Northrop Grumman has developed a new gallium nitride (GaN) microwave chip that operates in the W-band spectrum, a high-frequency range used for advanced radar, satellite communications, and emerging wireless networks.
The company said the chip was designed, manufactured, and made market-ready in less than six months, an unusually short timeline for a high-frequency semiconductor intended for defense and commercial applications.
Built at Northrop Grumman’s semiconductor facility in Redondo Beach, California, the chip is designed to strengthen wireless signals while operating at frequencies capable of transmitting large amounts of data with low latency.
According to the company, the technology could support secure military communications, next-generation radar systems, satellite links, and future 5G and 6G wireless networks.
Faster signals, smaller hardware
The W-band occupies frequencies between roughly 75 and 110 gigahertz, offering significantly more bandwidth than lower-frequency wireless systems. The added spectrum can help enable faster data transmission, higher-resolution sensing, and more secure communications.
W-band technologies are attracting growing interest because they can handle far larger amounts of data than many conventional wireless systems. The frequencies are increasingly being explored for applications ranging from high-resolution imaging and advanced sensing to satellite communications and future mobile networks.
Microscope photo of the high-frequency GaN microwave chip. Credit – Northrop Grumman
However, operating at such high frequencies requires specialized semiconductor materials and designs capable of maintaining performance while managing power and heat, areas where GaN-based devices have gained increasing attention.
Northrop Grumman said the new chip fully utilizes this portion of the radio spectrum to improve signal performance while reducing the need for larger and more power-intensive equipment.
Gallium nitride has become a key material for advanced radio-frequency electronics because it can operate at higher power levels and frequencies than conventional silicon-based devices. The material is already widely used in military radars, electronic warfare systems, and satellite communications hardware.
The company said the chip can act as a signal amplifier, helping wireless systems transmit and receive data more efficiently. In military applications, that could improve secure communications and data transfer between platforms and satellites. Commercially, the technology could help support future wireless networks as demand for higher data rates continues to grow.
Defense To 6G
The project was developed through the California DREAMS hub of the Microelectronics Commons program, a public-private initiative aimed at accelerating domestic semiconductor innovation.
The program is funded by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and brings together industry, government, and academic partners to speed the development of advanced microelectronics technologies.
Northrop Grumman said the rapid development cycle demonstrates how collaborative manufacturing and design efforts can shorten the path from concept to deployment.
The company manufactures microelectronics at two US-based facilities and produces millions of semiconductor components annually for defense and commercial customers. Its Microelectronics Center has been involved in semiconductor development for more than seven decades.
As governments and industries seek faster communications, more capable radar systems, and advanced sensing technologies, high-frequency GaN devices are expected to play an increasingly important role in future wireless infrastructure.
NASA’s missions these days rarely feature all-male crews. Jared Isaacman, its administrator, said women play prominent roles throughout the space agency.
In our latest episode of Lexicon, we sat down with Tom Grainger, Commercial Vice President at Niron Magnetics, to explore the hidden role permanent magnets play in modern technology and electrification.
From electric vehicles and wind turbines to smartphones and speakers, these components are essential to countless devices we rely on every day. Tom also discussed the growing strategic importance of rare earth magnets and the risks associated with highly concentrated global supply chains.
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Reinventing the magnet
Permanent magnets rarely make headlines. Yet, as Grainger explained to us, they sit at the core of modern electrification.
“Pretty well every modern electronic device relies on permanent magnets,” he told us. “The car you drive, the speakers you’re hearing me come out of right now, the microphone that’s picking up my voice, all of those are permanent magnet devices,” he added.
“Relying on rare earth magnets today means relying on a supply chain that is over 90 percent concentrated in China. Single point of failure geopolitically,” he said.
But it turns out the issue is not limited to mining.
“All through the supply chain, you see that concentration,” he explained. The result is what he calls a pinch point. “You’ve got a pinch point on which the global economy hinges,” he added.
A magnet-hungry world
Furthermore, the demand side only intensifies the pressure. “As cars install more speakers and compete on infotainment and a great in-cab experience, doubling the speakers doubles the magnets,” Grainger told us.
“Imagine as you move from an F-35 to a swarm of drones, you’re saving a lot of money, saving a lot of material, but you are greatly increasing your magnet consumption,” he added.
Even in a stable geopolitical climate, supply would be strained. “Even if everything is peachy globally, there are just not enough rare earths to solve this magnet-hungry global economy,” he added.
“For some critical rare earths, China put in place export controls,” he said. Those elements are required for high-temperature applications, which represent roughly 80 percent of use cases. Automotive production slowed. Defense programs accelerated alternative sourcing efforts. Phones, he recalls, were “ringing off the hook.”
