#chip design

All articles tagged with "chip design"

Can a Chip That Loves Zeros Make Huge AI Models More Efficient?

Sparse AI Hardware Could Cut Energy Use Without Shrinking Models

Researchers argue that new hardware built around sparsity could dramatically lower the energy and time needed to run large AI models by skipping computations involving values near zero.

Key Takeaways

Researchers argue that sparse-native hardware can exploit the many near-zero values inside large AI models.
A Stanford team reports a chip that averaged far lower energy use than a CPU while running faster across tested workloads.

DT Editorial Team·Apr 28, 2026·via spectrum.ieee.org

Waste Heat Becomes a Computing Medium in New Analog Chip Research

MIT-led researchers say microscopic silicon structures can use a device’s own waste heat to perform analog computation, hinting at a new path for thermal sensing and low-energy signal processing.

Key Takeaways

Researchers encoded information as temperature rather than electrical bits inside microscopic silicon structures.
The system performed a simple matrix-vector multiplication with more than 99% accuracy in many cases.

DT Editorial Team·Apr 22, 2026·via technologyreview.com