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Texas Instruments also has a pretty extensive line of RFID products. We ordered one of their evaluation kits for a graduate course project, and it's pretty neat stuff.

Texas Instruments also has a pretty extensive line of RFID products. We ordered one of their evaluation kits for a graduate course project, and it's pretty neat stuff.

I guess you mean this card and this non-existant SIIG card.

If you take a peek at SIIGs PCIe card (NN-E38012-S1), it has an extra TI chip on it that looks like it's hooked directly to the bus. Probably a PCI-PCIe bridge like this. The FW400 version ( NN-E20012-S1) has no such chip. That's probably what is causing the 1394b cards to be /54.

Extra bridge chip notwithstanding, if it was actually impossible to put it in given the timeframe, I'd like to hear somebody apologize for the downgrade and say they'll put it back in RevB. I use that port and I'm not even a video professional. I can imagine that those guys are already not very happy about the state of Pro Apps and universal binaries.

Can't tell you much about the ARM side, though I will say the TI compiler tends to get high marks on code density and speed on the ARM. I'm sure you could write your ARM code with GCC. I don't know how the heterogeneous linking process works. Only other thing I know off-hand is that there is no flash. Silicon processes that support flash tend to not support high clock rate, and DaVinci can go real fast. :-) More at DaVinci's website.

Disclaimer: I work for TI and had a hand in the C64+ DSP that it includes, but I'm not a member of the DaVinci product team.

Gee, maybe you should go to the manufacturer's site for that kind of detail, instead of whining that a news article didn't publish tech specs.

Currently, the Intels, AMDs, ATIs & Nvidias ship with 90nm chips.

At least the last time I noticed, nVidia was still using 110 nm. ATI's latest X1 series (R520-based) use 90 nm fabrication, but I'm not aware of these being available as real products yet. The previous generation (e.g. X800) were 110 nm, unless memory serves me poorly.

TI and IBM also produce 90 nm chips. IBM (same page as above) claims to have a 65 nm ASIC production capability on line as well, though I don't know whether they have any real customers for it.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Actually, for the TI-89, TI provides a C compiler and IDE for Windows

The french have given us great wine and great cheese. Texas has given un George Bush.

Texas has also given us the integrated circuit, without which we wouldn't be discussing this right now...

It's a ~200MHz ARM9 processor made by Texas Instruments. Namely the TI 1710. Notice it also has an integrated DSP.

There are several approaches to power distribution. One is "telco type" -48VDC distribution. This is most appropriate when the configuration doesn't change much. Wiring usually involves big cables and screw lugs. Plugs aren't standardized. More importantly, there's no set of simple rules, like the UL/NEMA/NEC standards that govern plugs, outlets, wiring, and circuit breakers, that make 120V power distribution safe without having to measure everything.

In the 120VAC world, everything has been designed so that end users don't have to worry much about overloading the wiring. If they do, a circuit breaker will trip. An ordinary power plug, a "5-15P", can handle 15A, so if you have an outlet strip, there is a breaker to protect the plug and cord from overload, should the total load on the power strip exceed 15A. A 20A power strip must have a "L5-20P" plug, the big twist-lock type. As soon as you get away from 120VAC, you lose that designed-in idiot-proofing. (Europe is still struggling in this area, with too many different connectors, so you don't get the same level of idiot-proofing in the 220VAC part of the world.) So once you leave 120VAC, you're going to need power engineering skills. (Clamp-around ammeters are very useful, and yes, you can get them for DC.)

There's also 400Hz AC distribution, which allows for smaller transformers and filter caps in power supplies. 400Hz rackmount servers are available. Aircraft, military, and some mainframe systems use 400Hz. It's not a big win in this era of switching power supplies.

There's 3-phase power distribution. Here's a 3-phase outlet strip. More to the point, there's an efficiency gain in running a UPS from 3-phase power, and big UPSs are usually 3-phase, at least on the input side. Arguably, power should be 3-phase down to the point where it's rectified to DC, because 3-phase rectifiers need far less filtering, but nobody does this for small loads.

