bah.. $10k? nothing! Attach two more zeroes and get a semiconductor industry grade rapid termal processing machine. That one will toast your bread up to 1000C++ in vacuum, done in a few seconds.
The Chinese not quite. Tsiolkovsky maybe but I do not think he ever built anything.
It is not about building something, but about the theory. Tsiolkovsky developed the basic theory of rocket flight and probably both Goddard and von Braun read all of his work. If you take a look at the guidance vane system that Goddard used and the one on the V2 they are so close it is scary. Yes it could have been parallel development but the closeness in time and the comment from von Braun make me wonder
Honestly, I see no resemblence in the vanes. I think you are mixing something up. Goddard was experimenting with intertial guidance systems, which were later also implemented by von Brauns people and essentially in all other rockets. But this is not about stealing ideas or something like that. Goddard was as well as the others a scientist and also published his work (to some extend..). It is just natural to build open others ideas, that is what science is about.
with a mechanical guidance system that was essentially just sophisticated clockwork and gyros adjusting tiny fins in the exhaust stream
No, actually it used some quite sophisticated analog computer (analog electronic feedback loop) to control the fins. There are some papers about this on the net, and believe me - an average EE can not design this after his analog control systems class.
The system was designed by the same guy, Helmut Hoelzer, that was later head of the nasa computing center. Go figure..
Likewise, with 1 watt, signal can in theory travel 13,467,980 miles.
Isnt the calculation a bit off? AFAIK the signal power does not decrease linearly with distance, but with a higher power depending on the transmitting antenna.
omg.. after reading that article I got the feeling that there are people even more geeky than computer geeks. "I'm thrilled the record was set by an all-American team using all-American equipment." The Ten Tec receiver is manufactured in Severville, TN and the Elecraft transmitter is produced in California and offered as a kit.
FPGAs have been around since the 70s, what's new about them?
AFAIK its the late 80ies.. sources? SPLDs do not count, naturally.
Regarding the original poster - if you have been following the recent developments in FPGA you may have noticed that it moved from niche logic replacement to mainstream SOC during the last two years.
-stole a bike and stored it in their home for several month (according to article) -they dismantled the elctronics, destroying part of the assembly by removing protective silicone coating.
I can see that tampering with such a bike is interesting, but wouldn't proper hacker ethics dictate that you return it after a few hours/days? Months is definitly on the "theft" side. These guys have lost my respect due to that. Also, hacking the mechanism is one thing - disabling it in a bunch of bikes another. First could get away as educational hacking, the second is vandalism.
In addition to that I have to say that these guys are quite lame. Even if they did not know about AVR microcontrollers, it would have taken a few hours search on the web to find out how to read them out with a homemade programmer. Instead it took them months to figure that out and finally requiring a store bought programmer. Lucky for them they found an ISP connecter, I bet otherwhise they would not have been have to read the contents....and requiring oversized flowcharts to understand some small (less than 8kb!) assembler program (photo).. pff... I would not hire them.
Well.. consider two things: 1) Vt control is already possible by controlling the work function of the gate and the channel doping. 2) There aint no such thing as substrate bias in SOI.
And a slight addition: It does not perpetuate moores law, it is just mitigating the problems that occured with gate dielectric scaling.
Moore's Law requires constant downscaling of the gate insulator in the transistor. Recently the industry came to a point where the tunnelling current through the insulator became so high that it is not possible to make it any thinner. This problem can be counteracted by increasing the channel mobility using strained silicon.
Can such a team be put together outside NVidia/ATI? You bet!
The only problem is that it DOES matter who these people are. And you can bet that everybody who is eligible is already occupied by a well paying full time job.
Looking at the products of the company tech source I think that they are mostly looking into using the design byself. They are selling special high resolution displays and graphics cards for aviation and other critical applications. These markets have extremely stringent safety protocols, of which many can not be met by the highly complex GPUs of today. In addition the exotic resolutions may pose a problem.
Having a straight forward design suitable for an FPGA would enable them add additional fail safe mechanisms and to qualify more easily for these applications. Oh yes, and they get others to work on their products for free. They could use rad hardened FPGAs for the final implementation.
