Latest news with #SMD
Barnama
5 days ago
- Business
- Barnama
Sarawak Gathers Govt Agencies, Industry Players For Next Leap In Semiconductors
KUCHING, July 19 (Bernama) -- Sarawak Microelectronics Design (SMD) Semiconductor will host the Sarawak Semiconductor Syndication Session on July 21 here. SMD, in a statement, said the one-day workshop brings together federal and state ministries, government agencies, local universities, training centres and industry players to accelerate Sarawak's development into a cutting-edge semiconductor hub. Jointly organised by the Sarawak Ministry of Education, Innovation and Talent Development (MEITD) and the Sarawak Ministry of International Trade, Industry and Investment (MINTRED), this initiative seeks to translate strategic vision into concrete actions and measurable outcomes, with a strong focus on Sarawak's future generation and economic resilience. The workshop follows the launch of the Sarawak Semiconductor Strategic Framework and the Sarawak Semiconductor Roadmap 2030, officiated by Sarawak Premier Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg in April this year. SMD chief executive officer Shariman Jamil will lead the session with an exclusive presentation of the roadmap, outlining ten strategic steps to build a comprehensive semiconductor ecosystem in Sarawak by 2030. 'This bottom-up approach has been our longstanding practice, ensuring our framework truly reflects industry needs - locally and globally - and unlocks opportunities for Sarawakians. 'This syndication will turn vision into reality, fuelling Sarawak's journey toward becoming the Silicon Nerve Centre of Asia. It's not just ambition. It's happening - and we want everyone to be part of it,' Shariman said in the same statement. Participants are expected to contribute to formulating coordinated strategies that align Sarawak's efforts with national and international objectives. The session's outcomes and strategic recommendations will be formally presented to Abang Johari. -- BERNAMA
Malaysian Reserve
5 days ago
- Business
- Malaysian Reserve
Sarawak gathers gov't agencies, industry players for next leap in semiconductors
KUCHING — Sarawak Microelectronics Design (SMD) Semiconductor will host the Sarawak Semiconductor Syndication Session on July 21 here. SMD, in a statement, said the one-day workshop brings together federal and state ministries, government agencies, local universities, training centres and industry players to accelerate Sarawak's development into a cutting-edge semiconductor hub. Jointly organised by the Sarawak Ministry of Education, Innovation and Talent Development (MEITD) and the Sarawak Ministry of International Trade, Industry and Investment (MINTRED), this initiative seeks to translate strategic vision into concrete actions and measurable outcomes, with a strong focus on Sarawak's future generation and economic resilience. The workshop follows the launch of the Sarawak Semiconductor Strategic Framework and the Sarawak Semiconductor Roadmap 2030, officiated by Sarawak Premier Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg in April this year. SMD chief executive officer Shariman Jamil will lead the session with an exclusive presentation of the roadmap, outlining ten strategic steps to build a comprehensive semiconductor ecosystem in Sarawak by 2030. 'This bottom-up approach has been our longstanding practice, ensuring our framework truly reflects industry needs – locally and globally – and unlocks opportunities for Sarawakians. 'This syndication will turn vision into reality, fuelling Sarawak's journey toward becoming the Silicon Nerve Centre of Asia. It's not just ambition. It's happening – and we want everyone to be part of it,' Shariman said in the same statement. Participants are expected to contribute to formulating coordinated strategies that align Sarawak's efforts with national and international objectives. The session's outcomes and strategic recommendations will be formally presented to Abang Johari. — BERNAMA
Time of India
09-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
S M Datta: A chairman with a heart
By Navroze D Dhondy It was late July 1996. As the Indian Airlines aircraft wobbled a bit and landed in Calcutta's Dum Dum airport, I was welcomed by torrential rain and loud cloudburst. The drive to the Oberoi Grand was a long and torturous one, where the Calcutta traffic truly lived up to its reputation…jams, snarls, water-logging, et al. After checking in to the hotel and doing the customary visit to the main Banquet Hall of the hotel where the SURF Carry-bag launch was to be held in a few weeks, I crossed over to the lobby trying to organise a cab to take me across the Howrah bridge to arrange a supplier of gas for the larger-than-life inflatable Dummy pack of Surf. No cabs were available. No Uber / Ola / Rapido in those days to quickly dial up. It was just my second time in Calcutta (the first as teenager from school) and I had no one to call or check with. Suddenly, I heard a soft-spoken voice in the lobby. He came a little closer and asked 'Is there a problem. Aren't you from Lintas?' It was Mr. S M Datta , who at that time was the Deputy Chairman - Hindustan Lever who saw me scurrying around like a headless chicken, trying to organise the cab. I nodded sheepishly and said, 'Yes, Mr. Datta, there is no cab available to go across to Howrah and check out the gas cylinders we need in the coming fortnight for the SURF conference' I had briefly met Mr. Datta at the HLL BackBay reclamation office when I had gone for a meeting with Mr. Shunu Sen- the then Director Marketing at Levers . The brief introduction and hello while he walked out of Shunu's office must have been hardly a minute or so. I was quite sure he wouldn't recognize me……..but he did! In a flash he raised his hand, beckoned a HLL Regional staffer from the Calcutta office and said, 'My work for the day is done, give the car