American Power Conversion has been pushing the idea of integrating power conversion, cable management, and cooling into standard racks. Classically, those are the big problems in big computer systems. Seymour Cray used to say that the big problems were "the thickness of the (wiring) mat" and "getting rid of the heat". By that standard, APC is now as much of a computer manufacturer as, say, Dell; neither makes motherboards or ICs, they just package gear from others. Which is a wierd thought.

All of this power is going to be converted again, at least once, and probably twice, before it hits the semiconductors. That's the job of point-of-load DC to DC converters, usually ICs on the board that do the final conversion. Typically, when you get to the computer, there's a conversion from the line voltage (120-240VAC, 48VDC, etc) to internal distribution voltages of 5-12VDC, then another conversion and regulation just before each device, usually downward to something like 3.3VDC. This keeps transient load changes from one device from affecting others. There may be on-chip regulation, too. The losses at those last stages of conversion are usually the biggest ones in the whole chain.

Forgot my source for the crypto info. First item listed is "New ISO 14443 Solution for MasterCard PayPass(TM)"

a little calculating device with maybe buttons and a small screen...

Not true for TI. Our largest Fabrication plants are right here in N. Texas, and we're building an even larger one right down the highway from me. Our largest design center is also in Dallas. (BTW, TI Bangalore is a design center - they don't mfg the chips there.)

Well, for highly specialised tasks, take a look at Analog Devices http://www.analog.com/ or Texas Instruments http://www.ti.com/.

They have been producing highly sophisticated cores that left a P4 bite the dust in a lot of cases.

I have worked on test-bed equipment that used a DSP PCI card that produced more test-data than a dual Xeon system could handle. JFYI.

GPUs like those from nVidia or ATI are still a lot less sophisticated than those DSPs, or hybrid DSP/uCs.

Still, in a few years FPGAs or CPLDs will surely be a so called "bigger threat" to (your favorite CPU company's) domination.... ;)

To split the hairs even more -- Noyce figured out how to connect the components by with metal traces on silicon. Kilby figured out how to combine resistors, capacitors and transistors on a single monolithic, and made some reference in his patent to printing the interconnections, although he didn't actually do it in his prototype.

Jack's Biography http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackstclair.s html

From the substitute for going on vacation article:

"I ... built up a circuit using discrete silicon elements. Packaged grown-junction transistors were used. Resistors were formed by cutting small bars of silicon and etching to value. Capacitors were cut from diffused silicon power transistor wafers, metallized on both sides. This unit was assembled and demonstrated to Adcock on August 28, 1958."

This guy was a true hacker! I wish I had the opportunity to meet him. Rest in peace Jack Kilby.

For all of us students, integration with the TI-89 Titanium would be truly awesome. The built-in calendar software is pretty cool (basic, but it gets the job done), but trying to type on the keypad is damned near impossible. The calculator comes standard with a USB port; it's almost a PDA.

It's easy to figure out what happened if you do a little snooping around. The CNN article doesn't tell you what buttons he pressed, and searching Google for "TI-30 Xa SE VA" will bring up every article on the matter which all have identical writeups.

Now, I took the first link that Google threw at me and there's a better picture there of the two calculators held up side-by-side. The "fixed" calculator is the one on the left. As you can see, the newly removed button is in the lower left corner of the calculator.

If you know your TI calculators, you'll know exactly what this button does, or rather, what its second function does. If you have no idea where I'm going with this, check out a stock TI-30 Xa here. It's a large enough image that you can easily see the symbols written in yellow above the key in the lower left corner of the calculator.

The symbols above the key in question are "FD" which means "press this key if you want to convert a Fraction to a Decimal or a Decmial to a Fraction". All you have to do to access this function is press the yellow "2nd" key located all the way at the upper left of the calculator (it's in the same row as the blanked out keys on the modified TIs).

I double checked my assumption, and you can see the directions in the manual on page 6 of the PDF.

