Slashdot Mirror

I'm honestly not sure whether BGAs are used in aerospace tech. For sure, some companies have been testing them for aerospace use for many years. It probably depends on whether a non-BGA version exists for whatever chip they need, and whether the alternative is worse (e.g. LGA).

Of course, the same problems can happen just as easily with any other surface-mount parts; it's just somewhat less common because it's easy to inspect and verify the soldering work when it isn't under a chip. I guess I probably should have said SMT rather than going for the worst-case package. Either way, the point still mostly applies. :-)

- Duplicating the product under another label and competing with the original

Pfft. Product? Amateurs. China has been caught duplicating entire companies

Not only that, but they expanded the companies they counterfeited. Did you know NEC made DVD players? NEC didn't know. But apparently they did and they were designed in a subsidiary that they never knew existed.

Other people agree that GPUs are still overpriced like heck.
https://www.eetimes.com/docume...

https://www.eetimes.com/docume...

It's a clone of the AMD EPYC! Of course it can compete with a Xeon.

Also it's not like China doesn't have the ability to design CPUs. It's just that X86 is a patent minefield. So even if they produced a chip they couldn't sell it worldwide without the blessing of both AMD and Intel. Just ask NVIDIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The above processor is used in their Sunway supercomputer. It's more equivalent to a GPU or Cell architecture than a CPU though. It's a mesh network of CPU cores on a chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The SW-3 SW1600 is a four-issue superscalar

If anything their issue has been they have not used high end manufacturing processes to make the chips. They are probably under embargo and can only use design rules two process generations behind. Notice that they even used SMIC to manufacture that processor to ensure the supply wouldn't be cut. However pretty soon they will have better sources to manufacture chips in China. Like TSMC:
https://www.eetimes.com/docume...

That's a 14/16nm fab. It is still two process nodes behind but it's still way better than what SMIC can produce which is 28nm.

Shssh .. don't tell them about GPRS

GPRS *IS* internet.

You must be thinking about WAP on an SMS bearer, as an OLD example of Something-Over-SMS

https://www.eetimes.com/docume...

But Samsung had a hard time selling their smartphones until they copied Apple. The End.

Samsung has held a large chunk of the smartphone market since 1999. Their recent increase in their market share (2008-2013) coincides with Nokia's demise.

I'll believe you when your source is not paywalled.

Oh, BTW: Nokias demise coincides with them not being able to bring out a phone to rival the iPhone and it's clone android.

PS:Samsung invented suing over stolen phone designs

Given that the cost of state-of-the-art fab is about $20 billion and that China is behind, a $47 billion investment is not a threat. EE times reports that by 2020 a state-of-the-art fab will cost about $20 billion and wikipedia says that TSMC predicts the same.

There is a reason why semiconductor giants such as ARM, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm and even super-rich Apple are fabless; State-of-the-art fabs are insanely hard. The successes here, such as Intel, have generations of accumulated in-house expertise and have spent decades attracting, training and retaining the best experts in the world. Not to mention the elusive engineering management culture necessary for that. Maybe it is impossible to enter at that level and you have to evolve your way there over decades.

So China needs to build a modern fab, but also fund the R&D to get to that point and fund development of modern CPU architectures so they have something to make. By the time China succeeds with all of that, if they can, they might be at least a generation behind.

Finally, it's not like the world would be made worse-off by increased state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing capacity. More better chips are a good thing.

They sued Transmeta, which did code morphing.

Emulation is not a new technology, and Transmeta was notably the last company to claim to have produced a compatible x86 processor using emulation ("code morphing") techniques. Intel enforced patents relating to SIMD instruction set enhancements against Transmeta's x86 implementation even though it used emulation.

I.e. it doesn't matter if you execute an SSE instruction directly in hardware, or if you translate it to an ARM NEON instruction and execute that, it is still violating the patent.

In the Intel/Transmeta cases Transmeta sued Intel first, Intel then countersued over code code morphing violating SSE patents. The end result was a cross-licensing agreement. And then Transmeta failed due to poor sales.

https://www.eetimes.com/author...

