Argonne National Lab is teasing an upcoming webinar that promises to unveil a new neuromorphic computing chip design that can drop power by 10 times or more without sacrificing accuracy. Insect brains are the inspiration for the work. The webinar, being held August 12 for only 15 minutes, will feature Angel Yanguas-Gil, principal materials scientist, discussing his team's discoveries to allow AI to perform on a chip design using less than 1 watt. The lab promoted the event with a vague reference that the new design relies on "new materials, designs and hardware," with few details. "Can we help AI adapt to new and extreme environments--in space, inside nuclear power plants, or anywhere temperatures exceed 500 degrees Fahrenheit?" the lab said in its promotion.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers uncovered and continue to explore new ways to advance a semiconductor chips design technique using artificial intelligence. They present several AI-based approaches to optimize atomic layer deposition, or ALD, processes in a recently published study. The method produces super-fine films of materials, like one atom thick. It also partly underpins the making of computer chips, which are now at the center of a global supply chain shortage that's pushed up prices of all sorts of electronics. "The effort predates the current chip shortage issues, but we have been looking at semiconductor processing and its manufacturing challenges for a long time," ARNL Principal Materials Scientist Angel Yanguas-Gil told Nextgov Thursday.

Scientists at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory have pioneered a cutting-edge neuromorphic computer chip--modeled off the brains of bees, fruit flies and other insects--that can rapidly learn, adapt and use substantially less power than its conventional computer chip counterparts. The physicist leading an interdisciplinary team that developed the state-of-the-art design recently spoke to Nextgov about the chips' potential to advance artificial intelligence. "If we start from a biology standpoint, we use ourselves, humans, as a model for intelligent systems, of course. But there are many other branches that evolution has taken where you can sort of reach big computational power," Angel Yanguas-Gil, principal materials scientist in Argonne's Applied Materials division, said. "Insects are one of these areas."

And on Nov. 2, 2018, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft crossed into the vastness of interstellar space, following Voyager 1, which made the leap six years earlier. Since their launch in 1977, the two probes have traveled more than 11 billion miles across the solar system, lasting much longer than scientists anticipated. Powered by plutonium and drawing 400 watts of power each to run their electronics and heat, the probes still snap photos and send them back to NASA. After 42 years, though, only six of Voyager 2's 10 instruments still work, and NASA scientists expect the probe will go dark in 2025, well before it leaves our Solar system. But what if Voyager 2 needed only a couple of watts of power?

And on Nov. 2, 2018, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft crossed into the vastness of interstellar space, following Voyager 1, which made the leap six years earlier. Since their launch in 1977, the two probes have traveled more than 11 billion miles across the solar system, lasting much longer than scientists anticipated. Powered by plutonium and drawing 400 watts of power each to run their electronics and heat, the probes still snap photos and send them back to NASA. After 42 years, though, only six of Voyager 2's 10 instruments still work, and NASA scientists expect the probe will go dark in 2025, well before it leaves our Solar system. But what if Voyager 2 needed only a couple of watts of power?