TI just removed the yellow lettering above the key and hoped that no one would figure out the "2nd" + "FD" key combination.

The state is issuing calculators? Man, I need to move to Virginia and enroll in grade 6. This is a much better calculator than my current one.

which is why a Graphing calculator + external keyboard add-on could quite possibly be the cheapest low power portable note taking device ever ;) Graphing calculators are a staple of modern education, nearly Everyone has to buy one, so economy of scale applies, the low power feature comes standard with calculators (they are always designed with months of operation time per battery change, because that is what people 'expect' from a calculator ;) Since the graphing/programing ability go hand in hand, word processors already exist for all the major brands of graphing calculators. And there are companies that sell keyboards for popular model graphing calculators... Although a high end graphing calculator typically goes for $100+ and the keyboard accessory is another $40 on top of that.. but like I said, most people need a graphing calculator at some point in thier education... So, it's more like 'upgrading' your already purchased device into a portable note taking machine for $40 ;)

But considering the feature sets of modern graphing calculators no wonder some are banned from use on SAT/ACT etc... you could program it in to have an answer sheet of typical questions on those types of tests, and breeze through with a perfect score ;)

http://education.ti.com/us/product/accessory/keybo ard/features/features.html

20,000 out of 35,500 TI employees are in the US. Also, TI is building a new manufacturing facility in the US. See http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/rennerroadfab/index.sh tml

http://education.ti.com/us/product/tech/85/feature s/features.html It has been discontinued.

The MSP430 is a family of microcontrollers. They also go up to http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/msp430 f1612.html$8.95

That price was taken directly from the TI website

"Device pricing starting at $0.49".

ICs like this should step down 110V to 12V, and a bridge of diodes and eeny weeny capacitor should make it DC. I just dont see why would anyone need big coils. I've increasingly been seeing 3-pin ICs that are power regulators, some that can handle plenty of wattage with a heatsink, and are TINY. I fail to understand why manufacturers are still packaging the ugly adapter. My new voip device from linksys, a PAP2, is small sleek, and comes with a giant unslightly adapter. Its the stereotypical engineer thinking... input=12V and design the rest of the PCB from there. Marketing just looks away.

To clarify some more: Linux is running on the host processor, while VxWorks or some other RTOS is running on device doing the heavy lifting (ARM, some DSP, PowerPC, etc.). Windriver is hardly unique; TI offers Linux and their own RTOS (know as BIOS) as a possible solution. See, for example, http://dspvillage.ti.com/docs/catalog/software/det ails.jhtml?templateId=5121&path=templatedata/cm/sw detail/data/swbios_link

Cradle Semiconductor has been working for a while on a similar technology.

Of course, it's all a matter of scale - TI had a 4 DSP, 1 CPU processor a while ago, but it only made 100 MFLOPS. Cradle's first product has 8 DSPs and 6 CPUs - depending on if you can get your data to properly pipeline through the processors, you can achieve up to 3.6 GFLOPs peak with only a 230 MHz clock.

It's not the people who work with programming and want to "break out" of it. The problem is with the hordes of scientists and engineers who don't know how to program.

Oddly enough, this is exactly what got me into a programming job. Some 15+ years ago, I was part of a group that Texas Instruments put through school to become Computer-Aided Draftsmen. But because I had a tendency to hack about, I ended up becoming the programmer for the group, writing AutoLisp add-ons for AutoCAD. The other guys were more interested in the drafting, and were happy to let me keep hacking around.

Two big differences between me and the submitter, though:

* The AS degree I got represents a tiny fraction of his PhD investment, and

* I wanted to be a programmer in the first place.

Pocket Pc? Nay! A TI Calculator!

Second-source replacement batteries for cell phones, laptop computers, etc are also endangered. In the sincerest flattery of Lexmark's toner cartridge scheme, TI has developed a chip to ensure your next rechargeable gizmo will work only with genuine OEM batteries. Good luck finding one after they bring out next year's model.