Intel's patent lawsuit with Transmeta resulted in only a set of counteracting settlements and a cross-licensing agreement. Transmeta would shutter its doors some time later due to disappointing sales.

"I remember only about a decade ago being amazed the first time I opened a computer's BIOS... Press PgUp to go to the previous tab... press PgDn to go to the next tab, press ESC to exit without saving changes... Ah, the good old days." Son, in the Good Old Days, we set the boot sequence with toggle switches. This topic actually came up last week on /. I'm proud to say that I really did work on such a computer once, a Cyber 170/750. There's a picture of a similar "deadstart panel" (for a different Cyber computer) here: https://www.eetimes.com/docume...

An Intel inside iPhone would be an interesting development.

Already happening. Fortune

Intel is working on much more than that and is trying hard to break into the phone market in a really big way, not just with atom based arch. Even though they have been out of the running for 16 years it seems this time they are coming back and are really looking for the brainz this time. Like I said either they are paying Qualcomm to not sue them or we might see a major tech merger. Say perhaps Qualcomm and Intel in a joint venture with a mind to squash Samsung once and for all?

Either way there are interesting times ahead in the cell chip sector and there will be blood on the floor with the introduction of the new high end Note by Samsung. The iPhone 8 has some serious competition this time around and I think Apple knows it. If the new 8 series from Samsung starts to take over a huge section of the market the way the original galaxy did you can bet the bullshit American protectionist law suits will fly again. Like the Boeing bombers now flying over Quebec Canada the tariff(s) on Samsung phones will be enormous.

While the RISC-4 IA is open, the U54 is a closed design.

This processor is all about "licensing" and intellectual property (IP). The opening line of this article makes SiFive's intentions very clear: "SiFive has taped out and started licensing its U54-MC Coreplex, its first RISC-V IP designed to run Linux." (Emphasis mine.)

You're presuming that the IC somehow came up with the data. Not so; the data came up with itself: http://www.eetimes.com/author.... (one of a multitude of articles about this).

Ok, someone created that data, it didn't *really* create itself; but it wasn't the IC. Nor (for better or for worse) is the IC the only organization that wants to sift through data.

You can read these articles to get the full picture of the Toshiba deal (why it matters and how it happened):
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

You can read these articles to get the full picture of the Toshiba deal (why it matters and how it happened):
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

You can read these articles to get the full picture of the Toshiba deal (why it matters and how it happened):
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

Um.... its LIDAR (light radar) [...] light that is being sprayed around.

O RLY?

Both short-range and long-range automotive-grade RADARs are used (mostly in the narrow-band i.e. 27â"77 GHz) for AD applications.

Modern self-driving prototypes rely on radar and lidar to âoecross validateâ what theyâ(TM)re seeing and to predict motion.

the environment is better off,

... Not so fast. One reason that electronics are less reliable now? Dendrites (tin whiskers) causing shorts. The cause of tin whiskers? The EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) law that prohibits lead (Plumbum) in solder. 5% Pb leads to a huge jump in reliability, but also a huge jump in toxins in manufacturing and landfills. Everything is a trade-off.

Even flash memory improvements seem to be slowing down, but that may be that demand is huge and increasing.

No, charge storage scales even worse than switching—and everyone agrees. Flash has recently been kept on life support by staggering efforts in bit-error management.

Thus all the research funds right now (ST-MRAM, carbon nanotube NRAM, STT-RAM, CBRAM, not to mention Intel's new TMium) are being funneled into bulk resistive technologies, such as the chalcogenides.

The charge bottle is dead. Long live the fickle dendrite!

The problem with silicon was written about extensively in 2016 (this only a decade after the frequency free-lunch had already ended, and five years after the power-scaling free-lunch started being served up in Continental-breakfast portion sizes).

