Oil and Water
Taking Advantage of Natural Segregation
Two years ago, a curious technology that had been under academic study for about 20 years for applications having nothing to do with semiconductors was presented in a paper at SPIE Litho as a way to push lithography. The next year there were 74 papers on it, and it was inescapable at this year’s SPIE Litho.
That technology is “directed self-assembly” (DSA). And it’s a complete departure from all of the other lithographic ideas that have been bouncing around as we wait for a) the demise of 193-nm immersion lithography and b) EUV to be ready for production.
Silicon Symbiosis
Lattice Acquires SiliconBlue
Anyone who watches the programmable logic industry has seen a major resurgence from Lattice Semiconductor over the past couple of years. Just a few years ago, the company was on the ropes financially and technically, and many experts were expecting the company to quietly perish in the night.
It did not.
Instead, Lattice came back with a spark of focused determination seldom seen in long-lived technology companies. The executive ranks were purged and refilled, the culture was dramatically transformed – from a rigid, top-down dictatorship to a bottom-up, participative, team-oriented environment that fosters creativity and risk-taking.
Bringing the Good News from Leuven
It is strange sitting indoors on a grey wet day in Belgium -- and Belgium does pretty good grey and wet in October -- listening to people talking about photovoltaic cells. But then imec, in Leuven, Belgium, is a pretty strange place.
When Bryon wrote about imec earlier this year, he commented that, even with the steady stream of press releases, it was difficult to get a handle on what the organisation actually does.
Packing Them In
A Look at High-Density PC – er – PWBs and Persecution of Solder
The world of PC boards – or, as they seem to be more widely called in the official literature, “printed wiring boards” or PWBs – has been a conservative one. For the most part, things are still done today like they were a few decades ago. Sure, dimensions have gone down, and we can do many, many more layers, and we can put passives on the back side, but, except for the bleeding edge, we pretty much do things the old-fashioned way: etch metal off of a board made out of some kind of resinous material, glue several of those together if needed, poke parts through the holes or stick them onto pads, and run the whole thing through a wave-soldering line. Some wires (particularly, white ones) may even be soldered by hand.
Building a Better Bridge To Tomorrow
Multi-core, Microservers and NASA’s Open Source Summit
In this week’s Fish Fry, Amelia debates the nature of the word multi-core and examines some new standards that will hopefully make multi-core implementation easier in the future. Amelia also digs into the newest Intel/ARM battle in the world of Servers, investigates some fuzzy TSA Math and looks forward to the first annual NASA Open Source Summit. Also this week, she offers up a new way to create energy (coming to a pond near you) and serves up a brand new nerdy giveaway.
The Dichotomy Of Power
Less is More, More is Too Much, and Harnessing The World Around Us
In Fish Fry this week, Amelia tries to unravel the “aloha” of electronic engineering terminology; what we can do to make more power, use less power, and how we can measure exactly how much power our design is using - or is going to use. In this “power” themed episode, she investigates Microsemi’s new solar energy announcement, looks into a cool new way to create wave energy and offers up some ideas on how we can use less energy in our systems. She also checks out a new tool that will help you understand the the power budget of your next design and reflects upon a very old technology being re-born in today’s modern shipping technology.
Can Engineers Change the World?
The story is often told, by both participants, that when Steve Jobs recruited John Scully from Pepsi to Apple he asked if he wanted to “sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” Do engineers change the world?
Firstly, a brief note on terminology. Engineer, in this context, is broadly defined as someone who builds new technology. (Not, as one company in England said a few years ago, a man who will come and retune your television set.) This is perhaps a broader definition than that current in, for example, Germany, where the title engineer is reserved to a qualified professional who has some form of regulatory or statutory recognition.
Calling All Plant Cars
Fish Fry - December 3, 2010
In Fish Fry this week, Amelia investigates the curious case of QuickLogic, Lattice Semiconductor’s new HiGig MAC IP Core, and Mercedes Benz’ new Biome concept car. Also this week, she announces the winner of the very first Fish Fry nerdy giveaway.
Green Gates, Graphics & Google
Last week’s reveal of the ARM Cortex-A15 processor got me thinking: since when did adding gates reduce power? Doesn’t that violate some fundamental law of physics?
Then I started looking deeper, and it turns out that a lot of designers are adding logic to reduce power. It’s a counterintuitive approach that’s clearly gaining traction. And it illuminates the interesting tradeoffs we make in engineering today versus those we made just a few years ago.
In the case of ARM’s latest processor design, one of the many little tweaks it includes is a special “loop cache.” It’s not a real cache, first of all. More like a simple FIFO buffer. It’s just big enough to hold about 32 instructions, or about 128 bytes all told. No big deal, in other words.