Robotics
Light-programmed SRAM aims to push AI weights into robots without the analog receiver
At the IEEE/JSAP VLSI Symposium, Cornell Tech researchers Jae-sun Seo and Yifan He demonstrated an optical receiver whose SRAM cells carry photodiodes, so a beamed QR-code-like bit matrix flips memory values directly and skips the analog light-to-digital circuitry that normally erases optical links' energy advantage. A calibration circuit references an expected-pixel-position frame so the link tolerates misalignment and tilt. The team frames it at model updates for warehouse robot fleets and memory-constrained microrobots, but the current transmitter is a static 14x14-bit metal mask, and the work needs one that can rewrite the matrix millions of times per second to hit gigabit rates. Michigan's Dennis Sylvester, not involved in the work, calls the problem important and the approach clever while noting the photosensitive bit cells are larger than conventional SRAM cells — a density penalty that could cancel the efficiency gain until the team shrinks them.
IEEE Spectrum — Optical Tech Would Update a Robot's AI on the Fly
Quantum Computing
Zinc oxide joins the spin-qubit host shortlist
Researchers led by Hosung Seo at Sungkyunkwan University, with collaborators at Wisconsin-Madison and Washington, say they have identified for the first time an atomic defect in the zinc oxide semiconductor whose spin properties make it a viable qubit host, published in PRX Quantum. ZnO is a wide-bandgap oxide already used in optoelectronics, so a defect qubit there would widen the field beyond diamond NV centres and silicon carbide. The announcement reached us as an institutional press release without the coherence times or operating temperatures that would let anyone rank it against existing hosts; the underlying PRX Quantum paper is the thing to read before treating this as a platform shift.
The Quantum Insider — SKKU-led Team Identifies 'Zinc Oxide Spin Qubit'
Chicago's quantum park lands its first hardware tenants — a fridge maker and a machine shop
The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park has secured its first two physical tenants for the IQMP FaQtory, a campus aimed at quantum supply-chain manufacturing: Zero Point Cryogenics, the Edmonton dilution-refrigerator builder, and Ability Engineering Technology, an Illinois precision engineering firm. The move follows the federal funding rollout for The Bloch Quantum Tech Hub. Notably these are components suppliers rather than qubit vendors — dilution refrigerators and precision fabrication are the physical bottleneck behind almost every superconducting and spin-qubit programme, and siting them next to the machines is the kind of unglamorous step that decides whether a regional cluster is real. No lease terms, headcount, or capacity figures were disclosed.
UK quantum access programme takes an eleven-strong third cohort
Digital Catapult, working with the National Quantum Computing Centre's SparQ programme, has named eleven organisations to the third cohort of its Quantum Technology Access Programme, among them NatWest and the Rail Safety and Standards Board. The scheme gives industrial users hands-on time with quantum hardware and expertise to test application ideas. It is a press release with no results attached — the useful signal is which sectors keep showing up (finance and transport infrastructure again), not any claimed advantage.
AI & ML
Proposed EPA rule would let states mute neighbours of new AI data centers
Ars Technica reports a proposed EPA rule that would hand states the power to decide how much public comment permitting requires — potentially none. The timing matters because the AI buildout's constraint is increasingly siting: power, water, and local objection, not chips. Weakening the public-input step mainly changes how fast a contested data center can be approved, which is a compute-supply story as much as an environmental one.
Ars Technica — AI firms want more data centers; Trump's EPA may give neighbors less say