TSMC Plans New Fab for 3nm
Focus Shifts To Architectures
ITRS roadmap predicts end of process miniaturisation by 2021
Transistors Could Stop Shrinking in 2021
Alchemy Can't Save Moore's Law
Will 5nm Happen?
TSMC will begin 10nm production this year, claims 5nm by 2020

TSMC remains strangely bullish, but you also need to realize that line size is not what it used to be. It used to be they pretty much shrunk the entire lithography. Now they shrink what they can shrink, and then define the new lithography based on the skinniest resulting body part (problem: what's left to measure after the wrist? answer: a Taiwanese wrist).

You jest, but imo you're not too far from the truth. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove said WAAAYYYYY back in 1998

"interactive data delivery was "a war for eyeballs," between large-audience broadcast TV and the power of the Internet to give people what they wanted when they wanted it-albeit at less than broadcast quality in most cases. "

With improved internet speed, wireless and graphics capabilities, the eyeballs have gone from TV to the computer monitor.

EE: Google Ramps Up Chip Design

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320981

The way Intel, Samsung, and TSMC measure transistor size isn't the same. Some of Intel's 22nm transistor structures were smaller than TSMC's 16nm. I do agree Intel's lead has shrunk, but just because one process is called 14nm and another 10nm doesn't really matter - transistor density and production yields are what are important.

Name one autopilot & vehicle that totally the vehicle's operator of all responsibility and need to be attentive.

You won't be able to, because none exist

They exist since decades. They just have not approval yet.

BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Toyota all have 100% autonomous cars. I'm pretty sure there are more companies.

However we call them "autonomous driving" and not "autopilot".

A few populations, not about the state of the art though, but videos included :D
http://www.fzi.de/en/research/...
http://www.fzi.de/en/research/...
http://www.kit.edu/kit/english...
http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

Question is when they will be market ready ...

If we still power our electric cars with lithium ion batteries in 2040 it will be a sad day indeed as it's not unlikely a better battery technology will come around by then.

We already have really great batteries for cars. See, what you do is store the energy in hydrogen. But just storing hydrogen is hard because it's either a non-energy-dense gas or a cryogenic liquid, so what you do is simply add some carbon to it so that it's liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. Then you can simply pump this "hydrocarbon" liquid fuel into a "tank" and voila -- you get a car that runs for hundreds of miles on a single charge, and can completely recharge in only a minute or so! IT'S AMAZING!

(Note, by the way, I'm not talking about continuing to rely on global-warming-causing fossil fuels. Instead, I'm talking about using biofuel or synthetic fuel. Either way, the essential reaction is CO2 + H2O + solar power -> fuel, accomplished by biology or machinery respectively.)

If you really want hardware churn, up the percentage of tin in the solder on the circuit boards. Tin whiskers will grow and short out the board. While they CAN be mitigated with additional coatings of other metals, this adds cost, and thus is likely not a feature of consumer-grade electronics. . .

I can't imagine the level of stupidity required for Google to make such a request. Google's own reports (which they resist being required to provide) show quite clearly that human drivers are frequently a very necessary supplement to their autonomous systems:

"Between September 2014 and November 2015, Google said there were 272 occasions when a technology failure forced the test driver to re-take control."
https://ia.acs.org.au/news/goo...

And this request comes shortly after a Google car was found fully-responsible for crashing into a bus:

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

And that's not a one-off... Google's small fleet of self-driving cars are getting in numerous accidents. 8% is the last figure I saw. Google spins it as the fault of everyone else except its own vehicles, but that claim is specious at best:

http://gizmodo.com/self-drivin...

There's ample evidence that self-driving cars do several things which (while they MIGHT be safe if all cars were autonomous) cause clashes with existing human drivers on the road:

http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...

Even the much-simpler task, of drive-by-wire in existing automobiles has proven too unreliable to trust human lives with. Toyota screwed this up badly, and it has cost them dearly:

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

The keyspace for several common symmetric encryption schemes (e.g. - AES-256) is on the order of 2^256. So, brute force attacks aren't even possible on them because there isn't enough energy in the universe to try all combinations before the heat death of the universe. You need to find some kind of flaw to drastically reduce the search space first.

