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They'll survive because nobody with two brain cells to rub together enjoys reading on a backlit and always-refreshing screen.

You do realize, of course, that active-matrix LCDs (like the IPS panels used in ALL Apple products) do not "flicker" (like the unavoidable consequence of "always-refreshing" CRTs).

Flicker in LCDs does NOT come from "refresh"; but rather from asymmetric-drive signals. Modern LCDs have hardware compensation for this. Hence, they don't flicker. At all.

This is why reading text on an LCD is much less fatiguing than reading it on, say, a CRT. e-Ink displays are also "comfortable" for this same reason; but that's not the point: The point is that properly-designed active-matrix LCDs don't flicker any more than e-Ink displays, at least as far as human eyes are concerned. And until the U.N. Non-Human Rights Treaty passes in 2030, we don't have to worry about making displays tuned to horses, dogs, cats and pigs.

Space Micro doesn't list the prices of their components or systems, nor can I find any from anyone else. Honeywell don't list their prices either. Atmel seem to have dropped out of the field. Linear don't list the prices for their space-hardened stuff. Don't see any for BAE either, or Intersil. Empire Magnetics require a lot of personal data before they give you access to even the price classification information. Not the prices, just how they're classified.

You've got to allow for a year's worth of traveling outside of an atmosphere and then operating on Mars for the duration of the mission. This analysis of radiation for manned missions suggests you're looking at 3.5 mSv per day, then 20 rems per year in most of the places of interest.

Converting everything to rads, it's 0.1 rads per mSv and 1 rad per rem, so that's 12.75 rads to get to Mars if you assume a year-long trip, plus 20 rads for the mission, so anything with a rating of less than 32.75 rads is pretty much guaranteed to fail. However, over the course of a two years, the odds of there being a solar flare are not insignificant. To be safe, you want resistance to a further 400 rad. 432.75 rad is within the tolerance of most of the space-hardened components (some components can be taken up to 1000 rad, others up to 10,000). However, the cheapest space components would NOT survive. You're talking high-end on the space scale.

I'm going to figure that the top-line components will cost 100x that of their conventional counterparts, due to the higher-level of precision and QA that are required. It might well be a good deal more. In Russia, you've also got to pay for smuggling decent-grade hardware out of the US, as all of this stuff will be under massive amounts of regulation.

My guess is that the cuts would have saved enough that those doing the cost-cutting could buy second homes in Switzerland.

It looks they are still being made.
http://www.intersil.com/products/deviceinfo.asp?pn=CDP1802A

I remember reading an article years ago. ionizing radiation is all around us, in low amounts. Naturally, small amounts of radioactive particles will make it into the epoxy and such surrounding ICs, and at some point it will decay.

From what I remember reading, it was inevitable, so they had to change the design of the [memory, I think] to make it resistant to occasional decay events.

I seem to recall the article being from the dawn of solid state memory, i.e. right after core. I'm thinking it was about DRAM, as SRAM is inherently harder to flip a bit in.

That said, all the oldschool car computers from the 80's generally had a 680x micro, with 256b or so of SRAM on board, and maybe 64k of program ROM - So it shouldn't be prone to problems.
Modern computers running.. whatever.. 68000's? x86? with globs of DRAM for infotainment stuff might be a little more prone to radiation flipping bits. I don't know.

I guess if they want to be hardass about it, they can use radhard RAM and ROM and a silicon-on-sapphire COSMAC [vomit] micro for the crucial driving bits, and a normal machine for the infotainment. This is the stuff they use (used?) in space.

Last I checked, Intersil still sold rad hardened 8086's and 1802's, at stupid prices - so presumably NASA and/or the army are still buying them.

Here's their rad hard 8086:
http://www.intersil.com/products/deviceinfo.asp?pn=HS-80C86RH
Apparently good to 100k rad dose - any humans nearby will be pushing daises a very long time before that.

