News on China's scientific and technological development.

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
China has greater land area than the United States...

And this from a Chinese publication... :confused:
Only slightly larger, 9.6 vs. 9.4 million sqkm. But at least 1/3 of China is mountains, while US is flatter therefor easier to build HSR.

Most HSR countries are much smaller in size than US. The author is not focused on comparing US exclusively with China, but rather using the size to make a point that US is too big (except China) not to build HSR.
 

Figaro

Senior Member
Registered Member
Baidu Digital Museum
Baidu to launch the world's first digital museum

2017-10-26 10:23

Global Times Editor: Li Yan

Jin Xiaping (far left) attends Baidu's press conference at the Episcopal Palace of Astorga in Spain on October 19. (Photo/Courtesy of Baidu Baike)

Baidu to launch the world's first digital museum dedicated to Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí

Interested in examining every brick and curve of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Família church and Casa Milà building without actually flying to Spain? The launch of the first ever Gaudí online museum may soon make this a reality.

At a press conference held last week at the Gaudí-designed Episcopal Palace of Astorga in Spain, Baidu Baike, the online Chinese-language collaborative encyclopedia platform owned by China's Internet giant Baidu Inc, announced that it would be launching the world's first digital museum of Gaudí's works in November. The project is being completed with the cooperation of the China-based Gaudí Asia-Pacific Research Institute and the Gaudí World Congress, the five-year-old annual session co-founded by the Gaudí Research Institute.

Tour online

Also Baidu Baike's first overseas digital museum project, the platform's online Gaudí museum will showcase the master's works and designs as well as old photos and research papers using modern technology such as AI, VR, videos and 360-degree photos. Visitors can examine buildings in detail by taking a virtual tour while listening as international Gaudí experts introduce the history and culture behind each work.

So far, the project team has finished documenting the Sagrada Família church, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. The team is currently working to record and digitize many of the architect's other works.

While the combination of VR, 360-degree photos and videos is nothing new, as museums worldwide have launched similar online tours, the application of AI technology seems to be a fresh concept.

"Baidu's AI technologies include image recognition technology and Augmented Reality (AR)," Jin Xiaping, director of Baidu Baike's digital museum project, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"We plan to also apply these technologies to real life tours in order to increase visitor participation and enhance their experience when they visit our partner museums," she said.

According to Jin, Baidu Baike's first edition of the Gaudí digital museum will be launched in Chinese, including the audio recordings. Jin hinted at the possibility of other language versions, as the platform's overseas projects expand.

Digitization wave

Since starting out in 2012, the Baidu Baike digital museum platform has produced 360-degree virtual tours to more than 220 Chinese museums, including Emperor Qin Shi Huang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province where the world-renowned terracotta army can be found.

The platform also provides visual records of collections from 1,615 museums across China, including Beijing's National Museum of China and the Yungang Grottoes Museum located in North China's Shanxi Province.

Digitalization of museums and art seems to have become a global trend in recent years as Internet companies, such as Google, have also been busy expanding their digital art projects. Launched in 2011, Google Arts & Culture (formerly known as the Google Art Project) has cooperated with museums around the world to put high definition photos of their collections online and worked with "more than 440 museums worldwide" -US-based technology news platform Techcrunch reported in May - to incorporate the platform's street view feature, which provides a 360-degree inside and outside views of museums.

With the number of views reaching around 67 million so far, the Baidu Baike digital museum platform is currently still focusing more on Chinese-speaking netizens, Jin said. She noted that the platform provides more complete coverage of Chinese museums than Google's project, which includes just a dozen of local museums in China. With the Gaudí project as a starting point, the platform is preparing to expand further out into the world.

"After introducing more overseas museums to our platform, we will launch multi-language versions, not only of our overseas projects, but also local projects," Jin told the Global Times.

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now I read
China to build 5th Antarctic research station
Xinhua| 2017-10-28 14:10:58
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China will build its fifth research station in the Antarctic, according to the State Oceanic Administration (SOA).

Chinese researchers have selected the site for the station, which will be on Inexpressible Island in Terra Nova Bay in the Ross Sea, said Qin Weijia, director of the SOA Polar Expedition Office.

"The new base will be a perennial research station and be able to independently carry out multiple scientific investigations in the Antarctic," said Qin at the annual academic meeting of China polar science, which concluded Friday in Changchun.

The Ross Sea is a deep bay in the Southern Ocean regarded as the least altered marine ecosystem on earth -- a living laboratory that could possibly tell the life history of the Antarctic.