“Magnets may already be as strategically important as semiconductors,” he added.
Forty years without a new material
Beyond supply risk, Grainger argues, there is a deeper technological constraint. The last major breakthrough in magnetic materials came in the 1980s with rare-earth magnets.
“The last time we had a new magnetic material that has had any sort of real commercial impact was rare earth magnets in the 1980s,” he told us.
That means four decades of motor and generator design constrained by the same materials. He uses a culinary analogy. “You can imagine you are a chef. You’ve been working with four ingredients. Suddenly, you have another option. It is just an unlock for breakthroughs in motor design,” he added.
“We’ve spent four decades without a new key and without a new door open,” he said. That new key, according to Niron, is iron nitride.
Iron nitride to the rescue
According to Grainger, iron nitride is not a brand-new discovery, being first identified in the 1950s. Later attempts in Japan produced promising but inconsistent results. The missing piece was the ability to understand and control the material at the nanoscale.
“We did not have the technology at the time to be able to explain, just from a physics perspective, what makes iron nitride so magnetic, and then to reliably produce iron nitride in this magnetic phase,” Grainger told us.
Advances in imaging and characterization in the 2000s and early 2010s changed that. “The ability to see what you’re doing when you make an experimental attempt to measure it was unlocked by advances in characterization imaging,” he added.
From there, it took more than a decade to move from laboratory research to bulk, commercially viable magnets. “It was a decade from that program to actually having commercially viable bulk permanent magnets,” he said.
The potential upside is significant. “For a rare earth permanent magnet made of neodymium, that number is about 1.6 Tesla,” he explained. “For iron nitride, that equivalent limit is 2.4 Tesla,” he added.
“That ceiling is 50 percent higher than rare earth permanent magnets,” he said.
Temperature performance is another factor. Rare earth magnets rely on scarce heavy rare earth elements such as dysprosium and terbium to maintain performance at high temperatures. “Iron nitride, just by virtue of its underlying crystal structure and properties, gets that temperature stability for free,” Grainger said.
Unlocking variable flux motors
One of the most intriguing applications discussed in the episode is the variable flux motor. Traditional permanent magnet motors use a technique called flux weakening at high speeds, which requires continuous electrical input.
Grainger described it with a metaphor: “think of it as holding a spring. If you move your hand, it pops right back up. And so you’re using power to do that.”
Variable flux offers a different approach. “Instead of continuous energy expenditure holding down that spring, it’s like a ratchet. You push down the spring once, and you lock it into place,” he said.
The result is improved efficiency across the speed range. In electric vehicles, that translates directly to range and battery savings. “You get a 2 percent decrease in battery materials. The cost savings on that don’t just pay for your magnets, that pays for your whole motor,” he added.
The same logic applies to appliances and data centers. Efficiency gains compound quickly when systems operate continuously.
Scaling manufacturing
Moving from breakthrough to production required another leap. “Niron has been introducing iron nitride permanent magnets, and we’re doing so on a nano scale,” Grainger told us.
“Our lab breakthrough was then the second breakthrough, which is really the process. And the process in that case becomes the product,” he said. The goal is modular scalability. Facilities can be replicated in multiple regions, reducing geographic concentration risk.
Iron nitride is composed of iron and nitrogen. Both are abundant and widely sourced. “Anywhere you have an industrialized society, you’ve got an opportunity for iron nitride domestic magnet production,” he said.
A strategic shift
Looking at the bigger picture, Grainger drew a historical analogy to the Haber-Bosch process, which enabled synthetic fertilizer production and reduced reliance on guano mining. “What iron nitride is, is that shift,” he said. “So, what if we could avoid all of that digging. What if we could avoid the reliance on what is fundamentally any mine has a shelf life,” he added.
So, instead of finite ore bodies, he describes a factory-built approach. “This is innovation as a cookie-cutter. Sort of the abundance philosophy around magnets,” he told us.
And, defense customers have taken notice. Programs initially planned for five to seven-year development timelines were “suddenly on 18-month fast tracks” after export controls tightened.
What the next decade has in store
Looking ahead, Grainger defines success in pragmatic terms. “Success for iron nitride is that we’re not talking about magnets as a scarce or critical pain point in global supply chains,” he added.
Beyond stability, he anticipates innovation. New motor and generator designs built around the expanded magnetic ceiling. Localized manufacturing in Asia, Europe, and North America. Reduced vulnerability and expanded design freedom.
“It can be hard sometimes to think about, can new things be done that aren’t just new assembly or new software?” he told us. “And absolutely they can.”