(I know it had a timer set to "wake it up" for the descent).

Not a problem for batteries.
Toys like BQ4852Y can live off its own on-chip battery for 10 years, wake your hardware up anytime inbetween, then provide several essential functionalities to microcontrollers (watchdog, Power On Reset), store data just like RAM except retaining it when external power is missing, and they weight a few grams. So the "main" batteries won't lose any more than their internal leakage until the system wakes up.

If you know how to solder, you could make a simple voltage regulator circuit, which just provides what you need, using something like the LM317.

There are other regulators you could use, but I don't remember part numbers for them.

Derive is the program that was most usefull to me when being in highschool. I know it's a windows program but I don't think you'll have any trouble running it under Wine (especially the older versions). It's not as bloated as mathematica or mathcad or mathlab, but it's also not in their price range (much more affordable for a standard family: 99-199$). It also features integration with some Texas Instruments Calculators right out of the box.

In the battle against Microsoft the fact that everyone and his mother is moving to Eclipse is not mentioned often. Yesterday there was a story that TI is jumping on the bandwagon for SC development. Eclipse runs on ALL platforms.

Your first calculator worked in Reverse Polish? Your father must have really loved you.

My first calculator, the Texas Instruments Little Professor, was not quite so advanced. Also, it was considerably more bulky than your Sinclair Scientific. However, it was a gift from a cherished engineer-type uncle, and I was quite attached. Unlike your calculator, it preferred to ask questions than provide answers (this makes it similar to some professors I know). Mostly, it asked about the times tables, which I became quite proficient at as a child.

My only complaint is that to this day the professor only comes in a male version.

And I'm also certian that the US didn't just complete the first non-government manned space flight and doesn't have billions of dollars going to develop private space flight.

Give me a break.

China is emerging as an ecenomic powerhouse, and it looks like it will continue down that path, provided their government doesn't screw up. However please don't pretend like all good things come from China. I gave just a small list of the US companies that produce advanced hardware, including what drives almost all the devices you listed. Your MP3 player may be built in China but it's usually using TI DSPs and AD opamps.

You know it's perfectly possible for China AND the US to be economic powers, and for both to benefit from trade with each other.

http://www.lenel.com/

http://www.ti.com/tiris/docs/products/readers/RI-H 4R-S5H3.shtml

What about using DSP's instead of FPGA's and just sticking with the coding to carry out GL calls on the DSP and pushing the signals out to the display? DSP's nowadays are very fast, are mainly made up of adders and multipliers which would be needed for all the matrix operations in a 2D / 3D display output.

Here are thre possible DSP's that could be used:

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tms320 dm642.html

... double-digit growth across all the company's major Semiconductor operations, with particularly strong contributions from wireless, DLP and high-performance analog products.

http://www.uni-leipzig.de/urz/images/abacus.gif
http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/tubes3/600-nl-807.jpg
http://www.ti.com/corp/graphics/press/image/on_lin e/transistor.jpg
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/resources/cisnews/v2i2/i lliac/Chip_Ant.jpg

With low power devices, there is the serious prospect of building sealed package electronics that would last longer than the application lifetime without ever introducing an additional power charge.

If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at the http://www.ti.com/msp430/MSP430 low power microcontroller from TI. I'm developing products with it today (dev. kit is sitting on my desk). Heck, I'm going to a developer conference that TI is giving on it next month in Dallas. The world is changing in the direction mentioned.

Example applications are already listed such as a smoke detector/intrusion detection system and power meter that have completely sealed packages (read never change batteries) that will function for 10 years.

Hence the idea of having a product you can't turn off is a serious one.

Welcome to a world of things happening around you without your knowledge or consent. I'd estimate that products that have the potential to to terrible things will be around us all in about 2 years.

By terrible things I mean:

• Track the user's position without any indication.
• Eavesdrop & surveil the customer or any persons near the customer.
• Not really be off when they are supposed to be.
• Have multiple purposes that are not expected by the consumer.

