Category Archives: Technology

As the World Races to Make More Chips, the Next Bottleneck May Be Femtosecond Lasers

 Nikolajus Gavrillinas, co-founder and CEO of LITILIT. (Source: LITILIT)

July 1, Vilnius, Lithuania. Last week, Apple announced that it would increase prices for its MacBooks and iPads by 20%, making it the latest company to raise electronics prices amid soaring chip costs and shortages. According to experts, the solution to increasing chip production lies not only in expanding manufacturing capacity but also in securing the right precision tools.

At the end of June, Apple said that it would raise prices for its devices due to chip shortages, noting that it had “never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.” Other tech companies, including Microsoft, Sony, Dell and HP have also increased prices or are planning to do so. The pressure is being felt across the whole electronics market: over the past year, memory chip prices have spiked approximately six-fold, according to a Morgan Stanley report quoted by Reuters.

The main reason for the price hikes is the AI boom, which has driven memory chip costs to levels that manufacturers can no longer absorb.

According to experts at LITILIT, a startup manufacturing femtosecond lasers, as chip demand grows, the world may also face a shortage of precision tools to manufacture them. Nikolajus Gavrilinas, CEO of LITILIT, says that femtosecond lasers are increasingly used in manufacturing the latest generation of semiconductors due to highly accurate processing with minimal thermal impact.

“On a modern chip node, even sub-microscopic thermal damage makes a component unusable. As chips become more complex, manufacturers turn to femtosecond lasers that can remove material without causing any thermal damage to the surrounding structure. Since femtosecond lasers are also increasingly used in the production of the equipment for the data centers and many other advanced applications, the world might also face a bottleneck, as femtosecond laser production remains concentrated in a small number of facilities worldwide,” Gavrilinas says.

Gavrilinas notes that having strong domestic femtosecond laser production capacity is especially important for Europe, which has recently proposed Chips Act 2, aiming to double the EU’s global semiconductor market share from 10% to 20% by 2030. Similarly, the US and China are also pushing to increase local chip manufacturing.

To address the potential shortage of femtosecond lasers, LITILIT has just broken ground on a new femtosecond laser factory in Vilnius. The factory targets a production capacity of 3,000 lasers per year within a couple of years of launch, making it the highest-capacity femtosecond laser facility in the world.

The company is producing lasers based on a few patented inventions (link to patent 1, link 2), made by Kęstutis Regelskis, Nerijus Rusteika, and Gavrilinas, in close collaboration with the Center for Physical Sciences and Technology (FTMC) in Vilnius. The company’s long-term vision is to bring femtosecond lasers to massive-scale applications, with similar cost, integration simplicity, and reliability as nanosecond fiber lasers.

“Typical femtosecond lasers can deliver exceptional application performance, but are notoriously difficult to manufacture and require highly qualified specialists in production. We developed lasers with reduced component complexity, a purpose-built design, a high level of automation, and production processes adapted to serial manufacturing. This makes them ideal for serial production at the scale required for manufacturing semiconductors and other components that demand high-precision tools,” Gavrilinas explains.

According to Gavrilinas, the lesson from the current chip shortage is that advanced manufacturing depends on more than the capacity of the lithography process. It also requires access to other enabling tools behind next-generation production: from femtosecond lasers to advanced packaging and precision material-processing systems.

Engineering the next generation of semiconductor materials, one layer at a time

News Release: Engineering the next generation of semiconductor materials, one layer at a time

July 1, 2026 — Silicon is an essential element for creating semiconductors, the building blocks of all modern-day computing technologies. However, as devices continue to shrink, engineers are approaching the limits of what silicon can achieve. 

Scality and OVHcloud accelerate European digital sovereignty with new cloud storage offering

Partners unveil a sovereign, cyber-resilient storage platform designed for the most demanding AI workloads, combining high-performance object storage, cloud-native infrastructure, and full data control, with no dependence on third-party hyperscalers

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30, 2026 – Scality, a global leader in data infrastructure software for the AI era, and OVHcloud, a global cloud provider and European cloud leader, today announced an expanded technology partnership and a new joint storage platform built for European digital sovereignty. The solution gives organizations full control over sensitive data, with no dependency on U.S. hyperscalers,  while delivering the performance and resilience required for the most demanding AI workloads.