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

Well, as I understand it, the encryption is AES-256. So, in theory, it would take about 33,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, assuming you used the fastest supercomputer.

Optical

Mechanics of "why not" here: http://blog.cryptographyengine...

Math of "why not" good introduction here: http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

spend a week cracking the data

How do you propose to do that?

If you assume:

        Every person on the planet owns 10 computers.
        There are 7 billion people on the planet.
        Each of these computers can test 1 billion key combinations per second.
        On average, you can crack the key after testing 50% of the possibilities.

Then the earth's population can crack one encryption key in 77,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

Anyone who thinks AES 256 (what iPhones are encrypted with) can be cracked by any computer doesn't understand the math.

That's not to say there aren't potential successful ways to get the information besides brute forcing. I just get a little chuckle out of every time somebody suggests governments have magic computers. Yes, I'm aware of quantum computing and exactly how far along the tech has come and no, it isn't something that anybody has yet. The magic quantum encryption cracking system is still *at least* a decade away. (It may never happen, and if I were guessing, I'd put it at closer to a couple centuries away, but even assuming impossible breakthroughs have already been made, a decade is unreasonably optimistic.)

Using a design patent in litigation against their supplier Samsung is mostly what the sneering is about. Who uses a design patent offensively?

How exactly could someone even use a design patent defensively?

BTW: http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

South Korean consumer giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is preparing to file lawsuits against a number of mobile phone handset makers in Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong, who it alleges have copied its products and breached its patents, according to a Taiwan government online report.

This a year before the iPhone came out, from a company owning the most US design patents - 50% more than the 2nd, Sony.

Actually, most embedded devices these days are programmed using C, C++, Java, JavaScript, or Python, so they probably did actually have a nice, high level language like this to work with.

Worse than that. Google for "ASCET" and "Matlab Simulink".

Of course, it's unlikely that there would be a high level language available to engineers to make it quite so readable as above - but hopefully the code illustrates the point.

Actually, most embedded devices these days are programmed using C, C++, Java, JavaScript, or Python, so they probably did actually have a nice, high level language like this to work with.

being bipolar technology, are inherently less efficient than their modern cousins, which are mostly CMOS FET technology.

This is not insightful or informative, it's plain wrong. Firstly, the competitor to BJT is MOSFET, not CMOS, since the latter implies two transistors not one. Secondly BJT and MOSFETs have substantially different characteristics. BJTs are faster linear amps, MOSFETS are faster at power switching, whereas BJTs handle very high powers better MOSFETS have better drive characteristics etc etc.

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

Besides if one was inherently superior why does the IGBJT exist?

The AC in a prius runs directly off of the HV DC batter pack. Go find a junked prius and loot the AC if you need some DC powered cooling.

No, the Prius air conditioner compressor is AC. The Prius inverter electronics converts the HVDC to the correct AC frequency to run the motor. So you'd need both the compressor and inverter assembly, which also includes the inverters for the motor-generators that move the car. And a 200V DC power supply. And all the right computers to get the inverter assembly to do something useful.

You'd wind up with a whole bunch of a Prius just to get a silly air conditioner.

From Special Issue: Inside the Toyota Prius: Part 5 - Inverter/converter is Prius' power broker:

The Prius also uses an electric air-conditioning compressor motor so that cabin cooling is maintained even when running in electric mode only. A second dc/ac inverter, with circuits located on a second ICU controller circuit board ringed with TO-packaged IGBTs, is deployed to power the electric A/C compressor from the HV battery pack. The A/C inverter IGBT packages are bolted to one face of the substantial heat-sinking enclosure of the ICU.

Open dots it's not wireless rather a contact layout.

http://www.eetimes.com/documen... it pretty clear at this point the only one with any market penetration is Qi.

VL-Bus predated PCI to market being the way to connect vid cards in the 486 days, PCI come out with the pentiums. SCSI was better and still is better, servers are still using SAS and most SATA devices use the SCSI protocol over the SATA bus. I can not think of a case where parallel ports vs usb was a choice maybe later generation zip drives.