Imagine a wrist watch that sends an approximate position out via wireless signals every few minutes or hours, with a unique tracking number. Or that transmits voice clips (which it has already transcribed via embedded software). Or constantly taking biomedical measurements, and reporting them to centralized databases (you medical insurer keeps track of any heart arrythmia, or strenuous activity).

These things might be given away for free, and even if you choose to avoid them, your neighbour may not, exposing you to considerable side effects. Keep in mind, that the code on these things is pretty much always closed source, so you never know what will be running on them.

Then again the power of positive effects is very significant. Depending on the use, the world could change in significantly different ways.

The magazine "American Heritage of Invention & Technology" has an interesting article in their current issue on the first transistor radio (see here). It was designed by Texas Instruments and built by Regency. Although the cost was high, $50 was real money in 1954, Texas Instruments only broke even on the product. They were breaking a lot of new ground in the mass-production of transistors and printed circuit boards. That helped them become a leader in the semiconductor industry, where they have made a great deal of money. A little Japanese company, later renamed to Sony, soon followed in 1955 with their own transistor radio.

this is the giant hole I wrote about a year ago, and thus far I see no one addressing it. I suppose the industry expects no one will offer PCI cards for sale that have, say, a TI 1394 interface chip on it - but given the NWO and the fact most of the rest of the world doesn't have any law against it, I expect this "security" will be moot from the day it begins. Worse case is you end up sending your source device to a tweaker who will just disable the encryption either in firmware or by replacing the 1394 chip with a pin-compatible device that lacks the encryption "feature."

Graphing Calculators can provide a similar (and much cheaper) tool. Beginners can start off with BASIC programs, and although these require some tweaking to run smoothly, that's part of the fun. (I goofed around with one myself a little while ago). More advanced assembly programmers have achieved some amazing stuff (such as greyscale on a black-and-white screen and a very accurate port of Bubble Bobble. The specs are all there for the asking.

Sure, calculators aren't as cool or powerful as what Lamothe is putting out there, but they do force you to be creative and do a lot with a little. Besides, making something happen on a little box just seems cooler - you tend to take having complex software for granted with PC's.

Texas Instruments makes a keyboard compatible with some of their (older) graphing calculators. With their NoteFolio program it cant be too hard to take notes in class with a graphing calculator like the TI-89 and the keyboard. http://education.ti.com/us/product/accessory/keybo ard/features/features.html

That's impressive, but do you have current Korean broadband penetration statistics? The most recent credible study I could find was the 2002 Pyramid Research study which showed at the time that S.Korea had 55% BB penetration, leaving the US at 14%.

Your last line is also a good point; what can really be considered broadband? Around here, you can get cable internet at a blazing 56kps, where the standard in S.Korea (at least a a while ago) was 2Mbps.

Boy, nobody seems to have read this very carefully -- including the ZDNET reporter wrote the original article.

Here are the relevant TI pages: their press release, and their UDSL home page.

First: the 200 Mbps peak bandwidth referred to is *aggregate* bandwidth -- upstream plus downstream -- for a symmetric 100/100 connection. These speeds have been talked about in the industry for some time -- see back issues of the DSL prime newsletter. The peak bandwidth in any one direction is probably 100 Mbps.

Second: The peak speeds are indeed at short distances, but they won't be limited to just those people living a block from their CO. Instead they will be delivered as FTTC (fiber-to-the-curb) or FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises), where an optical fiber runs from the CO to a local mini-DSLAM that serves a small neighborhood -- or even a single apartment building.

Third: TI is *not* selling UDSL as an ultra-high-speed DSL, but as a "universal" DSL to make it easier (read: cheaper) to upgrade customers when the time comes. Other silicon manufacturers will be selling similar technologies... But for the DSL customer, what matters is the "when the time comes" part -- and unless your neighborhood already has FTTC/FTTP, the time isn't going to come for a little while yet. :-)

But it will come.

Boy, nobody seems to have read this very carefully -- including the ZDNET reporter wrote the original article.

