News on China's scientific and technological development.

BEIJING - When the previously smog-blurred sun cast its light onto a bizarrely equipped house on Friday, a man who prefers to go by "Ruhai" saw his dream of converting the sun's rays into usable power come true.
Ruhai's three-story house, located in the northern suburbs of Beijing, stands out amongst the rest of the area's dwellings, with thin film solar cells (TFSC) on the walls and a silicon battery on the roof.
For Ruhai, a 42-year-old white-collar worker, Friday was his red-letter day, as it marked his first attempt to connect the mini-PV (photovoltaic) power plant contained within his house to the local power grid.
The house made history in that it became the first distributed PV system with a capacity of at least three kilowatts designed and installed by a private individual.
Although it is still being tested, Ruhai's home PV plant can generate 10 kilowatt-hours of power every day, enough for him to power his house for two days.
Ruhai, who professes a dream of becoming the "Steve Jobs" of China's PV industry, said he first saw opportunity in household-distributed PV systems five years ago. He began work on his own system, although his enthusiasm was dampened in 2011, when his application to connect to the state grid was rejected.
"I didn't give up. Perseverance can bring people hope," Ruhai said when recalling the efforts he made at that time.
Ruhai saw a silver lining in October last year, when the State Grid allowed distributed PV plants with a capacity of less than six megawatts to obtain access to the state grid.
He filed an application to the State Grid last November and had the country's first on-grid facility installed in his house one month later.
"I can stand the hassle of explaining to my neighbors who come over to see what's going on here," Ruhai said. "But what I really worry about is whether household PV systems can get the same subsidies as others."
The PV equipment costs Ruhai 14 yuan ($2.2) for every kilowatt of power generated, four yuan more than the costs paid by enterprises, as they are subsidized by the government.
"If I can receive subsidies of 0.4 to 0.6 yuan per kilowatt, I can recoup my investment within eight years," Ruhai said, adding that the return rate is expected to be 9.3 percent, much higher than a bank interest rate.
Ruhai's ambitions go far beyond illuminating one house, however. He said his goal is to promote household PV systems across the country.
Electricity generated by distributed PV plants now accounts for less than one percent of China's total PV generation, compared with some 70 percent in Germany and 80 percent in the United States.
"There is great market potential in household PV systems," Ruhai said.
Distributed PV generation refers to scattered solar power plants installed in neighborhoods that provide power to nearby homes in a more convenient and economical manner than conventional power plants.
The central government said last December that it will encourage the application of distributed PV power generation in local communities.
Solar power, a promising form of green energy, may provide an alternative for the government as it vows to control fossil energy consumption.
At the same time, the development of household PV system may also aid PV equipment manufacturers.
China's PV industry, with the world's largest capacity, is facing a sharp decline in demand in the wake of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures implemented abroad.
The country's PV industry should shift to the domestic downstream power generation sector to offset their export losses, said Meng Xiangan, secretary-general of the China Renewable Energy Society.
Along with domestic PV manufacturers, residents of China's southern provinces may be able to benefit by installing household PV facilities, as the public heating enjoyed by northerners does not exist in South China, despite cold winters there.

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mzyw said:

Mystery

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mzyw said:

I still have no idea how it works, may be somebody can explain?

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The solid-state quantum research crew from the University of Science and Technology of China succeeded in performing the quantum logic gate operation on one single electron at 10 picoseconds, renewing the previous world records by nearly 100 times, making a big step toward the semiconductor-based “quantum computer”.

It is inferable from the Moore's Law that around 2020, each transistor might be as small as an electron, also known as single-electron transistor. According to Guo Guoping, director of the research project, the information representation with “0” and “1” in the computer information processing is achieved by switch closure. Once the tunneling occurs as the transistor becomes increasingly smaller, the electron will go directly through the transistor and be uncontrollable by the switch closure.

The world’s major computer chip manufacturers are still trying to avoid tunneling. But in the opinion of Guo, it is wiser to utilize than avoid in the long term, advancing the use of “quantum computing” to represent the information “0” and “1” with the horizontal and vertical properties of one single electron.

“Any complicated computer operation is achieved by arithmetic operations of single and two bits, just like the building of houses in round and square bricks.

“The research achievement is a breakthrough in the single-bit operational speed, representing the elements of ‘0’ and ‘1’ with one single electron at 10 picoseconds,” said Guo.

Previously, the U.S. and Japanese research institutes achieved the electrically controlled semiconductor logic gate at 1,000 picoseconds. The achievement by Guo and his colleagues increases the operational speed by almost 100 times to 10 picoseconds, making a significant step in promoting the quantum computing from laboratory demonstration to practical use. The Nature Communications, a branch of the academic journal Nature, has published the achievement in its entirety recently.

Guo said that China has launched the solid-state quantum chip project in efforts to gain a foothold in the global competition in the next-generation computer chips. Once the quantum chip is introduced to the computer, it will make the quantum computer characterized by exponentially increased operational speed and greatly improved data processing capabilities.

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It is well known that optical imaging technology plays an important role in human’s discovering and exploring into the secret of the unknown. People pursue to seeing further, more thorough and clearer, no matter the large universe or even small molecule. However, limited to diffraction of light, the spatial resolution in traditional optical system is not possible to be infinitesimal due to the Rayleigh-Abbe physical limit. Therefore, it is acknowledged in current optical field to be a major research subject to break this limit and improve the existing imaging resolution of optical system.

Obviously, there are technologies like electron microscope and atomic force microscope which may get higher resolution, but due to various reasons and limitations (for instance, intravital time imaging is unavailable and sample preparation is complex), optical microscope is the main observation apparatus in present biomedical research field, material chemistry research field and etc. The lateral resolution of general optical microscope is limited to about 200nm, which is not precise enough for research of subcellular structure and molecular biology.