Considering the fact that I work in the DC buck regulator industry and work with a few of the guys who developed this topology, do not underestimate marketing. We currently offer 4-6 phase solutions for VRM11 and VRM11.1. These are the Intel spec on how tight the Vcore voltage needs to be. We typical run 30A per phase. Find me a CPU that requires 12x30A = ~500Watts for just the CPU (multiprocessors may have more than one regulator). From what I see, the only complex upgrade for the core 2 duo's is the tighter voltage tolerance, lower Vcore, and work on improving idle efficiency. Since Intel did a lot of work on improving the efficiency of their CPUs, overall power consumption has not increased (probably decreased). I should point out that our 4-6 phase controllers have a more advanced implementation for adjusting for load transients (aka CPU goes from 0% to 100%). It is possible that Gigabyte figured out a way to pay for 12 phases cheaply instead of 6 phases that are more intelligent. Here's one of our parts: http://www.intersil.com/cda/deviceinfo/0,1477,ISL6 327,0.html/

Its a CMOS Precision Chopper-Stabilized opamp http://www.intersil.com/products/deviceinfo.asp?pn =ICL7650S

Broadband -A type of transmission that shares the bandwidth of a medium--such as copper or fiber optic cable--to carry more than one signal. Broadband facilities have a bandwidth (capacity) greater than a voice grade line of 3 kHz. Such a broadband facility--typically coaxial cable--may carry numerous voice, video and data channels simultaneously. Each "channel" will take up a different frequency on the cable. "Guardbands" (empty spaces) exist between the channels to make sure that each channel does not interfere with its neighbor. A coaxial CATV cable is the "classic" broadband channel. Simultaneously it carries many TV channels. Broadband cables are used in some office LANs. But more common are the baseband variety, which have the capacity for one channel only. Everything on that cable to be transmitted or received must use that one channel. That one channel is very fast, so each device needs only to use that high speed channel for only a little of the time

CC.

Linksys 802.11g cards (and the new version of their 802.11b PCI card) don't work in linux. The chipset manufaturer, Broadcom, is holding back specifications on the card. If you want 802.11g in linux, the best solution is the D-Link card, or the Netgear one. Both use the Intersil Prism GT chipset. Intersil is very open about their design, and supports the development of open source drivers for Linux and other operating systems. Even if Broadcom were to open up, Intersil is more likely the company you would be wanting to give money to.

Still, drivers for the Broadcom chipset would be nice, so take a minute to sign the petition.

802.11g has a much better range than 802.11b. Read this (pdf). What you want is probably the charts on page 12 and 13. 802.11g offers significant improvements over 802.11b.

According to the Intersil Web site the documentation is out, and available under NDA. I don't know if the folks at wlan-ng had to sign an NDA for the Prism 2/2.5 docs, but if they did, I assume that they can do the same for the Prism GT (read drivers could be forthcoming)

Have a look at http://www.intersil.com/design/prism/papers/sympos um.pdf to see a summary of the loss you'll get through various materials. (page 4). Two other materials I've heard about but aren't listed are plaster with metal lath, and rebar concrete. Both will drop the signal dramatically. They basically both as as a faraday shield. Rebar concrete is what's used in most apartment buildings, it's concrete embedded with steel bars. Plaster in walls of houses often has a metal mesh called lath in it. In both its the metal content that kills the signal.

Here's the list from the PDF

> 2.4 GHz Signal Attenuation:
> Window Brick Wall 2dB
> Metal Frame Glass Wall into Building 6dB
> Metal Door in Office 6dB
> Cinder Block Wall 4 dB
> Metal Door in Brick Wall 12.4dB
> Brick Wall next to Metal Door 3dB

Brick and wood aren't much of a problem, so if you've somehow got a brick & wood apartment building, with no rebar, you're in luck ;-) (you're probably also in Asia)

simon

"Only good things can come from a tech visionary who purchases Old World infrastructure and is willing to run fiber to them."

I wouldn't call that an absolute. Look at the nightmare that Qwest Communications has caused. They're still using Pair Gain, in a city that is supposedly modern in design. We can't get DSL service in half of Phoenix that is within the copper distance needed to do it, and Phoenix was originally a US West Communications test city for the technology. I've had friends who couldn't get the phone company to install a copper circuit, and would not say who was responsible for Qwest's engineering decision to implement pair gain on every phone line.

So, I don't believe that companies usisng old-world, middle-world (not to be confused with middle-earth), or brand-new technologies are any better simply because of the tech. They have to actually provide service, not claim to be able to without delivering.

If you want to use slightly more stable drivers for the DWL-650, go pull a set from the manufacturer Intersil. I'm using their generic Prism 2.5 drivers with my card (don't know what the 3.0 set does) and they're WAY more stable than the ones on the DLink website. (In my case, the Signal Strength meter actually runs on Win 2K instead of BSOD).

