Technology – True/False – GK Questions

Chiplets integrate multiple specialized dies (CPU, GPU, I/O) via advanced packaging (2.5D/3D), improving yield, cost, and design flexibility vs monolithic chips. Used in AMD, Intel products. India's semiconductor strategy includes ATMP (assembly, test, mark, pack) capabilities. Critical for chip design questions.

Shape-memory alloys (Nitinol: Ni-Ti) undergo reversible phase transformation, enabling shape recovery upon heating. Applications: medical stents, actuators, aerospace. India researches SMAs at DMRL, IITs. Critical for smart materials and advanced manufacturing questions.

Flow batteries (vanadium redox) store energy in liquid electrolytes; power (stack size) and energy (tank volume) are independent. Advantages: long cycle life, deep discharge, scalability for 4-12 hour storage. Critical for renewable integration and grid stability questions.

Indian Space Policy 2023 enables private sector participation across space value chain: satellite manufacturing, launch services, ground infrastructure, and applications. IN-SPACe acts as single-window regulator. Critical for understanding India's space sector liberalization and economic potential.

India Semiconductor Mission (under MeitY) implements ₹76,000 crore incentive scheme for fabs, display fabs, ATMP, and design. Partnerships with global players (TSMC, Micron) announced. Aims to build strategic self-reliance in critical electronics supply chain. Critical for industrial policy questions.

Data Mesh treats data as a product: domain teams own data products, with self-serve infrastructure and federated governance. Addresses scalability limits of centralized data teams. Principles: domain ownership, data as product, self-serve platform, federated governance. Critical for modern data architecture questions.

GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux) declaratively defines desired state in Git; operators sync cluster state to match. Benefits: audit trail, rollback via git revert, peer review via PRs. Critical for modern cloud-native deployment practices and infrastructure management questions.

Digital India Act (proposed) aims to address: platform accountability, user rights, emerging tech governance, and algorithmic transparency. Complements DPDP Act and IT Rules. Critical for understanding India's evolving digital regulatory framework in policy exams.

Authenticator apps (Google Authenticator, Authy) generate TOTP locally, immune to SIM swapping, SS7 attacks, and phishing that compromise SMS OTP. NIST recommends moving away from SMS for high-security applications. Critical for authentication best practices questions.

Serverless (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions) scales automatically: from zero to thousands of instances based on demand. Pay-per-execution pricing eliminates idle costs. Trade-offs: cold starts, execution time limits, vendor lock-in. Critical for cost-optimized cloud architecture questions.

CDC captures insert/update/delete operations from database logs (binlog, WAL) and streams to targets (Kafka, data lake). Enables real-time analytics, cache invalidation, and event-driven architectures. Tools: Debezium, AWS DMS. Critical for modern data integration patterns.

Blue-Green deployment: run current version (Blue) and new version (Green) in parallel; switch traffic to Green after validation. Enables instant rollback by reverting traffic. Reduces risk vs in-place updates. Critical for zero-downtime release strategies in DevOps.

IT Rules 2021 mandate Significant Social Media Intermediaries (50L+ users) to appoint: Chief Compliance Officer, Nodal Contact Person, and Resident Grievance Officer. Also require traceability of first originator for certain messages. Critical for platform governance and compliance questions.

Deception technology deploys realistic fake assets (servers, credentials, data) to lure attackers, enabling early detection, threat intelligence, and reduced dwell time. Complements prevention/detection controls. Used in enterprise security and critical infrastructure protection. Important for advanced cybersecurity questions.

Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd, Consul) deploys sidecar proxies to handle service-to-service communication: mTLS encryption, traffic splitting, retries, metrics, and distributed tracing. Decouples infrastructure concerns from application code. Critical for cloud-native architecture questions.

Data lakes (S3, ADLS) store raw structured/unstructured data for flexible analysis; data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift) store curated, schema-on-write data for BI. Modern architectures use lakehouse pattern combining both. Critical for understanding data platform design in analytics exams.

IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) define infrastructure in declarative code files, enabling version control, peer review, automated testing, and consistent deployments across environments. Reduces configuration drift and manual errors. Critical for cloud operations and DevOps questions in technical exams.

AI/ML-powered attacks can mutate malware code, generate polymorphic phishing content, and adapt evasion techniques in real-time to bypass signature-based defenses. Requires behavioral analytics, anomaly detection, and AI-powered defense systems. Critical for understanding next-generation threat landscape in cybersecurity exams.

Universal Design principles (equitable use, flexibility, simplicity, perceptible information) guide creation of inclusive products, buildings, and digital services. Adopted in Indian standards (GIGW, building codes). Critical for sustainable, inclusive development and rights-based approach questions.

Neuromorphic chips (Intel Loihi, IBM TrueNorth) use spiking neural networks and event-driven processing to achieve orders-of-magnitude better energy efficiency than conventional GPUs for AI tasks. Promising for edge AI, robotics, and sustainable computing. Research ongoing at IITs and global labs.