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The feature size size today is in the lower range of the visible wave length spectrum

According to wikipedia, the visible spectrum ends at around 390nm.
Intel is currently doing 10nm and planning to go down to 7nm next year.

Here's an example of what can be done: https://www.bunniestudios.com/...

Now that's pretty impressive. However, it says the best possible current resolution is 14.6nm, so it can't currently resolve state of the art dies.
Also those pretty pictures? Their scale is in micrometers, as shown on them.

Lol, 8 out of 10 PCBs ordered by Raytheon are fabricated and populated in China.

Hey, they even sell refurbished components there: https://www.bunniestudios.com/...

Now talk about how Lattice merger block protects US from Chinese messing with American missiles

You can fix that issue very simply by only buying name brand memory.

Or maybe not so simply.

Chumby was one of Bunnie Huang's projects(of xbox hacking fame back in the day); and it was notably OSS-y and user accessible by the standards of consumer electronics. Best Buy briefly had their own chumby-based product("Insignia Infocast 8") and I picked one up a while back when they were on sale. The features weren't on by default; but you could poke a couple of menu items to start up SSH right out of the box; and the device used a microSD card for firmware, making experimentation with custom builds low-risk and fairly painless.

[i]However[/i] Sony's version, unlike all the other chumby variants, was markedly more closed because Sony included some video playback features that they didn't want people getting their filthy hands on. I think that, for that reason, their hardware was among the nicest/fastest of any of the chumby devices; but also the most hostile to user tinkering. That makes Sony terminating their support likely to sting even harder.

That said, I'm a bit surprised that the hammer didn't fall sooner: the chumby was a neat device; but it came out not too long before Android started showing up all over the place and at increasingly low price points, at which point the similar-role-but-vastly-tinier-ecosystem chumby really had no hope of survival or niche to occupy. I still use mine, it has served me well; but if I were buying today the combination of ubiquitous and cheap Android-things and the post-rPi crazy cheap dev boards would certainly rule it out. Dick move on Sony's part(non-Sony chumby units are still working fine); but not a total surprise.

The problem isn't the format/qualify process. It's the SD cards themselves. Shitty technology that uses a microcontroller to conceal and correct defects inherent in every SD card sold.

What storage device is that because it sure as hell isn't spinning rust. Head crashes anyone. Tape gets closest but the access speed sure sucks.

A storage device that doesn't yet exist. That's the point. Like it or not, the "spinning rust" you refer to, a trollish, derogatory term coined by SSD zealots, is a mature technology. We're at the point where a majority of conventional hard drives last as long as decade without having to worry about power losses or stupid bullshit like wear leveling. Just look at SD cards from which SSDs are based. Riddled with defects hidden with a microcontroller and software that makes them appear reliable.

I can jump over to DigiKey [digikey.com] and buy an ARM chip that is capable of running Linux and has more computing power than some of my first desktop computers for $20. The chip designs themselves tend not to be open, but they do tend to be quite well documented - the high end is almost always closed and subject to NDA, but there is little pressure to move that line backwards, and as the high end moves forward, the devices available to the OSHW developer get better and better.

China's different IP laws have lead to a lot of innovation because people don't get to rest:

My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping. Meanwhile, Western entrepreneurs often find themselves trapped in a spiderweb of IP frameworks, spending more money on lawyers than on tooling. Further investigation taught me that the Chinese have a parallel system of traditions and ethics around sharing IP, which lead me to coin the term “gongkai”

- http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...

The esp8266 is a cheap Wifi module that was sold as a cheap UART but has been hacked now to do basic GPIO straight from the chip itself. (All the original documentation was in Chinese). It even runs MicroPython and has an SDK.

Derek Lowe, In The Pipeline, I got into him from his Things I Won't Work With tag (Note: he's going to be moving to another domain in a few weeks)

Stephen Smith's Space KSC (I think he's a bigwig with NASA's outreach or advocacy programs or something)

Bunnie Huang's blog (famous for hacking the Xbox, but he isn't updating very often this year, so he must be working on something)

FYI... Sean "xobs" Cross and Andrew "bunnie" Huang disclosed low-level vulnerabilities in SD cards (as far as I can tell: on par with- and related to- the more recent BadUSB-type hacks) at a 30C3, back in December 2013.

For further details, see:-
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

I think it's funny that he's worried about being pwned by the flash card firmware (answer: you can't, it's not a generic interface like USB that can be keyboards, mice, network cards, etc. on a whim), and not about being cheated by the old "1GB card that claims to be 4GB" scam.