I can only imagine that the XP drivers would be better from them than DLink.

So an alien's first look at earth's computing technology might end up being RCA's CDP1802 microprocessor, huh? Maybe instead of that record we should've included a CHIP-8 ROM, so they could've played a few games and learned where our culture was really headed...

Now, if somebody like Jumptec, Ampro, or any of the other embedded CPU board makers would use this! I'd love to have that for my embedded system - fast graphics for all the traces, USB 2.0 for RF control, two Ethernet ports for access...

I wonder if anyone could pursade nVidia to put one of these in there... They have everything else....

I do this for a living, and I can tell you this won't help you listen to cellular.

First, all they are doing is taking the 455kHz IF from an existing radio, digitizing it, and using the computer to do the demodulation. Thus, if your radio won't receive the cellular band, your computer won't either. And if your radio can tune into the cell band, you can listen to AMPS without a computer - it's just narrowband FM.

Now, if you are talking about GSM, PCS, CDMA, or anything other than AMPS, then you will need more than just a receiver that can tune those bands. CDMA is spread over 1.5MHz of spectrum - unless your radio has an IF that wide you are out of luck.

GSM and PCS (which is just GSM at a different frequency) is narrowband, but it's still more complicated than FM- you need to be able to receive the complex (in the a + (srqt(-1))w sense of the word) waveform, and pull the bits out of the air. Then, you need to decode the protocol, run the vocoder algorithm, and generate the audio. We use TI C6X DSPs capable of 1.6BOPS, with special opcodes to help the decoding, and Special chips to do the grunt work and it still takes a lot of work to get it to run in real time.

Now, if you are a ham, and you want to do sideband, PSK31, or other modes, this is a great thing. But don't expect to be able to monitor your neighbor's phone with it.

Besides, if you ever HAD monitored cellular, you't realize it's about as interesting as watching grass grow.

Maybe the managers were concerned about how the engineers were always discussing doping, and just got the wrong idea. Heh.

--
Evan

55 kGray = 5500 kilorad.

Radiation-hardened ICs can withstand "only" 300 kilorad .

Think it's safe to send your consumer-grade electronics through the mail?

With two of these HDTV hardware codecs, one could make an SVGA Head-Mounted-Display _wireless_ cheaply. Just combine your HDTV hard codecs with the Interstil Prism Indigo, a 54Mb/s wireless LAN, and you're ready to rock.

-nb

And I agree with several of the posters - I'd like to see this sort of thing work its way into a box next to the computer.

Take
this bad boy, a four channel programmable down converter - 4 radios on a chip. You feed in 1 to 4 IF data streams, and this guy will decode them - about 2 billion operations per second, on a chip the size of your thumbnail (micro-ball-grid array). I work with its little brother, the 50214, on
my project, and I can't wait until I get past the big stuff and get some time to play.

That's the sick thing about soft radios: you do one down conversion from RF to IF, then digitize it, and from there on it's all math. When you are a ham operator, a math geek, and a software engineer, and you get paid to play with these, well, life is good.

Well you couldn't be more wrong about what processors are in this sucker!

There's actually 7 on-board, 6 of them are Harris RTX2010's (Harris is now Intersil). This processor can do 6 MIPS at 8MHz.. There is also one Honeywell 1750A that runs the flight program. (2.5 MIPS - The military hybrid of this chip also runs Linux ; .)

Nice little satellite for early 90's.

Well you couldn't be more wrong about what processors are in this sucker!

There's actually 7 on-board, 6 of them are Harris RTX2010's (Harris is now Intersil). This processor can do 6 MIPS at 8MHz.. There is also one Honeywell 1750A that runs the flight program. (2.5 MIPS - The military hybrid of this chip also runs Linux .)

Nice little satellite for early 90's.

Well you couldn't be more wrong about what processors are in this sucker!

There's actually 7 on-board, 6 of them are Harris RTX2010's (Harris is now Intersil). This processor can do 6 MIPS at 8MHz.. There is also one Honeywell 1750A that runs the flight program. (2.5 MIPS - The military hybrid of this chip also runs Linux ; ;.)

Patriot Sci. has a Java processor - actually it was a FORTH in Si processor origionally, but was 'retargeted' since FORTH bit the big one and became as relevant as LATIN. I'd like to try one out, since the RTX2010 only comes in (expensive) radiation hardened form.

Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.

Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.

The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...

Just my 5 eurocents...
Johan.