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My response to byte.com's article:

In your January 22 article about the DataPlay storage device, the author writes: "How long this claim, and its copyright-protection features, survive contact with the anti-intellectual-property-rights types remains to be seen". I believe this is misunderstanding the philosophy behind the opposition to SDMI. The big media corporations have consistently and repeatedly abused the rights of both the artists and their consumers, both by lobbying for new laws such as the DMCA and the "Sony Bono" Copyright Extension Act, and by twisting existing copyright law and ignoring international copyright treaties with such abuses as region coding of DVDs (which has been carried over to DVD Audio, making a mockery of their reasons for using it on DVD movies). Fair Use and the first sale principle are being eroded or bypassed entirely, with the introduction of the "You're buying a licence, not a copy" model, which, if effective, will remove the need for the recording companies to respect the consumer side of copyright law.

This article at EETimes discusses plastic transistors being used as a display device, and this story is about a startup offering a transistor printing process.

This article at EETimes discusses plastic transistors being used as a display device, and this story is about a startup offering a transistor printing process.

Regardless of which principality chooses to enforce copyrights, large corporate copyright holders have taken the initiative by employing "coded-in" architecture. Hence, traditional allowances that have kept the privelages of the copyright holder balanced with the public interest -- i.e. Fair Use-- may be hardwired out of the copyrighted product.

Take, for example, several MPEG layers currently in design. MPEG 21 (and I believe 4) comes with a nifty "Intellectual Property Management Layer" for "digital rights management."

Guess who's been busy championing this brand of fine-tuned copyright control?

Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative and a leader in the MPEG group, has been a main proponent of the MPEG-21 concept. SDMI is developing a generic architecture to handle security and digital rights management for Internet audio.
(from Electronic Engineering Times article)

I think Lawrence Lessig's book Code (link to O'Reily review) clearly explains the consequences of allowing powerful, corporate copyright holders to create their own copyright policy through soft/hardware architecture.

Sincerely,
Vergil

According to this EETimes article, high-frequency induction is a growing concern. It cites an academic paper stating "copper is much more problematic than aluminum when it comes to inductance...."

SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- The perils of chip design at 0.18 micron and below mandate new research in a number of areas, according to presenters at the recent International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) 2000 here. Calls were made for breakthroughs in areas such as power analysis and estimation, inductance modeling, analog layout, incremental CAD and process variability.

Beyond academic papers, this year's ISPD included a keynote speech by Aart de Geus, chairman and chief executive officer of Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) In his keynote speech, de Geus called for better estimation and analysis tools, and for attention to new problems such as inductance.

"Finally, after 25 years, inductance is coming back," de Geus said. "With high current, inductance does matter." But it won't be a big issue for most designers, he added, until feature sizes drop below 0.18 micron.

A paper given by Li-Fu Chang of Frequency Technology Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) outlined that company's research in inductance modeling of on-chip copper interconnects. Copper is much more problematic than aluminum when it comes to inductance, the paper notes.

Chang said the paper presents a "full chip" inductance modeling architecture. "Inductance modeling is much harder work than Rs and Cs [resistance and capacitance]," he noted.

This article on EETimes tells why the US standard sucks when it comes to mobility...

Beans

ISSCC: Transceiver developers creep toward 40 Gbits

Source EETimes

A link is here

So, we are moving to faster networks....2002 is a date tied to shipping product for oc768 by someone in one of the articles I read.

• Intel's Willamette will be out in Q3 running at 1.1 GHz to at least 1.4 GHz, coming pretty close or equal to these Alphas on megahertz, and likely on SPECint (integer and branching performance where Intel typically lags Alpha by 5-50%.) The proper comparison is current -products-to-current-products or future-at-dateX to future-at-dateX products, not current-to-future.
• Alpha's pre-eminence in floating point is about to drop sharply due to Itanium and Willamette products from Intel with substantially improved floating point (many more fp execution units). Alpha has traditionally provided 3x the floating point of Intel. About 3-4 years ago, Intel realized that floating point was useful for the mass market (3D games) and the workstation space they were starting to enter, and these two processor cores are the first to reflect significant prioritization of floating point from Intel (SSE in Pentium III was a minor modification of a existing core design.)
  • While Intel has kept this mostly under wraps, some details have leaked out indicating that Willamette/Foster (Foster is the "Xeon" version of Willamette) will have equal or better floating point than Itanium, and Itanium's floating point has been publicly characterized in things like Kenneth's Intel roadmap. Note that the existence of only 8 registers on IA32 designs like Willamette probably substantially restrains performance on real apps. Intel will add 144 new SSE2 instructions according to Sharky and eliminate the switch time previously required when going from regular fp to SSE instructions. The memory bandwidth gap between Alpha and Intel will also narrow with Willamette/Itanium.)

Net: Intel may be about to catch up a significant amount on floating point, a historic Alpha differentiator, and Intel clock rates and integer/branch performance definitely keep pace at the 1-2 GHz levels.

--LP