Deployment options include a 100% dedicated sovereign cloud and on-premises via the OVHcloud OPCP (On-Prem Cloud Platform), with backup replication across multiple availability zones (multi-AZ).

The expanded partnership addresses two urgent business needs: maintaining control over sensitive data in an increasingly demanding regulatory environment and providing private infrastructure capable of supporting the most intensive artificial intelligence workloads.

Sovereign infrastructure, uncompromised performance

Today, digital transformation faces a contradiction: organizations want the agility of the cloud but cannot afford to expose critical data to foreign jurisdictions. This challenge is particularly acute in healthcare, finance, defense, and public services, where strict regulations such as European GDPR, DORA, NIS2, and HIPAA for the U.S. require data localization and complete control over information assets.

The combination of Scality and OVHcloud OPCP solutions directly addresses this challenge. Scality RING and Scality ARTESCA provide massive, resilient, S3-compatible object storage deployed directly on the customer’s on-premises infrastructure. OPCP adds cloud-native orchestration, a managed services catalog, and deployment automation, all built on a foundation independent of foreign public cloud providers.

Beyond the on-premises layer, this alliance also extends to a dedicated storage offering on OVHcloud Bare Metal infrastructure through the HGR-STOR range. This setup enables organizations to easily deploy off-site backups with private S3 compatibility, integrated with leading cyber-resilience tools such as Veeam and Commvault, all hosted directly by OVHcloud. A key advantage is the guarantee of 100% dedicated servers, with no resource sharing with other customers, providing predictable performance and maximum isolation. It also supports a robust business continuity plan (BCP) by enabling controlled failover to OVHcloud infrastructure in the event of a disaster or primary site outage.

For end users, the result is a modern, seamless, sovereign cloud experience with predictable costs and without the legal risks associated with U.S. hyperscalers.

AI close to the data

Artificial intelligence requires vast amounts of data and computing power, but it is equally demanding in terms of latency and confidentiality. Training models or performing inference on mission-critical data, like medical records, financial transactions, and industrial telemetry, requires processing it where it resides.

The joint Scality-OVHcloud OPCP platform addresses this need end-to-end. Scality’s high-performance object storage, which is GPU-direct compatible and optimized for AI data pipelines, integrates natively with OPCP’s managed on-premises infrastructure. Organizations can train models, run MLOps pipelines, and deploy AI applications in near real time directly within their own environments, without compromising data security or regulatory compliance.

“OVHcloud and Scality share the same conviction: sovereignty is not a barrier to innovation — it is the prerequisite. By combining our high-performance object storage with the OPCP platform, we empower companies to scale their AI projects without ever sacrificing control over their data.”

– Emilio Roman, Chief Revenue Officer, Scality

“The OVHcloud OPCP platform was designed so that software vendors and their customers can benefit from the power of the cloud wherever they need it: on their own premises. Scality is the natural and recognized partner for high-performance storage solutions for the most critical data. Together, OVHcloud and Scality provide a sovereign infrastructure backed by more than 25 years of OVHcloud expertise and ready for AI.”

– Sylvie Houliere Mayca, Managing Director France Belux & MEA, OVHcloud

The joint solution was featured at VivaTech, June 17–20, in Paris Expo Porte de Versailles.

Tezos’ Ushuaia Upgrade Goes Live, Unlocking Greater Bandwidth for Data-Intensive Applications

Paris, France—30 June, 2026—The Tezos protocol has been successfully upgraded, with no fork or disruption to the network, following an on-chain governance process which saw broad participation from bakers (validators) and other community members. The activation marks another step along the Tezos X roadmap, advancing Tezos’ scalability and laying the groundwork for a greatly improved staking experience as well as post-quantum security. Developed by Nomadic Labs, Trilitech, and Functori, Ushuaia is Tezos’ 21st protocol upgrade – proposed, adopted, and seamlessly activated through on-chain governance by network stakeholders. 

Yann Régis-Gianas, Head of Engineering at Nomadic Labs, said, “With Ushuaia, Tezos Layer 1 does exactly what a modern settlement layer should do: increase data availability for the applications arriving with Tezos X, while preparing the cryptographic migration path long before quantum risk becomes urgent. It is a pragmatic upgrade: more capacity today, and safer foundations for tomorrow.”