Remember, Tech Source is a boutique graphics card company, and the guy proposing this (Timothy Miller?) is a graphics card engineer
Well, I read the specs and the introduction to the mailing list. They misspelled "vertices" and do not know how phong shading is done on pre-pixelshader graphics cards (hint: environment mapping). I doubt he has ever designed a 3D rendering architecture. This is also backed up by some of the specs. For example where is the use of 16.16 fixed point screen coordinates?
Well, its "Silicon On Insulator" (SOI), Si3N4 (whatever may be exciting about it) and high-k. I also do not know about dovetail, but it may be related to problems with void filling in interconnects as you get structures similar to a dovetail there. The phenomenon you are referring to is probably the "birds peak", common in LOCOS formation.
Sorry, I do not have any links. I'd suggest to look for some books about semiconductor prozessing e.g. S.M.Sze or Madou.
Its the evil thing in a chipfab. Everybody talks about HF and is afraid of coming near or getting exposed. A chemist would probably say: "Dont touch", thats it.
There are many other dangerous substances in a chip fab like silan, arsin, phosphin, chlourtriflouride (now thats nasty). But all over all the amount is pretty low and everything is sealed of insanely well. It is much more dangerous to work in a chemical plant.
Slashdot Mirror
..what it is good at though is amplifying it via the Ramen effect.
Guess what you had for lunch?
Just let it die! Enterprise was doomed from the beginning. At least we have the new BSG now - there is really no need for Enterprise anymore.
bah.. $10k? nothing! Attach two more zeroes and get a semiconductor industry grade rapid termal processing machine. That one will toast your bread up to 1000C++ in vacuum, done in a few seconds.
The Chinese not quite. Tsiolkovsky maybe but I do not think he ever built anything.
It is not about building something, but about the theory. Tsiolkovsky developed the basic theory of rocket flight and probably both Goddard and von Braun read all of his work.
If you take a look at the guidance vane system that Goddard used and the one on the V2 they are so close it is scary. Yes it could have been parallel development but the closeness in time and the comment from von Braun make me wonder
Honestly, I see no resemblence in the vanes. I think you are mixing something up. Goddard was experimenting with intertial guidance systems, which were later also implemented by von Brauns people and essentially in all other rockets. But this is not about stealing ideas or something like that. Goddard was as well as the others a scientist and also published his work (to some extend..). It is just natural to build open others ideas, that is what science is about.
But then the V2 as pretty much a scaled up version of one of Robert Goddard's later rockets.
Oh yes, and Goddard stole everything from Tsiolkovsky and the chinese. This is called evolutionary development, or science.
with a mechanical guidance system that was essentially just sophisticated clockwork and gyros adjusting tiny fins in the exhaust stream
No, actually it used some quite sophisticated analog computer (analog electronic feedback loop) to control the fins. There are some papers about this on the net, and believe me - an average EE can not design this after his analog control systems class.
The system was designed by the same guy, Helmut Hoelzer, that was later head of the nasa computing center. Go figure..
yes, thanks for nitpicking. I will mind my words.
Yes, that is my understaning too. Amazing that some 25year amateur radio geek veteran does not know this basic fact.
Likewise, with 1 watt, signal can in theory travel 13,467,980 miles.
Isnt the calculation a bit off? AFAIK the signal power does not decrease linearly with distance, but with a higher power depending on the transmitting antenna.
omg.. after reading that article I got the feeling that there are people even more geeky than computer geeks.
"I'm thrilled the record was set by an all-American team using all-American equipment." The Ten Tec receiver is manufactured in Severville, TN and the Elecraft transmitter is produced in California and offered as a kit.
yes, so relevant...
FPGAs have been around since the 70s, what's new about them?
AFAIK its the late 80ies.. sources? SPLDs do not count, naturally.
Regarding the original poster - if you have been following the recent developments in FPGA you may have noticed that it moved from niche logic replacement to mainstream SOC during the last two years.
