Equal parts of matter and anti-matter were created in the Big Bang, and anti-matter is created regularly as part of Beta decay. It isn't "not of this universe".
It is quite amazing, though. I agree with you there.
If any of the compound semiconductors had anything like as good a native oxide, there would be no silicon industry (silicon otherwise mediocre electron mobility and band-gap, though ok thermals).
I don't know about that... most compound semiconductors have really good electron mobility and so-so or worse hole mobility. One of silicon's great strengths is that the hole mobility is only 3X smaller than the mobility for electrons so p-channel devices are useful.
Also, silicon repairs itself when annealed. That's why you can do simple ion implants and don't have to screw around with expensive compound semiconductor stuff like MBE.
So, yeah, the Si native oxide is great, but there are other reasons why silicon is dominant.
While the article is quite right to highlight the proven, reliable technology in manned space missions, it is a mistake to infer that all space electronics technology used today is from the 70s and 80s. There is a vibrant design community for space electronics and a lot of quite whiz-bang stuff goes up in comms, scientific and recon sats. Someone mentioned the space industry hasn't dominated the electronics business for 40 years. That's true, but there are still niches that are absolutely dominated by space. For example, there are some incredibly high-performance millimeter-wave circuits, amazingly sensitive photodetectors and bolometers, and extremely fast Indium-Phosphide digital circuits (not full-on processors) going up in missions every year. Modern CMOS technology (deep submicron) is inherently radiation-tolerant, so rad hardening isn't as important commercially as it used to be, because there is an acceptable level of risk. Manned missions have a MUCH lower acceptable level of risk so mission planners are loathe to deploy anything new.
Those "ancient" 386 chips are probably mil-spec radiation hardened chips, too. Good luck getting your 45nm quad cores to work reliably in space...
They certainly are mil-spec. Intersil is still doing wafer runs of Silicon-on-Sapphire rad-hard 386s at their fab in Palm Bay, FL. I got to tour the fab during a job interview. Regarding the 45nm cores, they are probably quite radiation tolerant. Smaller feature size transistors have much smaller oxide thickness so it is much, much, easier for ions caught in the oxide due to radiation to tunnel away. So, total dose ceases to be a problem. The Single-Event-Upset (SEU) becomes a big problem though because embedded RAMs are not as robust (much lower noise margins with reduced power supplies) but that is usually dealt with using redundancy and a design style that doesn't allow dynamic logic or flip-flops.
High-performance circuits *are* used in space. There is some kick-ass stuff being designed at Northrup Grumman Space Technology, for example. It just isn't used in manned missions due to the incredible liability.
"I don't watch TV and therefore am better than you"
That would be an awesome sign for the Stewart/Colbert rally.
Kudu is insulting to 8-year-olds
on
Learning By Playing
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm not so sure about Kudu and the ilk. The problem I have with it is that it isn't programming. The description of Kudu from the article (making a motorcycle racing game) sounds an awful lot like Racing Destruction Set or that Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games. Also, I find the idea that you need some gimmicky, technicolor GUI for an 8-year-old to explore programming is a tad insulting to the 8-year-olds. I started learning Commodore-64 Basic when I was 6, and actually wrote a mildly sophisticated database program for my Little League Baseball team when I was 8 or 9. From the comments I've seen on Slashdot, my experience is certainly not unique. I think if I had started with Kudu I would have gotten bored and moved on. I'm an engineer now, largely I think from my childhood goofing about with computers.
I can't remember the name, but I saw a great book written by a Dad and his son about Python. I think that is a much better exploration into computers than Kudu.
I was so disappointed when I learned this story wasn't about a parrot that had learned to control a helicopter using an iPod. Then he could get his own damn crackers.
I agree with you, the LNA adds noise (of course it does). My point was that the SNR of the system with the LNA is better than the SNR of the system without the LNA. The noise figure of most ADCs is atrocious, you know.
For the sensor, there are three things at work. First, the vast majority of CMOS sensors have source-follower amps in the pixel to drive the output bus. These have gains less than one, and increasing their gain as much as possible improves the dynamic range. Second, there is some "charge conversion gain" associated with the photodiode that is actually the sensor. There is a lot of work in optimizing this. Third, there is the PGA and ADC you mentioned. To lower the noise floor of the pixel to below that of the electronics, people generally work on the photodiode, since, in a sense, it is analogous to the LNA in an RF system.
Alternatively, you could up the gain on each pixel, which as Greymist points out would reduce your signal to noise ratio.
Actually, increasing the pixel gain *improves* the SNR. This is because the noise limitation of these sensors is virtually always the readout electronics. Therefore, adding as much gain as possible before the signal hits the readout chain will lower the overall noise of the system. This is analogous to using a low noise amplifier (LNA) in front of an RF receiver.