China has built four Antarctic research stations over 30 years of research, with Changcheng and Zhongshan serving as the two perennial stations, and Taishan and Kunlun being the two summer stations.

China is building its first homemade polar icebreaker "Xuelong 2," which is expected to be completed in 2019. Scientists say it will provide a solid guarantee for China's polar expeditions.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Soon China will be self sufficient in smart phone chips

Homegrown chips power domestic smartphone sector
By Ma Si

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Workers on a production line of chip and main board products at a FiberHome Technologies Group factory in Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei province. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

A nanosecond is a long time in the semiconductor sector while three years is an eternity.

Back in 2013, Chinese smartphone chipmakers had a mountain to climb against global rivals such as Qualcomm Inc in the United States.

They barely even had a presence in the low-end segment of the market.

But all that changed after the government rolled out new policies and domestic players broke through technological barriers.

"Three years ago, we relied chiefly on a price war to crack the market," said Li Liyou, CEO of Spreadtrum Communications Inc, one of the largest chipmakers on the Chinese mainland.

"But as more resources were poured into research and development, we saw a fundamental change," Li added.

Plans to upgrade the homegrown chip industry are in line with the central leadership's call to turn China into a manufacturer of quality.

"We will move Chinese industries up to the medium-high end of the global value chain, and foster a number of world-class advanced manufacturing clusters," Party General Secretary Xi Jinping said at the opening of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on Wednesday.

Data from research agency IC Insights revealed that 11 Chinese companies were on the global top 50 list for integrated circuit designers in 2016. Only one domestic business was on it in 2009.

Spreadtrum Communications Inc is a classic example of what is happening inside the industry. It produced more than 600 million smartphone chips last year, accounting for over 25 percent of the world's total shipments.

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer, is also making inroads with its in-house Kirin chips.

In 2014, China's largest telecom equipment maker was struggling to upgrade its semiconductor division, despite putting together a program a decade earlier.

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But now most of its smartphones, including high-end models, are powered by Kirin chips. Last month, the Shenzhen-based business unveiled its first artificial intelligence chip, Kirin 970, with superfast computing and strong image-recognition capabilities.

It powers Huawei's new Mate 10 smartphone, which was launched on Monday to compete with Apple Inc's 10th-anniversary iPhone.

"AI can enable real-time language translation, heed voice commands, or take advantage of augmented reality, which overlays text, sounds, graphics and video on real-world images," said Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group.

Figures released from the China Semiconductor Industry Association showed that the domestic chip sector reported sales of 434 billion yuan ($65 billion) last year, an increase of 20 percent compared to 2015.

Xiang Ligang, a telecom expert and CEO of industry website Cctime, pointed out that Chinese companies are now benefiting from the government's policy to cultivate a domestic chip industry.

The program was put in place amid concerns that a heavy reliance on foreign technology would affect national security.

There were also other reasons, such as the fact that China was spending more on overseas chips than crude oil imports.

In 2014, Beijing set up China's Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund to support the sector and spur private financing.

One of the biggest beneficiaries was Tsinghua Unigroup, the parent company of Spreadtrum.

Earlier this year, it signed financing deals worth 150 billion yuan to carry on R&D into new homegrown chips.

This will give the State-owned technology group enough cash to fulfill its grand ambitions in the semiconductor sector, and join the ranks of global giants, such as Intel Corp, Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics Co.

Among the investors are China Development Bank and China's Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund.

"The next several years are key ... there is an enormous market out there," said Zhao Weiguo, chairman of Tsinghua Unigroup.

To illustrate that, Tsinghua Unigroup is now working on a $30 billion domestic memorychip production complex in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.

It will become China's largest plant when completed.

Private companies, such as Xiaomi, are also making major strides. The smartphone manufacturer unveiled its first in-house chipset in March.

Named Surge S1, the chip combines four powerful and efficient cores, which can help strike a balance between performance and power efficiency.

"Chip technology is the crown in the smartphone sector, but it is highly cash intensive," said Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi.

"If we want to challenge the world's top three players, we need to devote our long-term efforts into the research and development of chips," Lei added.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Heavy investment in semiconductor industry via JSCH
Firms invest in 3rd-generation semiconductor
Xinhua Finance in
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2017-10-26 16:37


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Chinese optoelectronics leader Sanan Optoelectronics Co., Ltd. (600703.SH) is accelerating investment in the third-generation semiconductor industry. This may foreshadow an explosive of the industry. At the recent 2017 China IC Industry Promotion Conference Summit Forum held in Kunshan, the development prospect of 5G and compound semiconductor attracted much attention.