Gingerbread - very nice. But nothing beats the C64 pie
The same thing came to my mind, they:
...and requiring oversized flowcharts to understand some small (less than 8kb!) assembler program (photo).. pff... I would not hire them.
-stole a bike and stored it in their home for several month (according to article)
-they dismantled the elctronics, destroying part of the assembly by removing protective silicone coating.
I can see that tampering with such a bike is interesting, but wouldn't proper hacker ethics dictate that you return it after a few hours/days? Months is definitly on the "theft" side. These guys have lost my respect due to that. Also, hacking the mechanism is one thing - disabling it in a bunch of bikes another. First could get away as educational hacking, the second is vandalism.
In addition to that I have to say that these guys are quite lame. Even if they did not know about AVR microcontrollers, it would have taken a few hours search on the web to find out how to read them out with a homemade programmer. Instead it took them months to figure that out and finally requiring a store bought programmer. Lucky for them they found an ISP connecter, I bet otherwhise they would not have been have to read the contents.
Flash drives has more than one chip (die) in them. They are talking about the memory density per die.
Well.. consider two things: 1) Vt control is already possible by controlling the work function of the gate and the channel doping. 2) There aint no such thing as substrate bias in SOI.
And a slight addition: It does not perpetuate moores law, it is just mitigating the problems that occured with gate dielectric scaling.
Moore's Law requires constant downscaling of the gate insulator in the transistor. Recently the industry came to a point where the tunnelling current through the insulator became so high that it is not possible to make it any thinner. This problem can be counteracted by increasing the channel mobility using strained silicon.
AND, for selling a real big super-computer server farm (Top1000), which makes real, hard millions of profit, you have to have the big irons in stock
The only problem is that you need BILLIONS, not millions to develop the next memory generation....
Can such a team be put together outside NVidia/ATI? You bet!
The only problem is that it DOES matter who these people are. And you can bet that everybody who is eligible is already occupied by a well paying full time job.
Looking at the products of the company tech source I think that they are mostly looking into using the design byself. They are selling special high resolution displays and graphics cards for aviation and other critical applications. These markets have extremely stringent safety protocols, of which many can not be met by the highly complex GPUs of today. In addition the exotic resolutions may pose a problem.
Having a straight forward design suitable for an FPGA would enable them add additional fail safe mechanisms and to qualify more easily for these applications. Oh yes, and they get others to work on their products for free. They could use rad hardened FPGAs for the final implementation.
Remember, Tech Source is a boutique graphics card company, and the guy proposing this (Timothy Miller?) is a graphics card engineer
Well, I read the specs and the introduction to the mailing list. They misspelled "vertices" and do not know how phong shading is done on pre-pixelshader graphics cards (hint: environment mapping). I doubt he has ever designed a 3D rendering architecture. This is also backed up by some of the specs. For example where is the use of 16.16 fixed point screen coordinates?
Well, its "Silicon On Insulator" (SOI), Si3N4 (whatever may be exciting about it) and high-k. I also do not know about dovetail, but it may be related to problems with void filling in interconnects as you get structures similar to a dovetail there. The phenomenon you are referring to is probably the "birds peak", common in LOCOS formation.
Sorry, I do not have any links. I'd suggest to look for some books about semiconductor prozessing e.g. S.M.Sze or Madou.
Its the evil thing in a chipfab. Everybody talks about HF and is afraid of coming near or getting exposed. A chemist would probably say: "Dont touch", thats it.
There are many other dangerous substances in a chip fab like silan, arsin, phosphin, chlourtriflouride (now thats nasty). But all over all the amount is pretty low and everything is sealed of insanely well. It is much more dangerous to work in a chemical plant.
here's so many "cool" catchy words and processes like Silicon Over Insulator, Damascene Process, dovetail prevention, SiN and SuperK dielectric
Nice buzzword dropping, but next time at least do it right - I count at least three mistakes.
Why? "void" is actually the correct term for this kind of phenomenon - and that is not limited to engineering.
A dicing machine using blades lined with diamond dust. Not cheap..