Following the activation of the Ushuaia upgrade on mainnet, Data Availability Layer (DAL) bandwidth has increased to 10MB/s, opening the door for applications on Tezos to move 15x more data than before. Tezos can now support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second without data publication becoming a bottleneck, making it well suited for games, high-frequency DeFi, and other data-intensive applications. Rather than being a hardware-driven leap, the increase comes from a combination of software optimizations and updated protocol parameters. Security remains unchanged; the same attestation thresholds, rewards, and redundancy factors apply, meaning decentralization isn’t being traded for throughput. Ushuaia also makes DAL attestation dynamic, so operations like fast withdrawals on Etherlink (Tezos EVM), are now confirmed noticeably faster.

The Ushuaia protocol code also includes further features that have not been activated on mainnet, but are now available on testnet for community assessment and feedback ahead of potential activation in a later protocol upgrade. These include the introduction of quantum-resistant user keys via the NIST-standardized ML-DSA-44 post-quantum signature scheme. While this feature remains on testnet for now, its introduction marks an early first step towards quantum readiness, well before any real threat materializes. Also coming to testnet with Ushuaia is enshrined liquid staking, a mechanism enabling users to deposit XTZ into a protocol-recognized contract and receive sTEZ, an FA2.1 token that increases in value relative to XTZ, as staking rewards accrue. It lets users keep funds liquid while participating in staking, without relying on centralized third-parties. The accrual model also simplifies accounting and DeFi integration. The feature is still being developed in cooperation with the broader Tezos community, and mainnet activation is being targeted for a future protocol upgrade.

Arthur Breitman, co-founder of Tezos, said, “Among other improvements, Ushuaia marks the first step in a timely transition to post quantum cryptography, a change every blockchain will need to undergo.”

21 successful upgrades later, Tezos continues to demonstrate its unique ability to evolve continuously and implement new features that better serve the needs of the builders and individuals developing on the network, laying the groundwork for the needs of future users without compromising on decentralization. More information about the changes now live on mainnet, as well as those which are feature-flagged for future updates, can be found on the official Nomadic Labs blog.

Delhi Government’s EV Push to Boost Investment, Manufacturing and Green Jobs: PHDCCI

New Delhi, June 30: The Delhi government’s electric vehicle (EV) policy push is expected to catalyse investment, strengthen manufacturing activity, and generate green employment opportunities, according to industry body PHDCCI.

The chamber said that the continued focus on EV adoption and supporting infrastructure will help accelerate the transition towards clean mobility in the national capital. It added that the policy environment is likely to encourage both domestic and global investors to expand their presence in the EV ecosystem.

According to PHDCCI, increased investment in charging infrastructure, battery technology, and related manufacturing units will play a key role in building a sustainable mobility framework. The initiative is also expected to create significant employment opportunities across manufacturing, services, and allied sectors.

Industry experts noted that Delhi’s EV push aligns with broader national goals of reducing carbon emissions and promoting sustainable urban transport systems.

PHDCCI expressed optimism that sustained policy support and industry collaboration will further strengthen Delhi’s position as a key hub for electric mobility in the coming years.

NITI Aayog Highlights GCC Ecosystem as a Key Driver of India’s Innovation-Led Growth

June 30: NITI Aayog has stated that India’s rapidly expanding Global Capability Centre (GCC) ecosystem is well-positioned to power the country’s next phase of innovation-led economic growth.

According to the policy think tank, GCCs have evolved into strategic hubs for research, product development, digital innovation, artificial intelligence, and advanced technology services, playing an increasingly significant role in global business operations.

The report attributes India’s growing prominence in the GCC landscape to its large pool of skilled professionals, expanding digital infrastructure, and a supportive business environment. It also emphasises the importance of continued investment in talent development, innovation, and collaboration between industry, academia, and government.

NITI Aayog noted that strengthening the GCC ecosystem will not only enhance India’s competitiveness in the global knowledge economy but also create high-value employment opportunities and accelerate technology-driven growth.

The report calls for sustained policy support and a future-ready ecosystem to enable India to emerge as a leading global hub for innovation and enterprise services.

Finance Ministry Approves INR 1.25 Lakh Crore for India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 Boost

New Delhi, June 30, 2026: The Finance Ministry has approved a ₹1.25 lakh crore proposal for India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 2.0, marking a major step towards strengthening India’s position in global chip manufacturing, according to official sources.