In order to break the diffraction limit, many optical super-resolution methods are sprang out in recent years, including PLAM, STORM, STED and etc. However, all these method are limited to unimolecule location algorithm or spot scanning imaging which have a relatively lower speed and need some special dyestuff to mark samples. Besides, SIM is another method. It uses specially modulated light field illumination sample and obtains super-resolution image though spatial spectrum processing. Since it belongs to wide field imaging method, it forms images fast.

Presently, only America, Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Japan and other several states could control SIM technology and China relatively lags behind in this field.

Research team led by Yao Baoli with State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, XIOPM, CAS has been long engaged in research on bio-photon technology like optical micro-manipulation technology and optical super-resolution imaging (optical tweezer has been applied into production). Since the development of SIM imaging technology in 2010, supported by major scientific research program, Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China and national natural science foundation program, deep and thorough theoretical and practical researches have been conducted, key technologies concerned have been mastered, an innovative plan different from existing laser interference illumination SIM technology (which has been applied for national invention patent) was presented and SIM technology based on DMD and LED illumination was proposed firstly and realized.

Compared with laser interference illumination SIM technology, this technology has higher spatial resolution, faster imaging speed and images with better quality and it greatly reduced the device’s complexity and cost. Through calibration, the system’s lateral resolution reaches 90nm which is the best in the same field over the world. To prove the technology and the practical application effect of the model machine in biochemical field, the research team and The Fourth Military Medical University cooperated with University of Konstanz to conduct experiment research. Using this system, they successfully got super-resolution images of mitochondria of BPAE and cerebral neuron of mouse and realized 3D optical sectioning of mouse’s cerebral neuron and plant pollen.

Compared with current sectioning microtechnic, it is about ten times better in imaging depth and speed, which provides a new technology for forming large-area and fast 3D images to underlying biological samples. The research achievement was published on January 23, 2013 on Scientific Reports, supplement of Nature, and titled “DMD-based LED-illumination Super-resolution and optical sectioning microscopy”.

Super-resolution imaging technology is an important research direction both in present international optical field and 135 plan of XIOPM. The research result edged XIOPM into the world front rank in the field of super-resolution optical microscope.

Crossing and cooperating with biomedicine and material chemistry, the technology would greatly improve China’s research level in the field and its achievement transformation would change the situation that China has no high-tech device with independence intelligent property right in the field of super-resolution optical microscope.

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Weiwu Hu said Loongson Technology is sampling a 32-nm Godson server processor and plans to ship a 28-nm version this fall to as many as ten server makers in China.

Loongson Technology Corp. Ltd. is sampling its first commercial microprocessor with plans to ship production chips in the fall to as many as 10 China server makers. The milestone, if reached, represents a long-term dream of China’s technocrats--a home-grown computer based on its own microprocessor.

Loongson (Beijing, China) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences described the Godson 3B1500, an eight-core server chip, at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The 32-nm part is sampling now with the tape-out of a shrink to a 28-nm manufacturing process expected within two months.

The 28-nm version will be Loongson’s first commercial processor, Weiwu Hu, who heads the project, told EE Times in an interview at ISSCC. He cautioned that it’s still early days for the architecture despite the fact it has been in development for nearly a decade. STMicroelectronics NV has been a manufacturing partner for Loongson in the past.

"Our ecosystem is still small," Hu said, noting Loongson has been actively developing a server software community for its 64-bit MIPS-based processor for about 18 months.

Developers in China have created a database and middleware platform for Godson in Java that rides on Linux. They have also developed a software stack for running storage and email servers.

"We are initially targeting dedicated markets with fixed software stacks," said Hu, who attended ISSCC in a traditional Mao-era suit fitted with a red pin signifying his membership of the Communist Party

The processor has been tested running open-source KVM virtualization software as well as Hadoop, he said. Such software could help it make inroads into general-purpose servers in data centers for Web services such as Baidu, China’s search engine.

China server makers Dawning, Great Wall and Inspur are among the ten systems companies planning to use Godson. The processor may sport somewhat lower performance than competing chips from Intel and others, but Loongson and its partners will have an advantage in price and in local support, Hu said.

Loongson and CAS oversee two of about six major microprocessor efforts in China, Hu said. Besides its effort in commercial servers, Loongson is working on versions of Godson for government supercomputers as well as for personal computers and embedded systems.

"We have done pilot runs of a few thousand Godson desktops," Hu said. “They are being used mainly in government-related businesses."

In addition, 32-bit embedded versions of the Godson core are already used in televisions made by China’s Haier and Hisense. Loongson has a license to the MIPS architecture on which Godson is based, Hu added.

Separately, C*Core develops and licenses embedded processors. Its technology is based on Motorola’s M*Core design.

At least two other microprocessor teams in China are quietly working on supercomputer-class projects, Hu said. Loongson is also developing versions of Godson for such high performance systems, he added.

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China is planning to build a national earthquake monitoring and warning system in five years.

While the system would never be able to forecast an earthquake, it could detect quakes and notify people within seconds before seismic waves actually hit them, according to an anonymous official with the China Earthquake Administration (CEA).

Timely warnings may effectively reduce casualties and economic losses resulting from earthquakes, the official said on Tuesday. He also said the development of the system was launched in 2009 and is expected to be verified this March.

The project has been filed with the country's top economic planner for approval and includes the establishment of some 5,000 stations across the country with funds of 2 billion yuan (320.4 million US dollars), according to the official.

A trial program including nearly 100 monitoring stations is currently being carried out in southeast China's Fujian Province and has proven successful, he added.

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In4ser said:

The problem is the Loongson/Godson does not use x86 instruction set. That makes it incompatible with Windows or OSX and limits its commercial market potential.

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