There are, of course, limitations. Pixels generally have a voltage gain of less than one (that is, the gain from the photodiode to the pixel output) so there isn't much you can do there.
I'm just curious what this would be like in low light settings, cramming that many pixels into such a small space has got to have some effect on sensitivity.
Pixel size, per se, has no impact on the light sensitivity of the pixel. That depends only on the read noise of the sensor and its associated electronics. A small pixel, however, does limit the depth of the potential well, so it would have more of an impact on in bright settings. What I'm saying is it would reduce the dynamic range of the sensor, but not have any direct effect on its performance in low light.
To get back the bright performance, pixels can be ganged together to make superpixels, but, of course, this trades a bit of resolution.
I think companies wanting specific tools out of their new graduates are stupid. They are going to get the equivalent of DeVry grads who "learned computers". But I agree, many of them want that. What's the answer? Not sure, but I think we're doing a pretty good job right now, if only the IT industry didn't pigeonhole people so quickly.
I've been reading articles like this since I was a teenager. The first one had some stuff in it about how "Tomorrow's systems analysts need to be learning dBASE but Universities are behind". A few years later, "Schools aren't teaching Rational Rose techniques". Give me a break. You should be learning *concepts* in school, not *tools*. When I was in college, I learned a lot of engineering concepts, and only the tools I needed to do the labs. Today, the tools have changed completely, as they always do. I'm quite glad I took a course in Digital Logic Design, rather than in something like "Espresso Logic Minimizer", which hasn't been used in years.
And what is up with that guy studying Six Sigma and businesses processes (and "lean manufacturing"). Why would he think purposefully giving himself brain damage would be good for his career? Is he getting a Certificate in Buzzwords?
It really surprises me that we're on the cusp of such a technological singularity and we don't seem to have a single company/government putting forth any serious effort toward achieving it. How relevant will today's governments and economy be when you have superbrains capable of outsmarting anything else on the planet in virtually no time? It seems like there might be at least a little value in getting there first, you know?
Maybe the fact there is so little investment into this is a hint. It is really, really hard and the people with the money and understanding don't think it is doable. It is a bit like Fusion and large-scale space exploration. Incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and the more we learn, the harder it gets.
It doesn't matter how good your calibration is, the accuracy is still very low for analog computers (compared to digital ICs, for example). Anything above maybe 4 to 6 bits of accuracy will start being slower than digital circuits in the same process (speed/accuracy tradeoff. There may be really, really specialized situations where this is useful, but not many. But that's a bit off-topic, since this company isn't trying to sell an analog computer IC.
I'm a bit worried about them being completely fabless. I'm sure all their circuits work in SPICE, but how is this going to deal with real world noise, especially embedded on some other digital chip? The powerpoint explicitly states that is adversely affected especially by the sudden spikes caused by digital noise...
I wouldn't worry too much. More companies than not are fabless you know. They are going to deal with noise the way all analog designers deal with noise. They are going to use a deep n-well with guard rings. They are going to bypass the hell out of their supplies. They are going to run their signals on high metal with shields beneath. The same things we all do.
"[A]nalog devices working with analog values" does actually imply it is an analog computer, at least in part. Still, the overall usage sounds does novel, through the usage of Bayesian statistics "operations" logic as an alternative to the better known Boolean logic operations used in binary digital computers.
I have to disagree with you here. An analog computer is not the same thing as analog electronics in general. As an analogy, using a few digital gates to control an alarm doesn't mean you just built a digital computer.
An analog computer is a special system that uses analog circuits to solve systems of differential equations. It is uniquely analog in the sense that it is continuous-time and has a continuously-variable output (not quantized). In the 40s and 50s, it was cheaper, more accurate (usually) and certainly required less equipment to do simulations using analog computers versus digital computers. Those days are long, long gone.
Sure, analog electronics more than "still exist". The analog IC market is growing faster than it ever has. But I would be hard pressed to call the analog subtractor in a Pipelined ADC an "analog computer", nor would I call the mixer in a mobile phone (a circuit that multiplies two analog waveforms) an "analog computer" either.
It's not analog in the sense that we use op amps, we still use gates
What's the difference? A gate is just a high speed high gain ultra high distortion opamp.
Op amps have differential inputs, for one thing. They also generally have much, much higher gain than a gate. Do a voltage transfer characteristic of an inverter in the process of your choice and look at the slope when it is in its linear region. The case won't be any larger than 10 - 15 Volts/Volt. Can't hardly use *that* as an op amp.
Of course, if they managed to do this using digital IC fab technology (analog ICs are very "big" when you compare to modern digital deep submicron technology), that'll be a huge breakthrough.
