News Digital Twins' research gains $285 million in CHIPS ACT funding — virtual chip tech could revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing

[Admin]

The Biden administration has released a notice of funding opportunity for a yet-unchosen organization to start an institute studying "digital twin" technology, virtual modelization of real-world manufacturing facilities.

Digital Twins' research gains $285 million in CHIPS ACT funding — virtual chip tech could revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing : Read more

 

[chaz_music]

My goodness. "Digital Twin" is a just a new 2024 wording for "simulation" but simply placed into a VR environment to allow for seeing a physical representation of the simulation. Unless I missed the clever part, somebody seems to have conned a gov officials into funding a money trough for the simulation software industry. The VR part will help humans visualize the work flow, but finding technical errors and chip yield relies on accurate simulation fidelity, not whether it is in a VR environment. In the simulation world engineers say "garbage in, garbage out" as poor simlations are the norm (very, very common in fact). Let's hope they get some proper experts who are not feeding from the trough to help temper this down.

Change a buzz word and all of a sudden people think some new tech has been born and the world will throw money at it.

For instance a great buzz word is AI. A simple list of earlier tech that is actually the same as AI: neural nets, fuzzy logic, adaptive control, and adaptive Kalman filters. These have been around for over 30-40 years. The only real recent improvement is the number of nodes economically available, with the world mostly ignoring the inexpensive and efficient analog version of neural nets.

 

[JRStern]

My goodness. "Digital Twin" is a just a new 2024 wording for "simulation" but simply placed into a VR environment to allow for seeing a physical representation of the simulation. Unless I missed the clever part, somebody seems to have conned a gov officials into funding a money trough for the simulation software industry. The VR part will help humans visualize the work flow, but finding technical errors and chip yield relies on accurate simulation fidelity, not whether it is in a VR environment. In the simulation world engineers say "garbage in, garbage out" as poor simlations are the norm (very, very common in fact). Let's hope they get some proper experts who are not feeding from the trough to help temper this down.

Change a buzz word and all of a sudden people think some new tech has been born and the world will throw money at it.

For instance a great buzz word is AI. A simple list of earlier tech that is actually the same as AI: neural nets, fuzzy logic, adaptive control, and adaptive Kalman filters. These have been around for over 30-40 years. The only real recent improvement is the number of nodes economically available, with the world mostly ignoring the inexpensive and efficient analog version of neural nets.

The Chips Act is already $200,000,000,000 slush fund for entirely unstated goals. Probably fund a $100,000,000 study on how homo habilis chipped away to make stone tools.

I would presume that Intel and all the big fab companies already have all the digital twins they need. I thought this news might be about medical digital twins of patients, which is a project that seems to need some actual kick-starting.