The initiative aims to expand semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the country by setting up new fabrication and allied facilities, strengthening the electronics supply chain, and boosting domestic production of critical components.

Officials said the mission is expected to reduce India’s dependence on imported chips, while attracting greater investment from global technology companies and creating new opportunities for jobs and innovation in the sector.

The proposal is expected to enhance India’s self-reliance in key technology areas, including electronics, telecommunications, automotive systems, and defence applications.

The plan will now be placed before the Union Cabinet for final approval. Further details regarding implementation are expected to be announced after clearance.

India’s UPI Goes Live in Greece, Boosting Global Digital Payment Reach

New Delhi, June 30: India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has gone live in Greece, marking a significant step in the global expansion of India’s digital public infrastructure, Union Minister Piyush Goyal said.

 Pic Credit: https://x.com/PiyushGoyal

The launch enables seamless digital payments between India and Greece, strengthening financial connectivity and making cross-border transactions more convenient for users and businesses. Officials said the move reflects growing international acceptance of India’s digital payment ecosystem.

According to the Minister, the expansion of UPI overseas highlights India’s leadership in digital innovation and its efforts to promote interoperable and efficient payment systems globally. He added that such integrations will benefit travelers, businesses, and the Indian diaspora by enabling faster and more secure transactions.

The development is part of India’s broader strategy to extend its digital public infrastructure to partner countries, enhancing financial inclusion and strengthening economic ties.

Further collaborations are expected as India continues to explore new international partnerships for UPI integration.

Tamil Nadu Floats Tender for 2.5 Lakh Devices to Boost Rural Broadband Connectivity

Chennai, June 30: The Tamil Nadu government has floated a tender for the procurement and deployment of 2.5 lakh devices to strengthen rural broadband connectivity across the state.

The initiative is aimed at improving digital infrastructure and ensuring better internet access in rural and remote areas. Officials said the devices will help enhance last-mile connectivity and support the expansion of the state’s broadband network.

The project is expected to improve access to key digital services, including e-governance, education, healthcare, and other online platforms, thereby promoting digital inclusion in underserved regions.

Authorities noted that the tender process will identify suitable vendors responsible for supply, installation, and maintenance of the devices. The rollout is intended to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural areas.

Further details regarding implementation timelines and execution strategy are expected after the tender process is completed.

HighPoint Partners with Insyde® Software to Deliver Secure, OOB OpenBMC Management for Disaggregated NVMe-oF Storage Platform

FREMONT, CA & TAIPEI, TAIWAN –June 30 2026– HighPoint Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of next-generation high-performance storage and connectivity solutions, has announced a partnership with Insyde® Software, a leading provider of UEFI BIOS, OpenBMC and platform root-of-trust firmware. This collaboration introduces enterprise-grade, out-of-band (OOB) OpenBMC management capability to HighPoint’s newly launched RocketStor 4243AS, a 24-bay Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) NVMe-oF rackmount storage platform.

As modern data centers face unprecedented demands, the simultaneous, aggressive scaling of both raw performance and massive storage capacity has pushed traditional server architectures past their physical limits. To prevent resource bottlenecks in AI, machine learning, and High-Performance Computing (HPC), data centers are rapidly shifting toward composable architectures that decouple these assets—allowing ultra-dense flash pools to scale capacity and performance independently over Network / PCIe Fabrics, while making out-of-band management a mission-critical requirement.

The RocketStor 4243AS features Dual 100GbE connectivity network connectivity, native support for both RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and TCP network protocols, and a built-in hardware BMC baseboard. By integrating Insyde’s mature OpenBMC system management software, the RocketStor 4243AS offers fully compliant Redfish® framework, giving operators complete infrastructure visibility, strict security controls, and intelligent thermal defense systems.

“The RocketStor 4243AS represents a major architectural milestone for HighPoint as we expand our lane-optimized heritage into networked fabric storage,” said May Hwang, Director of Marketing at HighPoint Technologies, Inc. “By combining our line-rate Dual 100GbE hardware bridging architecture with Insyde’s secure OpenBMC solution, we are effectively eliminating the ‘enterprise tax’ that has historically plagued CDI deployments. Data center operators are no longer forced into costly, vendor-locked storage ecosystems. With this unified platform, they can deploy a completely hardware-neutral, ultra-dense flash pool that scales performance and capacity independently over Network/PCIe Fabrics, while fitting seamlessly into their existing automated management frameworks.”

