Not surprisingly, several interesting updates this week regard artificial intelligence in one way or another. Among them, the news about robotic startup Skild attracts the attention on the marriage between AI and robotics, a promising perspective also from the point of view of the study of living beings. So far, AI has achieved incredible language-centric performance: AI can even emulate the skills of a semiconductor expert, just see the news about SemiKong below. But throughout evolution, language is just the latest addition to a range of other key functions that are still difficult if not impossible to artificially replicate. Motion control is definitely one of those key functions: still today, we have no idea of how we could build a robot performing like a playing kitten – a small mammal, very far away from human beings in the evolution tree. In nature, there is no such thing as a language skill without a body, and there has to be a reason for that. So focusing on motion control sounds like approaching the problem from the right side.
GlobalWafers to get CHIPS act funding
The U.S. Department of Commerce plans to provide up to $400 million under the CHIPS and Science Act to Taiwan-headquartered GlobalWafers to build and expand facilities in Sherman, Texas (to establish the first 300mm silicon wafer manufacturing facility for advanced chips in the United States) and in St. Peters, Missouri (to establish a new facility to produce 300mm silicon-on-insulator wafers). Further, GlobalWafers plans to convert a portion of its existing silicon epitaxy wafer manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas to silicon carbide epitaxy wafer manufacturing, producing 150mm and 200mm SiC epitaxy wafers.
