university is the best job you can do,” she says. “I didn’t make a lot of money, but at the end of each day, I looked back at what I did [with pride]. Because of the academic freedom and the autonomy I had, I was able to do many things in addition to teaching, including research.”

To continue her work in developing technology to monitor weather events, in 2016, she helped found ClimaCell, now Tomorrow.io, based in Boston. The startup aims to use wireless communication infrastructure and IoT devices to collect real-time weather data. Messer-Yaron served as its chief scientist until 2017.

She continues to update the original algorithms with her students, most recently with machine learning capabilities to extract data from physical measurements of the signal level in communication networks.

A global engineering community

When Messer-Yaron was an undergraduate student, she joined IEEE at the suggestion of one of her professors.

“I didn’t think much about the benefits of being a member until I became a graduate student,” she says. “I started attending conferences and publishing papers in IEEE journals, and the organization became my professional community.”

She is an active volunteer and a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. From 1994 to 2010 she served on the society’s Signal Processing Theory and Methods technical committee. She was associate editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. She is a member of the editorial boards of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

In the past 10 years, she’s been involved with other IEEE committees including the conduct review, ethics and member conduct, and global public policy bodies.

“I don’t see my career or my professional life without the IEEE,” she says

Last week the organization tasked with running the the biggest chunk of U.S. CHIPS Act’s US $13 billion R&D program made some significant strides: The National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) released a strategic plan and selected the sites of two of three planned facilities and released a new strategic plan. The locations of the two sites—a “design and collaboration” center in Sunnyvale, Calif., and a lab devoted to advancing the leading edge of chipmaking, in Albany, N.Y.—build on an existing ecosystem at each location, experts say. The location of the third planned center—a chip prototyping and packaging site that could be especially critical for speeding semiconductor startups—is still a matter of speculation.

“The NSTC represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the U.S. to accelerate the pace of innovation in semiconductor technology,” Deirdre Hanford, CEO of Natcast, the nonprofit that runs the NSTC centers, said in a statement. According to the strategic plan, which covers 2025 to 2027, the NSTC is meant to accomplish three goals: extend U.S. technology leadership, reduce the time and cost to prototype, and build and sustain a semiconductor workforce development ecosystem. The three centers are meant to do a mix of all three.

New York gets extreme ultraviolet lithography

NSTC plans to direct $825 million into the Albany project. The site will be dedicated to extreme ultraviolet lithography, a technology that’s essential to making the most advanced logic chips. The Albany Nanotech Complex, which has already seen more than $25 billion in investments from the state and industry partners over two decades, will form the heart of the future NSTC center. It already has an EUV lithography machine on site and has begun an expansion to install a next-generation version, called high-NA EUV, which promises to produce even finer chip features. Working with a tool recently installed in Europe, IBM, a long-time tenant of the Albany research facility, reported record yields of copper interconnects built every 21 nanometers, a pitch several nanometers tighter than possible with ordinary EUV.

“It’s fulfilling to see that this ecosystem can be taken to the national and global level through CHIPS Act funding,” said Mukesh Khare, general manager of IBM’s semiconductors division, speaking from the future site of the NSTC EUV center. “It’s the right time, and we have all the ingredients.”

While only a few companies are capable of manufacturing cutting edge logic using EUV, the impact of the NSTC center will be much broader, Khare argues. It will extend down as far as early-stage startups with ideas or materials for improving the chipmaking process “An EUV R&D center doesn’t mean just one machine,” says Khare. “It needs so many machines around it… It’s a very large ecosystem.”

Silicon Valley lands the design center

The design center is tasked with conducting advanced research in chip design, electronic design automation (EDA), chip and system architectures, and hardware security. It will also host the NSTC’s design enablement gateway—a program that provides NSTC members with a secure, cloud-based access to design tools, reference processes and designs, and shared data sets, with the goal of reducing the time and cost of design. Additionally, it will house workforce development, member convening, and administration functions.

Situating the design center in Silicon Valley, with its concentration of research universities, venture capital, and workforce, seems like the obvious choice to many experts. “I can’t think of a better place,” says Patrick Soheili, co-founder of interconnect technology startup Eliyan, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif.

Abhijeet Chakraborty, vice president of engineering in the technology and product group at Silicon Valley-based Synopsys, a leading maker of EDA software, sees Silicon Valley’s expansive tech ecosystem as one of its main advantages in landing the NSTC’s design center. The region concentrates companies and researchers involved in the whole spectrum of the industry from semiconductor process technology to cloud software.

Access to such a broad range of industries is increasingly important for chip design startups, he says. “To design a chip or component these days you need to go from concept to design to validation in an environment that takes care of the entire stack,” he says. It’s prohibitively expensive for a startup to do that alone, so one of Chakraborty’s hopes for the design center is that it will help startups access the design kits and other data needed to operate in this new environment.

Packaging and prototyping still to come

A third promised center for prototyping and packaging is still to come. “The big question is where does the packaging and prototyping go?” says Mark Granahan, cofounder and CEO of Pennsylvania-based power semiconductor startup Ideal Semiconductor. “To me that’s a great opportunity.” He points out that because there is so little packaging technology infrastructure in the United States, any ambitious state or region should have a shot at hosting such a center. One of the original intentions of the act, after all, was to expand the number of regions of the country that are involved in the semiconductor industry.

But that hasn’t stopped some already tech-heavy regions from wanting it. “Oregon offers the strongest ecosystem for such a facility,” a spokesperson for Intel, whose technology development is done there. “The state is uniquely positioned to contribute to the success of the NSTC and help drive technological advancements in the U.S. semiconductor industry.”

As NSTC makes progress, Granahan’s concern is that bureaucracy will expand with it and slow efforts to boost the U.S. chip industry. Already the layers of control are multiplying. The Chips Office at the National Institute of Standards and Technology executes the Act. The NSTC is administered by the nonprofit Natcast, which directs the EUV center, which is in a facility run by another nonprofit, NY CREATES. “We want these things to be agile and make local decisions.”