Anyhow, here are some relevant links:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...

I think it's funny that he's worried about being pwned by the flash card firmware (answer: you can't, it's not a generic interface like USB that can be keyboards, mice, network cards, etc. on a whim), and not about being cheated by the old "1GB card that claims to be 4GB" scam.

Anyhow, here are some relevant links:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...

Are rife especially on ebay
if you want to know about flash RAM devices then check out
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...
and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... it is very informative

It's surprising. Kingston? I thought they were a good brand.

Kingston is a fairly serious company; but it's unfortunately not too surprising to see them involved in this story(and, specifically, with a NAND downgrade, rather than a controller swap). The company has its fingers in just about every step of the flash and DRAM supply chain, except actually fabbing the stuff(they do testing, they do IC packaging, they assemble DIMMs and the various USB, SSD, SD, CF, etc. flavors that people want flash in, they do support and logistics for PC outfits that want memory to shove into their products, and so on).

Unfortunately for them, the companies that do fab flash tend to have SSD interests of their own at this point. This puts Kingston in a slightly tricky position: too much on the line to just go full OCZ; but always having to scrape around to get flash at prices that they can still make a living on.

There's a very neat piece about the...interesting issues... that this causes with some of their SD products.

It amazes me when companies sell down their good name. It takes a lot of time and money to earn it, and it never brings in as much when you do this. So not too more companies on my "avoid" list. Luckily there is a lot of competition.

When a company pulls this kind of trick, they are dead to me. I don't understand why companies think that they will get away with such actions. It may slip through once but it only takes one time getting caught and then people will start looking back at past hardware releases to see if they did the same thing before. The damage to a company's reputation can be devastating, all to earn some extra profit.. Such a shame.

Both of you are mistaken - in a lot of cases this is simply because production runs are different.

Kingston and PNY are well known brands that buy a lot of excess parts. They build their storage using what stuff they have available. If Samsung overproduced flash chips that Apple can't soak up, they can either idle their factories (expensive), sell the excess on the market (depressing prices), or sell it to a company who does wholesale purchase of excess, like Kingston or PNY.

Option 3 is generally preferred because option 2 can impact contracts (i.e., if Apple sees Samsung is selling the same product for far less than they paid, they're going to demand a refund).

So basically, Kingston and PNY build products based on what they have on hand - perhaps today it's slower flash chips from Toshiba, tomorrow Samsung had an overrun and they can put in super speedy Samsung chips, etc.

While most electronics manufacturers generally try to go for the same parts over and over again (or with few substitutions - e.g., Apple buys hard drives from Seagate and WD (and their acquired companies like Toshiba and HGST), flash from Toshiba and Samsung, etc), there are other companies that build product based on what's on hand.

And heck, it's also one reason why Kingston and PNY product is so damn cheap - because by taking the excess stock and building what's on hand, they get parts at a good discount, but the variability in parts is much greater. Part manufacturers are happy because it means they don't have to dump product on the open market where their customers may demand the discounts as well, and they have someone to absorb overruns.

It's just like the McRib, really. McDonalds brings it back when pork prices are low and there's an excess they can obtain far cheaper than the open market (but they can take it all rather than buy it in small batches).

The downside is, of course, that product variability is high. Perhaps they get a stock of superfast Samsung, decide to use it to launch a new line, then Samsung has better supply management and the source of cheap excess disappears. Then they're now handling excess of a slower chip some other manufacturer has excess.

Heck, you can buy several different seemingly identical products and they'd all be different inside - the only way to guarantee would be to check the batch numbers.

And this applies to their products as well - RAM, SD cards, etc.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang actually did an analysis of this when they were buying SD cards in bulk from Kingston and getting issues. On Micro SD problems. It's a very detailed analysis of what REALLY happens with Kingston. PNY is probably extremely similar in behavior as well.

If you want consistency, you need to go with someone who builds it in, like Sandisk (Toshiba), Lexar, etc. who order parts direct, rather than an aggregator who builds simply based on what they were sold.

It's less a bait and switch, and more of "well, we had these parts today, and when we run out tomorrow we'll use those parts".