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TO SEM PALAVRAS ... TERCEIRO LOTE FOI LIBERADO! Na notícia de hoje:Entre os materiais presentes na terceira divulgação de arquivos sobre OVNIs, um dos casos mais recentes chama atenção por ter ocorrido em julho de 2025, no nordeste dos Estados Unidos.
De acordo com o relato oficial, por volta das 21h no horário local, uma testemunha retornava do trabalho quando observou uma luz intensa nos fundos de sua propriedade. O fenômeno estava posicionado sob uma fileira de árvores, a cerca de 7,6 metros de altura e aproximadamente 27 metros de distância.
Candidato à Presidência do Brasil afirma que pode divulgar arquivos sobre OVNIs se for eleito
Durante entrevista ao programa American Alchemy, o ex-ministro da Defesa e candidato à Presidência, Aldo Rebelo, afirmou que o Brasil possui registros oficiais sobre fenômenos aéreos não identificados e declarou que poderá divulgar documentos atualmente sigilosos caso seja eleito.
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ShinyHunters claims it exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, where it says it stole 40GB of student and billing data. "ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand," reports The Register. From the report: "University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents," a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. "We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs." They didn't say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims.
A Google threat intelligence report published Thursday afternoon corroborated ShinyHunters' claims to have compromised more than 100 organizations. Google said it spotted malicious activity, "consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273," between May 27 and June 9, and notified more than 100 global orgs "whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these, we're told, are based in the US and 68 percent are in the higher-education sector. Oracle has released a "patch availability document," but it's unclear whether a patch is currently available.
Extremely powerful large language models (LLMs) still operate as though they’re typing on a keyboard, processing workloads in a simple left-to-right fashion. But in locally-run, single-user scenarios, this sequential processing can leave graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs) underutilized.
Google is betting that DiffusionGemma can get around this bottleneck. The new experimental open model generates text “exceptionally fast,” creating entire blocks of text simultaneously through diffusion techniques rather than through token-by-token processing. The company says this technique results in 4x faster inference compared to auto-regressive models that rely on sequential processing.
It can also save users money. Technology analyst Carmi Levy noted that existing pay-per-token monetization models “penalize the use of less than optimally efficient AI solutions.”
But DiffusionGemma “could herald a new generation of task-defined, efficient solutions that can enable expanded compute capacity without draining the operations budget,” he said.
A contrast to left-to-right processing
Built on Google’s Gemma 4 family and its Gemini Diffusion research, DiffusionGemma is a 26B mixture-of-experts (MoE) model designed to maximize text output generation.
It essentially shifts how models use hardware, giving processors a larger hunk of work each cycle so it can draft full 256-token paragraphs in sequence. This allows the model to generate text up to 4x faster on GPUs, Google claims. It activates only 3.8B parameters during inference, and, when quantized, can fit within 18GB VRAM on high-end consumer GPUs like Nvidia RTX 5090.
“It upgrades your model inference from a single, sequential typewriter to a massive printing press that stamps the entire block of text simultaneously,” Google research scientists Brendan O’Donoghue and Sebastian Flennerhag wrote in a blog post.
AI image generators begin with pure, random ‘visual noise’ and iteratively refine that into a finalized picture (what’s known as ‘diffusion’); DiffusionGemma applies this same process to text. It does not generate tokens in order, but begins with a “canvas of random placeholder tokens” that it processes in multiple passes, identifying the context tokens it feels are most relevant and using those to refine the rest.
The model has the ability to self-correct, using confidence scoring to re-evaluate tokens in the next pass. “The model iteratively refines its own output, allowing it to evaluate the entire text block at once to fix mistakes in real-time,” O’Donoghue and Flennerhag explained.
DiffusionGemma also has bidirectional attention, they wrote. “Generating 256 tokens in parallel with each forward pass allows every token to attend to all others.” This can be particularly helpful in domains that are non-linear in nature, such as mathematical graphs, code infilling, and in-line editing, they said.
DiffusionGemma is optimized across Nvidia’s hardware stack, making it compatible with consumer setups as well as with high-performance enterprise systems like Hopper and Blackwell.
Because it is released under the Apache 2.0 license, developers can freely use, modify, distribute, and commercialize the software using their preferred tools. It can be run on GPUs or in the cloud through Google Cloud Model Garden or Nvidia NIM, and is available on Hugging Face, GitHub, and vLLM, with support for the open-source library llama.cpp coming soon.
Key use cases
The model is particularly useful in local workflows that are “speed critical,” such as generation of non-linear text structures, and unlocks what Google calls “new patterns of model behavior” like multimodal understanding and generating and rendering code in near real-time.