That actually wouldn't be a breakthrough at all. I've been designing analog ICs in digital deep submicron technology for 8 years. Some really big companies (Broadcom, Marvel, etc.) have built their businesses on it. I'm currently working on a Pipelined ADC in 65nm CMOS. You may be thinking about Bipolar Analog ICs, which are still important in the marketplace. But, for communications or imaging systems work, the vast majority of analog circuits are on digital CMOS (with or without a special capacitor option).
As an aside, I read recently that they still make close to 100 million 555 timers every year. I wonder what they're used for.
Actually, the article doesn't say that at all. In fact, it gives virtually no indication about how these new devices work. An analog computer uses op amps to solve differential equations. I highly, highly doubt that is what this new device is doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Beta+ decay isn't a particularly high energy process. It happens in the brain of anyone who has ever had a PET scan, and they live to tell the tale.
Oh, please.
Equal parts of matter and anti-matter were created in the Big Bang, and anti-matter is created regularly as part of Beta decay. It isn't "not of this universe".
It is quite amazing, though. I agree with you there.
If any of the compound semiconductors had anything like as good a native oxide, there would be no silicon industry (silicon otherwise mediocre electron mobility and band-gap, though ok thermals).
I don't know about that... most compound semiconductors have really good electron mobility and so-so or worse hole mobility. One of silicon's great strengths is that the hole mobility is only 3X smaller than the mobility for electrons so p-channel devices are useful.
Also, silicon repairs itself when annealed. That's why you can do simple ion implants and don't have to screw around with expensive compound semiconductor stuff like MBE.
So, yeah, the Si native oxide is great, but there are other reasons why silicon is dominant.
While the article is quite right to highlight the proven, reliable technology in manned space missions, it is a mistake to infer that all space electronics technology used today is from the 70s and 80s. There is a vibrant design community for space electronics and a lot of quite whiz-bang stuff goes up in comms, scientific and recon sats. Someone mentioned the space industry hasn't dominated the electronics business for 40 years. That's true, but there are still niches that are absolutely dominated by space. For example, there are some incredibly high-performance millimeter-wave circuits, amazingly sensitive photodetectors and bolometers, and extremely fast Indium-Phosphide digital circuits (not full-on processors) going up in missions every year. Modern CMOS technology (deep submicron) is inherently radiation-tolerant, so rad hardening isn't as important commercially as it used to be, because there is an acceptable level of risk. Manned missions have a MUCH lower acceptable level of risk so mission planners are loathe to deploy anything new.
Those "ancient" 386 chips are probably mil-spec radiation hardened chips, too. Good luck getting your 45nm quad cores to work reliably in space...
They certainly are mil-spec. Intersil is still doing wafer runs of Silicon-on-Sapphire rad-hard 386s at their fab in Palm Bay, FL. I got to tour the fab during a job interview. Regarding the 45nm cores, they are probably quite radiation tolerant. Smaller feature size transistors have much smaller oxide thickness so it is much, much, easier for ions caught in the oxide due to radiation to tunnel away. So, total dose ceases to be a problem. The Single-Event-Upset (SEU) becomes a big problem though because embedded RAMs are not as robust (much lower noise margins with reduced power supplies) but that is usually dealt with using redundancy and a design style that doesn't allow dynamic logic or flip-flops.
High-performance circuits *are* used in space. There is some kick-ass stuff being designed at Northrup Grumman Space Technology, for example. It just isn't used in manned missions due to the incredible liability.
"I don't watch TV and therefore am better than you"
That would be an awesome sign for the Stewart/Colbert rally.
I'm not so sure about Kudu and the ilk. The problem I have with it is that it isn't programming. The description of Kudu from the article (making a motorcycle racing game) sounds an awful lot like Racing Destruction Set or that Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games. Also, I find the idea that you need some gimmicky, technicolor GUI for an 8-year-old to explore programming is a tad insulting to the 8-year-olds. I started learning Commodore-64 Basic when I was 6, and actually wrote a mildly sophisticated database program for my Little League Baseball team when I was 8 or 9. From the comments I've seen on Slashdot, my experience is certainly not unique. I think if I had started with Kudu I would have gotten bored and moved on. I'm an engineer now, largely I think from my childhood goofing about with computers.
I can't remember the name, but I saw a great book written by a Dad and his son about Python. I think that is a much better exploration into computers than Kudu.
I was so disappointed when I learned this story wasn't about a parrot that had learned to control a helicopter using an iPod. Then he could get his own damn crackers.
The summary is wrong. No one is a member of /b/.
Not doing anything? I thought Obama was busying destroying our country by fundamental changing everything to socialism.
Nicely done, Mr CF, nicely done.
Dave,
I agree with you, the LNA adds noise (of course it does). My point was that the SNR of the system with the LNA is better than the SNR of the system without the LNA. The noise figure of most ADCs is atrocious, you know.