In any event I do not see a whole lot of public wireless charging ports. Starbucks being the big one but they are using the powermat devices.

In 2006 they developed a 350GHz room temperature capable silicon gallium CPU. Where is that?

No they didn't. They developed a 350 GHz room temperature transistor.

According to this article it was a CPU:

http://www.techspot.com/news/2...

Maybe the article is wrong?

In 2002 they developed a 350 GHz silicon-germanium transistor.
In 2006 they developed a silicon-germanium processor that reached 350 GHz at room temperature and 500 GHz when supercooled with liquid helium.

Yeah they seem real ethical.

None of those other nodes pitches involved dimensions of which quantum mechanical tunneling was the dominant effect, nor of gate thickness being one atom. But that's what 10nm is.

Not even close. They have on the research stage made functional 3nm FinFET transistors, if they can be produced in the billions is unlikely as it requires every atom to be in the right place but 10nm still has some margin of error. The end of the road is in sight though...

I thought using hydraulics and fiber optics was obvious and such things are common in hazardous industrial environments. I remember seeing demonstrations of fluidic logic although I am not sure it scales down well enough compared to MEMs logic:

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

I wonder how it would compare though to a much faster dedicated silicon on insulator process with 100^2 micron feature size.

Somehow I doubt that the temperature inside of your pants pocket is 85 deg C (queue joke). You need MLC flash for any reasonable amount of video storage capacity. MLC flash does not hold up well to high temperatures within the normal industrial operating range let alone from a data recovery standpoint in case of fuel fire (800 deg C or so?), even with insulation.

I could see it being difficult to justify the costs if you can't provide a reasonable guarantee that the data could be recovered in the event of an incident.

I think you're going to wake up one morning and realize the internet-of-things revolution happened quietly around you. Either that or you're going to get dragged kicking and screaming into an internet-of-things world much like the textile workers of the early 1800s who opposed industrialization.

For the most part, the necessary tech artifacts you're talking about already exist. You can already order a mesh-routed, IPv6 aware radio IC for pretty cheap (6LoWPAN, example part by TI). It's been 4 years since NXP Semi demo'd occupancy-aware lighting modules. For me at least, intelligent lighting is a big deal because lighting costs are the third highest contributor to my electric bill.

The hardest parts, in my opinion, are pushing for standardization of interfaces to keep complexity and cost down, and ever-important though higher-visibility now, security and access control. There are already significant working groups dedicated to these tasks, for example, the goog/nest, ARM, samsung, et.al. in the Thread group. But there are a ton of different and incompatible ways to do the same thing; ANT+, bluetooth LE, zigbee, and 6lowpan are just the low power ones I can think of off the top of my head. And that's just the physical through network OSI layers, it doesn't begin to address announcement of features (zeroconf, etc.) to each other or standardized interface presentation to the user (????).

So where are the products? Well, Nest gen2 thermostat is IoT-enabled. Fitbit monitors all wirelessly update your stats and profile. Apple's [i]watch and the moto360 smart watch are both network-aware. Even companies outside of the consumer electronics sphere are getting invested, like Chevorlet's automotive lte/wifi.

Granted, these aren't the groundbreaking, for-every-person products you're talking about, but the tech infrastructure is coming into its own. Product development takes time and age is only going to make the baseline models cheaper, more capable, more standard, and more prevalent. There's a lot of work to be done yet, but given the number of people and companies invested in IoT consumer electronics industry-wide, it's hard to imagine a world where everyone simply gave up on the tech instead of working out the problems.

Feeding the troll but what the heck....

From early 2012

The company aims to deliver about May 18 a second report on transistor characteristics of the CPU. It will include an analysis of the DC electrical properties of the chip’s NMOS and PMOS transistors, data on its gate and channel leakage current and performance benchmarks measured at three temperature levels.

The analysis will include use of Scanning and Transmission Electron Microscopy, Spreading Resistance Profiling and X-ray techniques. UBM TechInsights is a sister division of UBM LLC, the publisher of EE Times.