Levy explained, “DiffusionGemma is particularly well suited for interactive coding and editing where its efficiency allows rapid processing and iterations,” noting that its ability to fit within 18GB of VRAM and its deployability on commonly available local GPUs can potentially benefit customer service-related workloads that lean heavily on real-time interaction and local processing.
“DiffusionGemma also incorporates a thinking mode that is especially adept at problem solving,” he said. For instance, the model was fine-tuned to play Sudoku, a typically challenging task for autoregressive models because each token depends on future tokens. This “rather handily” illustrates the model’s capability to solve more complex problems, Levy noted.
Limitations
Google freely admits that DiffusionGemma is geared to specific workflows, and there are “key trade-offs.”
The model is engineered for small batch size inferencing and low-latency, high-speed generation low-to-medium batch sizes on a “single capable accelerator.”
In high-QPS cloud serving environments, (where infrastructure is designed to handle tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per second with ultra-low latency), DiffusionGemma’s parallel coding “offers diminishing returns,” and can even result in higher serving costs, Google conceded. In addition, its overall output quality is lower than that of standard Gemma 4, which is built for apps demanding maximum quality.
However, Levy noted that while DiffusionGemma “can be less precise than other models in certain workloads,” subsequent refinement cycles could overcome this limitation.
While Google isn’t sharing runtime costs, it’s clear that this is an efficiency play, he added. “When deployed across the kinds of workloads that would optimally benefit from its architecture, DiffusionGemma seems to have the potential to reduce processing overhead and related costs,” he said.
📷 Mark Johnston from Scottsdale, Arizona A line of filaments march toward the limb of the Sun, which itself is bedecked with multiple prominences in this Hα image. Both phenomena are made of loops and tendrils of plasma that arch off the surface of the Sun; their varying appearance depends on the viewing geometry. TheContinue reading "Prominent filaments"
The Bornean ferret badger is a small carnivore with the slinky body of a ferret and a face mask like a badger. A new study confirms that it lives only in the mountains of Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. Ferret badgers are nocturnal carnivores, widespread across Southeast Asia, but the Bornean ferret badger (Melogale everetti) lives only in a narrow mountain range on the island of Borneo. A group of researchers from the Bornean Carnivore Programme, part of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), Sabah Forestry Department, and Sabah Parks set out to understand the Bornean ferret-badger’s distribution within Sabah. Between 2021 and 2024, the research team set up 188 camera-trap stations across Sabah’s western highlands and recorded the badgers more than 400 times, discovering a new population in the process. The new population in the Nuluhon-Trusmadi Forest Reserve of Malaysian Borneo, expanded the known range of the species, but photo-traps and habitat modeling showed that Bornean ferret badgers are only found within the greater Sabah’s Kinabalu-Crocker-Trusmadi mountain landscape. “I grew up in Tambunan and had never seen or even heard of the Bornean ferret badger,” said Mohammad Aliyuddin bin Jaini, field manager of the Bornean Carnivore Programme in a press release. “I decided to place some camera traps around my family’s farm simply to see what wildlife might be there, and I was amazed when a Bornean ferret badger appeared in the photographs. To discover that an Endangered species found only in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
On June 6, nine female white rhinos arrived in Mozambique’s Zinave National Park following a two-day translocation. Their arrival marks the culmination of nearly 10 years of rhino reintroduction efforts in the park, aimed at rebuilding a viable breeding population of the mammals in Zinave after decades of local extinction. The white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum) were transferred from the Manketti Game Reserve in South Africa and join another 30 white rhinos and 22 black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) introduced to Zinave since 2022. “[The translocation] went fantastically well,” Antony Alexander, a regional manager for the conservation nonprofit Peace Parks Foundation, which manages Zinave and organized the translocation, told Mongabay by phone. “I’m sure they’re happy to be in the wild again.” Zinave, which covers around 4,090 square kilometers (1,580 square miles) in the southern province of Inhambane, has previously been called a “silent park” after decades of civil war wiped out much of its wildlife. “You could almost sense the very low levels of life with insects and birds and smells and sounds,” said Alexander, describing Zinave before wildlife restoration efforts began. “That’s changed dramatically over the last 10 years.” Among the species reintroduced since 2016 are the critically endangered black rhino and Selous’ zebra (Equus quagga selousi), as well as the endangered African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana), vulnerable leopard (Panthera pardus) and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta). The rhinos help maintain Zinave’s ecosystem as they are bulk grazers, eating a high volume of grass. This helps prevent fire risk, as overgrown…This article was originally published on Mongabay
TAMPA, Fla. — Avanti Communications is moving to close a chapter on the debt-fueled geostationary expansion that once defined the British satellite operator, with plans to sell the youngest payload […]
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