They may not make it here at $25 (a cynic would note that this is hardly the first story involving some Indian outfit that was allegedly going to work wonders in low cost electronics, who then dithers and flakes out, increasing prices, slipping schedules, or trimming specs, until, mysteriously, they eventually manage to deliver something or other, right about the time that Chinese mystery-brands are selling them on ebay for the same money, Slashdot has had at least a couple of such stories involving tablets for education); but the route taken by cheap 'n cheerful electronics to the US appears to be fairly swift and not too marked up(as long as you don't pay Belkin or somebody to write an English manual and slap their sticker on it). The US isn't a 'How do they hit that price point even with counterfeit parts and child labor? miracle of cheapness; but this isn't Brazil, or one of those lucky European countries where the price is the same as in the US, except that they want that many pounds or that many euros...

There's also already a laptop with an FPGA
http://www.bunniestudios.com/
It's still a niche market
It's something cool to have that's only going to appeal to a tiny share of the market.
That FPGA on that laptop costs more than the SoC and RAM combined

Here's an RSN product, Bunnie Huang has been building his own completely open hardware laptop, and demand has been such that they're looking to sell them sans-screen in a router case with two NICs: Novena

I have no idea about availability, but they're around, Jake Appelbaum was playing with one the other day in a recent talk.

If I remember correctly the cheapest phones are sold for US $12 on the street in China, which are sold for US $ 10 in larger quanities direcly from the factory:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...

I doubt I'll ever go there, but the two places where I've seen the most about Shenzen (without trying to) and all its wonders from a techie point of view are Dangerous Prototypes and Bunnie Huang. I think it helps a bit that they are both (AFAIK) living over there right now.

Most ARM chips cost less than $5, with some selling for pennies.

Not to nitpick, but it's likely that *most* ARM chips made actually sell for pennies, given that they are turning up in some very unlikely places. The question isn't whether or not Intel will sink ARM, that's very unlikely. The question is only how much and to what degree. There's an *astronomical* market for low-speed chips that cost $0.03 for embedded/microcontroller use.

CPU with its own memory,eh? Hmmm.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

An SD card today has a ~100MHz ARM or 8051 running the flash translation layer and wear levelling algorithms. See http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3592 for some insight.

After all, USB sticks don't have much in the way computing power.

I guess you haven't read this article yet.

Have a look at BadBIOS http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/10/badbios-features-explained.html, which infects BIOS by merely inserting a reprogrammed USB flash drive. It works on OS X, which is a certified Unix. And to know how easy it is to reprogram the firmware of a managed flash (SD card, USB flash drives), check this post from few days ago http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

Really? You think they're not going to break into anyone's house? Or do you think software can protect against physical access?

My best security advice is to use a hardened firewall (something like OpenBSD), only Free Software and some sort of non-obvious physical tamper-detection if you want to be safe against this. Building your own custom hardware (like this guy would be the best solution for physical access, since they're unlikely to devote the resources to reverse-engineer your hardware before they can do anything.

It's a tough one, though. You'd have to check everything for tampering every time you come home, etc. That'd defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, since the cops will just point at it as prima facie evidence that you're hiding something.

Here, you can use some of my tinfoil now.

Not necessarily. It depends on what your needs are and how much money are you willing to invest.

Might be reflective of the USA's electronics manufacturing industry.

You want to see old school radio shack style stuff (and more), go to China (especially Shenzen). Of course there's a difference, in those places you may see people doing dubious stuff like assembling batteries in front of you and sticking the "original" holograms on them: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=283 ;)

Ah, you're right. Reballing can be annoying but the people in China do it all the time, somewhat reliably. No telling what effect the PoP will have though.

The SD card market is chock full of dodgy cards, even from reputable manufacturers, in this case it seems Microsft is not actually pulling our chain:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

Also, they've done a KB explaining what happens when you change cards:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831

By the way, here's a guy who does this in his spare time. He may not have the $10+ million budget that the big boys have, but it should give you a little context as to what really happens in industry.

(As the original article was instantly slashdotted, I can only guess that the AMD exploit was found through software avenues.)

For those who want to live a little more dangerously, you should try Shenzhen, right beside Hong Kong. It's the new Akihabara and all the new bleeding edge mix & match gadgets the rest of the world hasn't seen before is there. It's now also the electronics manufacturing hub of the world since Everything now's made in China :)

Check these sites out for some of the goodies:
http://shanzai.com
http://micgadget.com
One of the most interesting non-knockoff gadgets to come out of there last month is the Apple Peel, a smart jacket you can slip over an iPod touch that turns it into an iPhone.

Not everything over there is fake knockoffs and Shenzhen China's Shanzhai garage hardware hacking & remixing culture is very interesting.

