Aron Kirschen: Analog AI Chips Deserve Better than RRAM*

SEMRON pioneers analog AI chips based on memcapacitors, encoding the weights and biases of machine learning models by hardware design to reach unparalleled energy efficiency.

We had the pleasure of speaking again with the co-founder and CEO, Aron Kirschen, about what it takes to develop analog AI chips, from the foundry process to a demo board, and how Intel Ignite accelerated their journey:

*Sponsored post—we greatly appreciate the support from Intel Ignite

Future of Computing News

🤖 Introducing Pharia-1-LLM: transparent and compliant (Aleph Alpha)

🤖 3 Co-Founders Leave French AI Startup H Amid ‘Operational Differences’ (PYMNTS)

🤖 Anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make Claude tick (TechCrunch)

🤖 100M Token Context Windows: Research update on ultra-long context models, our partnership with Google Cloud, and new funding (Magic)

🤖🧱 FermiNet: Quantum physics and chemistry from first principles (DeepMind)

🦾 Elon Musk unveils Tesla’s new ‘Cortex’ supercomputer, but it’s not ready quite yet (electrek)

🦾 Imagination shifts AI strategy and abandons NPUs — company secures $100M in financing (Tom’s Hardware)

🦾 Cerebras Systems throws down gauntlet to Nvidia with launch of ‘world’s fastest’ AI inference service

🦾 China’s export curbs on semiconductor materials stoke chip output fears (FT)

⚛️ A year in, SemiQon is on track to make quantum computers powerful, compact, and affordable (SemiQon)

💨 Air-Powered Logic Circuits: using compressed air instead of electricity to perform computational and control functions (Perplexity)

QC Design: Shaping the Future of Quantum Design Automation

What if you could simulate fault-tolerant quantum computers, much like the semiconductor industry is using electronic design automation software?

QC Design was founded in 2021 by Ish Dhand and Martin Plenio to develop design software and architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computers. Their quantum design automation software allows quantum hardware manufacturers to build the ultimate computing machines allowed by the laws of physics:

Good Reads

⚛️ Survey Report: The Current and Future State of Quantum Computing (QuEra)

“While significant technical challenges remain … The pace of development is generally meeting or exceeding expectations, and there is a strong interest in both the positive impacts and the ethical implications of quantum computing technology.”

⚛️ Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold (arXiv)

“Quantum error correction provides a path to reach practical quantum computing by combining multiple physical qubits into a logical qubit, where the logical error rate is suppressed exponentially as more qubits are added. However, this exponential suppression only occurs if the physical error rate is below a critical threshold. In this work, we present two surface code memories operating below this threshold …”

Get more context on this research result from this blog post by Tommaso Demarie, the founder of Entropica Labs: Big results in quantum error correction from the Google Quantum AI Team and collaborators

⚛️ MQT Qudits - A Framework For Mixed-Dimensional Qudit Quantum Computing (GitHub)

“A framework for research and education for mixed-dimensional qudit quantum computing developed as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) by the Chair for Design Automation at the Technical University of Munich.”

🦾 Compute Moonshots: Harnessing New Physics (Mackenzie Morehead)

“The digital computing domain is reaching relative maturity, with traditional electronics well into the final phase of their S-curve and GPUs in the middle of theirs. At the same time, demand for compute shows absolutely no sign of slowing, …”

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