to Navroze to visit Howrah' After 2 weeks was the grand SURF- CarryBag Launch Conference and it was the very first one I organised for Levers, as I had just got transferred from Lintas Delhi to Lintas Bombay. The high and mighty of Levers were all there. It was the first time that SURF was removing the shackles of the good-ole cardboard carton and moving into a more trendy, contemporary plastic carry bag, with an in-built handle. Besides SMD, there was Shunu, Anju Choudhary, Sanjay Khosla, Vindi Banga and Arun Adhikari who were delighted by what we pulled off at the Oberoi Grand despite the many hurdles that Calcutta could create before such an important launch! At the end of the evening, the ever-gracious SMD walked up to shake my hand, and being a man of few words, said, 'well done'. Many a year passed by, and I had moved on from Lintas. It was around 2002, and I had just set up Creatigies. I was on a late-night flight back from Bombay and while pulling my bag out of the boot of the cab, I landed wrenching my lower back. While I was seated in the aisle seat, SMD walked past me and we both nodded in acquaintance with a smile across both faces. Not a word spoken. When he returned from the visit to the aircraft loo, he saw me sitting in a rather awkward posture, with my lower back fairly stiff. 'What happened?' And I explained my lower back spasm. Without saying another word, he pulled down his briefcase, opened the bag, took out a small medicine pouch, and plonked a pill in my hand. 'Have this, it's a painkiller and a muscle relaxant. Will help you feel better' On landing, with a wave and a smile, he walked out of the aircraft. And that was the last I saw of him. SMD. The affable, gentle, Chairman who guided HLL for over 6 years. A few days ago, Mr. S M Datta crossed over to the other side, leaving behind a legacy of a chairman who was humble, humane and heartwarming. RIP, Sir! (The author is the founder and managing director- Creatigies Communications. Views expressed are personal.)
Atlantic
04-07-2025
- Science
- Atlantic
America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life
In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment. It demonstrated that humans have finally built tools powerful enough to see across interstellar space and detect evidence of biospheres on distant worlds—in other words, tools truly capable of discovering alien life. Given the telescope technologies we astronomers have now and the ones we'll build soon, within a few decades, humans might finally gather some hard data that can answer its most profound, existential question: Is there life beyond Earth? What's arguably even more remarkable is that unless something changes very soon, the humans making that epochal discovery might not be NASA and the American space scientists who power it. The U.S. space agency is facing a funding and personnel crisis that the Planetary Society has called ' an extinction-level event.' The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget—a version of which passed Congress and now awaits the president's signature—slashes NASA's funding by almost a quarter. That means, adjusted for inflation, NASA would get the same level of funding it had in 1961, before John F. Kennedy called for the United States to put a man on the moon. The modern version of NASA has far more on its plate: maintaining the International Space Station, hunting for Earth-killing asteroids, and using its Earth-observing satellites to help farmers monitor soil conditions. The president's budget also calls for an aggressive push to land humans on both the moon and Mars. It's hard to see how the agency can safely and accurately fulfill its current responsibilities—let alone develop advanced (and expensive) scientific equipment that would advance the search for alien life—with such reduced funding. ('President Trump's FY26 NASA Budget commits to strengthening America's leadership in space exploration while exercising fiscal responsibility,' a NASA spokesperson wrote in an email to The Atlantic. 'We remain fully committed to our long-term goals and continue to make progress toward the next frontier in space exploration, even as funding priorities are adjusted.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Almost all of NASA's divisions face dramatic cuts, but the proposed nearly 50 percent slash to its Science Mission Directorate poses the greatest threat to hopes of future grand discoveries, including finding life on other worlds. SMD's engineers and scientists built the rovers that helped scientists show that Mars, now a freezing desert, was once warm and covered in rushing water. The researchers it funds developed probes that revealed vast subsurface oceans on some of Jupiter's moons. SMD is also where you'll find the folks who built the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a flotilla of other instruments. These extraordinary machines have provided views of colliding galaxies 300 million light-years away, captured the death throes of stars like the Sun, and recorded portraits of interstellar clouds that birth new generations of stars and planets. In 2023, the scientists and engineers of the SMD were tasked with building the all-important Habitable Worlds Observatory, designed specifically to find alien life on planets light-years away. Slated to launch sometime in the 2040s, the HWO is planned to be about the same size as the JWST, with a similar orbit beyond the moon. Unlike the JWST, the HWO's sophisticated detectors must be able to tease out the light of an exoplanet against the billions-of-times-brighter glare of its host star, a signal as faint as the dim glow of a firefly flitting around a powerful field light at the San Francisco Giants' Oracle Park, but detected from all the way across the country in New York City. But now, many astronomers fear, NASA might never get the chance to build HWO—or carry out a slew of other