You should also check out the blog of Andrew "bunnie" Huang, said to be the first guy outside Microsoft to hack the X-Box & wrote the book on it. He co-founded & created the Chumby (open source hackable hardware gadget) and his adventures in Shenzhen are pretty cool.

For those who want to live a little more dangerously, you should try Shenzhen, right beside Hong Kong. It's the new Akihabara and all the new bleeding edge mix & match gadgets the rest of the world hasn't seen before is there. It's now also the electronics manufacturing hub of the world since Everything now's made in China :)

Check these sites out for some of the goodies:
http://shanzai.com
http://micgadget.com
One of the most interesting non-knockoff gadgets to come out of there last month is the Apple Peel, a smart jacket you can slip over an iPod touch that turns it into an iPhone.

Not everything over there is fake knockoffs and Shenzhen China's Shanzhai garage hardware hacking & remixing culture is very interesting.

You should also check out the blog of Andrew "bunnie" Huang, said to be the first guy outside Microsoft to hack the X-Box & wrote the book on it. He co-founded & created the Chumby (open source hackable hardware gadget) and his adventures in Shenzhen are pretty cool.

I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.

Are you possibly referring to Bunnie's Blog? AFAIK she's an engineer that works for Chumby. She's posted some interesting stuff on manufacturing in Asia, including jaw-dropping videos of high-throughput circuit assembly (by humans, not robots).

The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.

Strange... this IEEE paper describes eFuses as synonymous with laser-cut fuses, which are also used for processor binning, disabling cores, serial numbers, etc.

In any case, that also means they're one-time-programmable... which is the most significant difference from how they're described in the Wikipedia article. But it means that they're "programmable" via laser, not electrically.

Clearly there's no agreement on the terminology for these things.

You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.

You sure about that? The 2005 article that I linked, while short on details and clearly pushing a product, describes a process that's apparently economical for embedding 32-4096 bits of flash into a CMOS process.

Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)

Sure, there's got to be a way to do it. I know from playing with PIC microcontrollers that most of these have a way to "permanently" disable read/write access to the onboard flash program memory. There are ways to unlock some of them, but they ain't pretty. Presumably the manufacturer has an undocumented way to do it electrically.

Check out the attacks on the DSi, especially the RAM sniffer/injector by scanlime. You can even download the code and give it a go, if you can make the hardware setup that he built. Essentially, you downclock the DSi to a more manageable speed and then tap the entire RAM chip (address and data), so you can get a realtime trace of everything that the console does with external RAM, and change anything. The implementation itself is done using an FPGA and a USB 2.0 FIFO chip. It's really quite amazing.

This would be nearly impossible to pull off with the type of RAM on the PS3, but it definitely beats random glitching.

If you want an older example, check out bunnie's xbox hack from 2001. He taps the LDT (HyperTransport) bus on the Xbox1 using a custom sniffer board and highly tuned FPGA code in order to capture the fast DDR bus transfers and sniff out the secret boot sector.

From what I've read, "demo units" is what IPEX (the NewEgg supplier that shipped the parts in question) was calling them, not NewEgg itself. NewEgg only relayed what information they initially received from IPEX, saying that they themselves were still "unsure and investigating".
It's still a bit odd how neither NewEgg nor Intel wouldn't outright deny they were fake. This whole fiasco sounds quite a lot like the recent Micro SD issue that Chumby ran into a few weeks earlier. An interesting read about the "grey" market and "ghost shifting".

Just open http://www.bunniestudios.com/ and it will work.

Uh, but he's wrong! From his own link, the Taiwanese workers are earning about USD1150 per MONTH (which is actually not bad in the 3rd world country I'm in[1]).

The _FIRST_ sentence says it: "The average worker in Taiwan earns a monthly salary of NT$36,564".

Google says 36564 Taiwanese dollars is about USD1150 : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=36564+TWD+in+usd&btnG=Search&meta=

If the average US person can't figure out the difference between years and months, or have poor reading comprehension, or can't be bothered to check stuff properly, it's no surprise US bosses are outsourcing to other countries.

So what if those 3rd world workers are crap. No point paying far more for just as crap (or worse).

And guess what, many of these "3rd world" workers aren't that crap.

See: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=185

I've shown some kids these videos and told them that that's the sort of competition they'll be facing (more so as countries like Vietnam start getting into it as well).

[1] FWIW, I'm a cheap worker (relative to the USA) in a 3rd world country. But hey at least I can read, spell and do basic math (with help from Google :) ). I can even write some simple perl and python code...