An industry insider believe that with the arrival of the 5G era, the third-generation wide bandgap semiconductor materials, such as silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN), will see development opportunities. A number of listed companies, including Sanan Optoelectronics, Nationz Technologies Inc. (300077.SZ), Yangzhou Yangjie Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. (300373.SZ) and Sichuan Haite High-Tech Co., Ltd. (002023.SZ), have made layout in the sector. Global semiconductor leader Infineon expects that GaN will account for 75 percent of base station RF power device market.

Third generation semiconductor emerges

In the 5G era, a mobile phone may need 16 PA (power amplifier) chips and more base stations, large-scale antenna (Massive MIMO) and filters. This brings development opportunities for third-generation semiconductor. At the recent 2017 China IC Industry Promotion Conference Summit Forum, multiple participants highlighted the development prospect of 5G and compound semiconductor.

“RDA Microelectronics has accumulated much strength in the RF front-end market. Our operating revenue will once again rise back to 100 million US dollars this year, and is expected to continue to grow rapidly in 2018 and 2019,” said RDA Microelectronics assistant vice president Jia Bin. RDA Microelectronics is a major mobile phone communication chip producer. Its products include power amplifiers, converters and receivers.

The energy-saving effect of third-generation semiconductor is commendable. Suzhou Dynax Semiconductor Co., Ltd. vice president Pei Yi said that the efficiency of GaN power amplifier improves 10 percent from traditional LDMOS. This means that each base station can save 50 watts of electricity, and all base stations around the country can save 13 billion watts of watts each year. Therefore, GaN is the best choice for millimeter-wave micro base station power amplifiers.

A market research report from QYResearch shows that the size of the global RF front-end market was 12.5 billion US dollars in 2016, and is expected to reach 25.9 billion US dollars by 2022, with an annual compound growth rate of 12.9 percent.

Multiple A-share companies made investment

“In the third-generation semiconductor sector, Sanan Optoelectronics will make use of its fund to invest in RF, optical communications, filters and power electronics. It aims to build itself into the next-generation communication GaN device platform,” said Chen Wenxin, the company’s RF marketing director.

As an optoelectronics leader, Sanan Optoelectronics has made large investment in the third-generation semiconductor long. In June 2015, Sanan Optoelectronics introduced into China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, in order to further expand its IC business which focuses on the III-V compound semiconductor. Later, the company and Fujian Province jointly set up an IC industrial investment fund with a scale of 50 billion yuan (the first phase was7.51 billion yuan .

Sanan Optoelectronics disclosed in the semi-annual report that its subsidiary Xiamen Sanan Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. has submitted samples to 47 companies, of which 11 chips are mass-produced in a small sale. The company also made investment in optical communication chips and filters. It is reported that Sanan Optoelectronics’ third-generation semiconductor business mainly focuses on mobile terminals. Its products are mass-produced in a small sale. The company can receive nearly 100 wafers order each month, which is expected to contribute to the company's earnings from 2018 to 2019.

In addition to Sanan Optoelectronics, many A-share listed companies, including Yangjie Electronic Technology, Haite High-Tech and Nationz Technologies, have involved in the third-generation semiconductor business.

Yangjie Electronic Technology said in the recent institutional research said its silicon carbide chip technology has reached the leading level in the country. As early as July 2015, Yangjie Electronic Technology raised no more than 1 billion yuan for the development, research and industrialization of SiC chips and device. The company said in its semi-annual report that it will continue to promote the development and the third generation semiconductor project, develop and improve production process 650V/1200V silicon carbide JBS product that can be compatible with the silicon wire.

Nationz Technologies has just begun to enter this area. The company said on August 15 disclosed that its wholly-owned subsidiary Shenzhen Qianhai Nationz Investment Management Co., Ltd. and the Qionglai People's Government, Chengdu signed an agreement on the investment of compound semiconductor eco-industrial park. The former will raise fund to build a compound semiconductor industry chain ecosystem in Qionglai City, with a total investment of no less than 8 billion yuan. The industrial park is expected to take shape in three years.

In addition, Haite High-Tech built a 6-inch second-generation/ third-generation semiconductor IC chip production line via its subsidiary Chengdu HiWafer Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Zhuzhou CRRC Times Electric Co., Ltd. (subsidiary of CRRC Corporation Limited) is high-power SiC device leader in China.

(Translated by Coral Zhong)
 
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