missions that maintain the U.S.'s strong advantage in space science, as well as keep it ahead in the hunt for alien life. Under Donald Trump's plan, NASA would be forced to abandon 19 'active' missions. These include Juno—which is revolutionizing astronomers' understanding of Jupiter and could help them understand similarly monstrous worlds in other solar systems with other Earth-like planets—and New Horizons, a mission that took nearly 10 years to reach Pluto and is now flying into uncharted space at the edge of the solar system. The budget also decimates the future of space-science exploration. Scientists have been desperate to get back to Venus, for example, after a chemical compound associated with life was potentially detected high in its atmosphere in 2020; the two missions that would get us there are axed out of the administration's budget. The plan for the Nancy Roman Telescope, which would test key technologies necessary for the HWO, is so withered that many astronomers worry the telescope might never leave Earth. Worst, the development for the HWO takes an 80 percent cut in the president's proposed budget, going from $17 million in 2024 to just $3 million in 2026, before rebounding in 2028. The HWO represents one the most ambitious projects ever attempted, and the technological innovation needed to build it, or probes that might land on Jupiter's ocean moons, get measured across decades. In order for such missions to succeed, investments have to remain steady and focused—the opposite of what the Trump administration has proposed. Amid all the difficulties the country faces, the losses in space science might seem trivial. But American science, including space science, has paid enormous dividends in keeping the nation strong, prosperous, and worthy of the world's respect. If the original budget passes, one in every three of NASA's highly skilled workers will lose their job. The agency, in turn, will lose decades of hard-core technical experience: Not many people know how to blast a robot science rover from Earth, have it cross hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and then land it—intact—on the surface of another planet. As the cuts take hold, plenty of NASA scientists might be forced to take jobs in other countries or early retirements they didn't want, or simply be let go. And the agency will be set back decades more into the future by choking off funding to young researchers at every level. Just as the U.S. is stumbling and falling back in its efforts to find alien life, astronomers around the world are preparing for the steep climb. The European Space Agency has a list of missions aimed at studying exoplanets. China has announced a 2028 launch date for Earth 2.0, a space telescope designed to find Earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars. If it succeeds, that mission would put China on a path to building its own version of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. In my work as an astrophysicist, studying the possibilities of life on exoplanets, I travel around the world representing American science. In those travels, I consistently find people in other countries wearing two icons of American culture: the Yankee cap and the NASA logo. That a kid in Florence or a middle-aged guy in Bangkok would wear a NASA T-shirt is testimony to the power of its legacy. NASA—with its can-do spirit and its willingness to dream like no other organization in the history of the world—is America. If protected and nurtured, it would almost certainly lead the charge to answer that most existential question of life beyond Earth. But if this administration's shortsighted budget passes, it might be some other nation that discovers we are not alone in the universe.
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Small Mine Development to build portal and decline at California VMS deposit
Blue Moon Metals has awarded a significant contract to Small Mine Development (SMD) for the construction of a portal and decline at its Blue Moon mine in Mariposa County, California, US. The contract award follows a formal request for proposal process, with SMD's proposal aligning with Blue Moon's objectives regarding health and safety, local employment, cost, schedule and performance. The construction work is a critical step towards facilitating infill and exploration drilling and will support further studies necessary for the mine's commercialisation decision. Blue Moon CEO Christian Kargl-Simard said: 'The award of this contract represents a major step forward in the development of the critical metals-related Blue Moon Mine. 'The ability to access the orebody from underground will greatly accelerate the company's plans towards a mine commercialisation decision, and the minimal footprint at surface allows us to do so in a very responsible manner – both physically and environmentally. We are proud to have SMD as a partner on this significant milestone.' Planning and engineering efforts to support the construction are set to begin immediately, with portal development expected to start in the second half of 2025 (H2 2025). The exploration decline is scheduled for completion by the third quarter of 2026 and will include an underground exploration drilling campaign and additional study work. The project is expected to create at least 20 local jobs directly with the mine and through SMD and their subcontractors. In related news, the European Commission has designated Blue Moon Metals' Nussir Project in Norway as a Strategic Critical Raw Material Project under the 2023 EU Critical Raw Materials Act. This act aims to diversify critical mineral supplies and reduce reliance on China, with the Nussir Project being the first in Norway to receive such status. "Small Mine Development to build portal and decline at California VMS deposit" was originally created and published by Mining Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
