■Interest rates
Bond firms look for rise
The Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in the second half next year as fiscal stimulus and 12 interest-rate reductions spur economic growth in the US, Wall Street's biggest bond-trading firms said. The central bank will lift its target rate for overnight loans between banks, or federal funds, from a 44-year low of 1.25 percent by the end of September 2003, according to a majority of economists at the 22 firms that trade with the Fed, known as primary dealers. The last time the central bank raised rates was in May 2000. Policy makers meet today, less than a week after the US unemployment rate rose to 6 percent in November, matching an eight-year high reached in April.
■ Transistors
IBM thinks really small
International Business Machines Corp scientists have built the world's smallest working silicon transistor, which may help reduce the size of computers and other electronic devices. The transistor is six nanometers in length, which are about 20,000 times smaller than a human hair. It's 10 times smaller than state-of-the-art transistors in production today, IBM said. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Researchers are trying to shrink computing to microscopic levels to speed processors, cut power consumption and handle more complex problems. Details of the transistor will be published in a technical paper to be presented next week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. "The ability to build working transistors at these dimensions could allow us to put 100 times more transistors into a computer chip than is currently possible," said Randy Isaac, IBM Research vice president of science and technology, in a statement.
Agencies
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
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