“Data center teams deploying CDI at scale need both performance and manageability on the same platform,” said Bryant Lee, AVP of Product Marketing, Server & AI Infra, Insyde Software. “Supervyse brings Insyde’s production-proven OpenBMC expertise to HighPoint’s RocketStor 4243AS — delivering Redfish-native orchestration, hardware-anchored secure boot, and real-time thermal control without touching the high-speed storage network. That’s the out-of-band management hyperscale environments now demand.”

Synergized Solutions & Core Benefits

Purpose-engineered for hyperscale storage workloads, Insyde’s Supervyse® OpenBMC architecture transforms HighPoint’s high-density NVMe-oF platform into a fully orchestrated infrastructure asset—resolving the operational bottlenecks that have long constrained large-scale CDI deployments:

• Uncompromised Fabric Performance via True OOB Isolation: The RocketStor 4243AS offloads storage traffic entirely to its hardware fabric engine, achieving line-rate Dual 100GbE speeds. Insyde’s OpenBMC operates on a completely independent management plane, ensuring that continuous real-time telemetry polling, asset discovery, and user authentication never interrupt or add latency to the high-speed storage network.

• Effortless Scale-Out via Network Switches: Because the RocketStor 4243AS operates as an autonomous networked target rather than direct-attached storage (DAS), capacity grows by plugging additional units into existing leaf-spine fabrics. Supervyse handles the rest—zero-touch discovery, policy-driven remote provisioning, and lights-out commissioning of new pools, with no physical access or host reboots required.

• Proactive Thermal & Dynamic Cooling Defense: Driving 24 high-performance NVMe SSDs in a compact rackmount chassis generates significant heat under sustained workloads. Supervyse draws on Insyde’s deep firmware engineering capability to continuously sample slot-level thermal sensors and dynamically tune fan PWM curves in real time—preempting NVMe thermal throttling and locking in IOPS consistency through the most demanding AI and HPC ingest cycles.

Key Technical Features of Supervyse OpenBMC Solution

Supervyse OpenBMC  provides the RocketStor 4243AS with a suite of enterprise-grade features designed to optimize data center orchestration and asset security:

• Full Redfish® API Compliance: Supervyse delivers a fully DMTF-compliant RESTful API surface, enabling DevOps and infrastructure teams to integrate the RocketStor 4243AS directly into market-leading software-defined storage (SDS) platforms and private cloud operating systems—out-of-the-box interoperability with industry-standard orchestration stacks.

• Hardware-Root-of-Trust (RoT) Secure Boot: Implements comprehensive cryptographic validation of BMC firmware images to shield out-of-band management interfaces from sophisticated supply-chain attacks and unauthorized local modifications.

• Slot-Level Drive Presence & Dynamic LED Drive Controls:  Interfacing directly with the RocketStor 4243AS backplane via low-level management buses to log NVMe drive placement changes and command the physical drive tray LEDs (fault, identify, activity), minimizing repair windows for field technicians.

• Advanced Out-of-Band Remote Access: Offering a clean, intuitive web-based GUI with an encrypted Secure Shell Protocol (SSH), Supervyse give operators a secure remote path to configure low-level parameters, cycle device power, and flash firmware—even when the primary 100GbE storage interfaces are down.

Market Impact and Availability

By combining HighPoint’s ultra-dense CDI hardware storage infrastructure with Insyde Software’s hardened management expertise, the joint solution redefines what data center architects can expect from open, disaggregated storage. The RocketStor 4243AS effectively democratizes high-performance NVMe-oF deployments, delivering a scalable, vendor-agnostic architecture that drops seamlessly into modern automated infrastructures without the burden of proprietary storage costs.

The HighPoint RocketStor 4243AS NVMe-oF target platform, fully integrated with Insyde’s secure OpenBMC solution, is available for order immediately through HighPoint’s global network of authorized distribution, resale and system integration partners.

RocketStor 4243AS MSRP USD$ 8,999.00

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HighPoint RocketStor 4243AS NVMe-oF CDI NVMe Hardware Storage Platform