GoKawiil
Tech News
An artist created a silver-colored statue of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis using gallium, a soft metal with a low melting point. Placed outdoors, the statue's face melted away within about 30 minutes, exposing a skeleton underneath.
The U.S. Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital has issued Wolfspeed Inc. a conditional 30-year loan commitment letter worth $1.5 billion. Wolfspeed, which makes silicon carbide and gallium nitride materials, plans to use the funds to upgrade GaN epitaxy capabilities and develop radiation hardening for its products. The loan requires Wolfspeed to issue warrants for up to 7.5% of its fully diluted equity, and remains subject to due diligence, government approvals and existing lender consent.
A webinar featuring Dr. Pavel Terekhov, a postdoctoral researcher at NIST, will explain how combining finite element simulation with multipole decomposition in COMSOL Multiphysics can predict and explain optical resonances in dielectric metasurfaces. The talk will cover a crystalline silicon metasurface built from quadrumer meta-atoms that shows enhanced absorption from two coexisting multipole mechanisms, as well as ongoing work on a gallium nitride metasurface using four interacting multipoles to control reflection, transmission, and quasi-bound-states-in-the-continuum behavior.
A Virginia Tech graduate student, Hugh Grennan, demonstrated a printable composite made by mixing eutectic gallium-indium liquid metal into uncured PDMS silicone, shown on the 3D Printing Nerd YouTube channel. The mixture forms tiny liquid-metal droplets encased in silicone that stay conductive even after being cut, and when printed on a syringe-fed 3D printer, the droplets can be stretched into elongated shapes that channel heat in a chosen direction.
Belgian federal prosecutors arrested a 52-year-old Beijing-born Belgian resident, identified as H.L., on May 10 at a Brussels airport as he attempted to board a China-bound flight. He is accused of transferring gallium nitride semiconductor trade secrets from BelGaN, where he worked, to GanKool, a Chinese firm developing identical chip technology and founded shortly after he joined BelGaN. He now faces charges including industrial espionage and unlawful disclosure of business secrets.