I'm wondering how much it costs, initial costs, and maintenance (including support+repair contracts).

Basically: is it cheaper than a factory worker in a 3rd world country?

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=185

In some cases where it is cheaper, they do use a mix of robotics and humans in China:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=186

BTW some of the factory food there looks quite decent to me:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=190

Fish, vegetables, egg and I do eat stuff like pig intestines and kidneys (and like it if it's done nicely), so that sort of stuff isn't a problem for me - doesn't need to be disguised in a sausage/patty/nugget. Yum ;).

I'm wondering how much it costs, initial costs, and maintenance (including support+repair contracts).

Basically: is it cheaper than a factory worker in a 3rd world country?

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=185

In some cases where it is cheaper, they do use a mix of robotics and humans in China:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=186

BTW some of the factory food there looks quite decent to me:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=190

Fish, vegetables, egg and I do eat stuff like pig intestines and kidneys (and like it if it's done nicely), so that sort of stuff isn't a problem for me - doesn't need to be disguised in a sausage/patty/nugget. Yum ;).

I'm wondering how much it costs, initial costs, and maintenance (including support+repair contracts).

Basically: is it cheaper than a factory worker in a 3rd world country?

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=185

In some cases where it is cheaper, they do use a mix of robotics and humans in China:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=186

BTW some of the factory food there looks quite decent to me:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=190

Fish, vegetables, egg and I do eat stuff like pig intestines and kidneys (and like it if it's done nicely), so that sort of stuff isn't a problem for me - doesn't need to be disguised in a sausage/patty/nugget. Yum ;).

Surely you could've bought a SIM-free Android phone? Personally, I'm curious to see if anyone in China starts selling the Shanzhai Tiger G3 direct to the West on ebay... for $140 it looks interesting. Mr Bunnie of Xbox hacking fame had favourable things to say recently about the Shanzhai industry, it seems that is where the real cost cutting and innovation is coming from, kind of like the way Silicon Valley used to be.

Some of these mutations make no difference; others render the virus harmless; and quite possibly, some render the virus much more dangerous. Since viruses are replicated and distributed in astronomical quantities, the chance that this little hack could end up occurring naturally is in fact quite high. This is part of the reason, I think, why the health officials are so worried about H1N1: we have no resistance to it, and even though it’s not quite so deadly today, it’s probably just a couple mutations away from being a much bigger health problem.

It's good to be a skeptic, but when you're too "skeptical" to accept what experts tell you (oh, wait, you're a biologist specializing in human disease?), you're willfully ignoring the obvious.

Interesting. You aren't the only one talking about Shanzhai.

Bunnie Huang (for Xbox hacking and Chumby fame) has some interesting experiences, mostly positive, doing similar things in China. See his blog.

Bunnie's go a fairly good blog that has a number of entries on the Chumby manufacturing process that goes into a lot more detail than the interview.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=7

But if you're set on working on a new language, I'd suggest Mandarin. The reason here is that it's the only language in which there is a large amount of computer-related material which is not available also in English. The material I'm talking about is data sheets. There are quite a few data sheets for hardware parts available in Mandarin but not English. (see for example the article about Chumby manufacture in China

Yes. I have heard that is not due to whiskers, but the fact that the lead-free solder they use is much less ductile/more brittle than traditional types. ...but it's also an engineering issue as other products go lead-free without issues. It is a bit easier to pop off though.

Bunnie Huang recently looked at an RROD'ed system and found inconclusive results, but there are an assortment of reasons that could contribute to it.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=223

Look at Bunnie Huang's analysis.

The problem wasn't any chip at all. It wasn't even heat. The problem was the chips were not soldered to the board.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=223

Doesn't matter who designed or made the chips. If they aren't soldered down, they won't work. And that's what the problem was. That's why X-clamps (mostly) work.

Heat is semi-tangential. If the chip is soldered down, heat won't pop it off and if it isn't soldered, any kind of movement will break it loose, even when cold. This is how MS could ship you replacement units that were RRoD out of the box. They were fine before they were shipped and were broken loose during shipping.

Most of the problem appears to be solderability problems, not a problem with chip design or manufacturing.

You may remember on of Bunnie Huang's previous exploits - he's the guy who hacked the XBox. He's a hardware-hacking demi-god and has a fantastic blog for electronics geeks. You can read all about getting the Chumby manufactured in China, as well as other topics.