And that is just to see the circuitry. Good luck reverse engineering it to figure out what does what and verify there is nothing there that should not be there.

You might also look at this for an even older take on 486 and pentium tear downs... again with no attempt at reverse engineering the logic.

Heh...if it were trash, you'd not see it being one of the primary GPUs for mobile devices.

The problem isn't PowerVR itself. It's proprietary drivers on their stuff not being available that's always been the problem. Else you'd probably be singing their praises like most do NVidia for the problem space.

Mods, lay down the damn crack pipe...this one's not "informative", nor is it even accurate. Proof:

Rockchip RX3168 uses SGX GPU
Apple uses SGX in their iPads...
Ingenic uses it with their MIPS Android SOC
MediaTek uses it

And the list goes on and on. Unless this one uses AMD (well and now NVidia with Kepler...) or can convince Broadcom to make their top-end Videocore IV stuff available to use, they're talking out their backside out of box. It's crap because you can't easily get drivers for it and it's closed- and the only difference between them and NVidia on X86 is that NVidia makes closed drivers available, ImgTec doesn't. The same can be said for Adreno, Mali, and a few others. Now, if ImgTech could ass themselves to make available their drivers for X86 Atom boards, things would be better there.

Pretty sure those runaways were caused by morons who put their floormats over the accelerator, not software.

Pretty sure they weren't (at least, not all of them).

Having spent more than 18 months going in and out of the secure room to study Toyota's code, Michael Barr, CTO of the Barr Group, put together an 800-page report analyzing the 2005 Camry L4's software. On the witness stand, he walked a jury step by step through what the experts discovered in their source-code review.

...

Barr testified that the source-code review indicated "both that task could die by the memory corruption, and that also that one of side effects of that would be that this -- for example, that task died, that many of fail safes would be disabled." But is it possible to prove that the experts' discoveries in that cloak-and-dagger source-code room would manifest themselves in a moving vehicle? How do we know how a car might react to malfunctions or an outright failure in Task X?

...

However, we have confirmed in other vehicle testing that I'll talk about later, that if the incident begins with the peddle, [sic] brake peddle [sic] pressed at all, even lightly then the unintended acceleration will continue, potentially, forever unless the driver tries the risky thing of letting go of the brake while the car is driving away with him.

Broadcom's business model is actually working for them.

Only for very small values of "working". If you invested $100 in Broadcom stock back in the year 2000, you would have $21 today, and last month they laid off 20% of their workforce.

It looks like Broadcom still has a good business

Yeah, except for the minor issue that Broadcom chose to exit the mobile SoC business and laid off 2500 people including the team that developed and supported the VideoCore chip used by the RPi, so maybe it wasn't quite a good enough business.

The desktops with native java CPUs never happened.

ARM now makes chips with instructions designed specifically for running a VM (like the JVM, it even calls them the Java extensions). I don't know if Intel has any plan for that kind of thing.

As the blog in EE Times ("The Case for Free, Open Instruction Sets") argues, an ARM license costs $1M to $10M and takes 6 to 24 months to negotiate and then they take a small royalty per chip.
http://www.eetimes.com/author....

The proprietary instruction sets (ARM, IBM, Intel) have indeed evolved; that is not the problem. The problem is that you're not allowed to share implementations of the proprietary instruction sets with others. Thus, the lowRISC project is using a design from UC Berkeley for free without having to take the time or money to negotiate a contract, and they can modify it as much as they desire. Can't do that with ARM.

A more hidden advantage is that a lower complexity chip is easier to fab.

A modern ARM core that you get spending $1M would be easily a 6-7 Metal process, and masks aren't cheap ($100K each. And a 6-7 Metal would easily need 15-20 masks, so $2M outlay before the first chip is made).

If the low complexity design can get away with a 4Metal design, that can easily halve the cost of just starting up. Plus if you use lower end technologies that they're about to retire instead of the latest and greatest, that'll cut fab costs down even more.