Here are the relevant TI pages: their press release, and their UDSL home page.

First: the 200 Mbps peak bandwidth referred to is *aggregate* bandwidth -- upstream plus downstream -- for a symmetric 100/100 connection. These speeds have been talked about in the industry for some time -- see back issues of the DSL prime newsletter. The peak bandwidth in any one direction is probably 100 Mbps.

Second: The peak speeds are indeed at short distances, but they won't be limited to just those people living a block from their CO. Instead they will be delivered as FTTC (fiber-to-the-curb) or FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises), where an optical fiber runs from the CO to a local mini-DSLAM that serves a small neighborhood -- or even a single apartment building.

Third: TI is *not* selling UDSL as an ultra-high-speed DSL, but as a "universal" DSL to make it easier (read: cheaper) to upgrade customers when the time comes. Other silicon manufacturers will be selling similar technologies... But for the DSL customer, what matters is the "when the time comes" part -- and unless your neighborhood already has FTTC/FTTP, the time isn't going to come for a little while yet. :-)

But it will come.

Following links from links from the article, I came across http://www.ti.com/tiris/ which is the list of the RFID equipment that TI is already selling to companies. In fact, their item RI-TRP-RFOB looks exactly like the Mobil SpeedPass that I stopped using a few months ago, although I wonder which version it is- they have a 64-bit read-only, an 80-bit read-write, and an 88-bit read-only with a challenge-response mechanism, all working at 134.2kHz.

Even better (or worse for consumers,) their RI-I01-110A looks a lot like the square "anti-theft" stickers that I've seen on different items at Wal-Mart for years... which leads me to believe that pretty much every Wal-Mart in the country already has RFID readers at the doors, and they just need to install more 13.56MHz tags on/in their merchandise in order to attain their dream of "total retail visibility".

I wonder if the "de-activate" device they have at the cash registers is actually turning off the tag, or if it's just registering the tag as "sold" in a separate computer system which is (as far as you and I know) only being used for loss prevention purposes, and the reader looks up the serial number and recognizes it as sold and therefore doesn't squeal at you when you walk out the door.

I also have an idea for a device I'd like to see on the market, which would read an RFID tag, show you what data is contained in it, and which could "toast" a tag after you get it home- so you could verify that it is indeed shut off. It would have to work with several frequency bands, and would probably have the same low power limits that the in-store readers are limited to (in order to get FCC type-acceptance.) Free idea for a business venture if somebody knows how to build such a beast, and I'll be one of your first customers...

Following links from links from the article, I came across http://www.ti.com/tiris/ which is the list of the RFID equipment that TI is already selling to companies. In fact, their item RI-TRP-RFOB looks exactly like the Mobil SpeedPass that I stopped using a few months ago, although I wonder which version it is- they have a 64-bit read-only, an 80-bit read-write, and an 88-bit read-only with a challenge-response mechanism, all working at 134.2kHz.

Even better (or worse for consumers,) their RI-I01-110A looks a lot like the square "anti-theft" stickers that I've seen on different items at Wal-Mart for years... which leads me to believe that pretty much every Wal-Mart in the country already has RFID readers at the doors, and they just need to install more 13.56MHz tags on/in their merchandise in order to attain their dream of "total retail visibility".

I wonder if the "de-activate" device they have at the cash registers is actually turning off the tag, or if it's just registering the tag as "sold" in a separate computer system which is (as far as you and I know) only being used for loss prevention purposes, and the reader looks up the serial number and recognizes it as sold and therefore doesn't squeal at you when you walk out the door.

I also have an idea for a device I'd like to see on the market, which would read an RFID tag, show you what data is contained in it, and which could "toast" a tag after you get it home- so you could verify that it is indeed shut off. It would have to work with several frequency bands, and would probably have the same low power limits that the in-store readers are limited to (in order to get FCC type-acceptance.) Free idea for a business venture if somebody knows how to build such a beast, and I'll be one of your first customers...