For the sensor, there are three things at work. First, the vast majority of CMOS sensors have source-follower amps in the pixel to drive the output bus. These have gains less than one, and increasing their gain as much as possible improves the dynamic range. Second, there is some "charge conversion gain" associated with the photodiode that is actually the sensor. There is a lot of work in optimizing this. Third, there is the PGA and ADC you mentioned. To lower the noise floor of the pixel to below that of the electronics, people generally work on the photodiode, since, in a sense, it is analogous to the LNA in an RF system.
Carl
I do, actually. Because they are "hard" in a deep and fundamental way.
Alternatively, you could up the gain on each pixel, which as Greymist points out would reduce your signal to noise ratio.
Actually, increasing the pixel gain *improves* the SNR. This is because the noise limitation of these sensors is virtually always the readout electronics. Therefore, adding as much gain as possible before the signal hits the readout chain will lower the overall noise of the system. This is analogous to using a low noise amplifier (LNA) in front of an RF receiver.
There are, of course, limitations. Pixels generally have a voltage gain of less than one (that is, the gain from the photodiode to the pixel output) so there isn't much you can do there.
I'm just curious what this would be like in low light settings, cramming that many pixels into such a small space has got to have some effect on sensitivity.
Pixel size, per se, has no impact on the light sensitivity of the pixel. That depends only on the read noise of the sensor and its associated electronics. A small pixel, however, does limit the depth of the potential well, so it would have more of an impact on in bright settings. What I'm saying is it would reduce the dynamic range of the sensor, but not have any direct effect on its performance in low light.
To get back the bright performance, pixels can be ganged together to make superpixels, but, of course, this trades a bit of resolution.
I think companies wanting specific tools out of their new graduates are stupid. They are going to get the equivalent of DeVry grads who "learned computers". But I agree, many of them want that. What's the answer? Not sure, but I think we're doing a pretty good job right now, if only the IT industry didn't pigeonhole people so quickly.
I've been reading articles like this since I was a teenager. The first one had some stuff in it about how "Tomorrow's systems analysts need to be learning dBASE but Universities are behind". A few years later, "Schools aren't teaching Rational Rose techniques". Give me a break. You should be learning *concepts* in school, not *tools*. When I was in college, I learned a lot of engineering concepts, and only the tools I needed to do the labs. Today, the tools have changed completely, as they always do. I'm quite glad I took a course in Digital Logic Design, rather than in something like "Espresso Logic Minimizer", which hasn't been used in years.
And what is up with that guy studying Six Sigma and businesses processes (and "lean manufacturing"). Why would he think purposefully giving himself brain damage would be good for his career? Is he getting a Certificate in Buzzwords?
It really surprises me that we're on the cusp of such a technological singularity and we don't seem to have a single company/government putting forth any serious effort toward achieving it. How relevant will today's governments and economy be when you have superbrains capable of outsmarting anything else on the planet in virtually no time? It seems like there might be at least a little value in getting there first, you know?
Maybe the fact there is so little investment into this is a hint. It is really, really hard and the people with the money and understanding don't think it is doable. It is a bit like Fusion and large-scale space exploration. Incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and the more we learn, the harder it gets.
It doesn't matter how good your calibration is, the accuracy is still very low for analog computers (compared to digital ICs, for example). Anything above maybe 4 to 6 bits of accuracy will start being slower than digital circuits in the same process (speed/accuracy tradeoff. There may be really, really specialized situations where this is useful, but not many. But that's a bit off-topic, since this company isn't trying to sell an analog computer IC.
I'm a bit worried about them being completely fabless. I'm sure all their circuits work in SPICE, but how is this going to deal with real world noise, especially embedded on some other digital chip? The powerpoint explicitly states that is adversely affected especially by the sudden spikes caused by digital noise...
I wouldn't worry too much. More companies than not are fabless you know. They are going to deal with noise the way all analog designers deal with noise. They are going to use a deep n-well with guard rings. They are going to bypass the hell out of their supplies. They are going to run their signals on high metal with shields beneath. The same things we all do.
"[A]nalog devices working with analog values" does actually imply it is an analog computer, at least in part. Still, the overall usage sounds does novel, through the usage of Bayesian statistics "operations" logic as an alternative to the better known Boolean logic operations used in binary digital computers.
I have to disagree with you here. An analog computer is not the same thing as analog electronics in general. As an analogy, using a few digital gates to control an alarm doesn't mean you just built a digital computer.
An analog computer is a special system that uses analog circuits to solve systems of differential equations. It is uniquely analog in the sense that it is continuous-time and has a continuously-variable output (not quantized). In the 40s and 50s, it was cheaper, more accurate (usually) and certainly required less equipment to do simulations using analog computers versus digital computers. Those days are long, long gone.
Sure, analog electronics more than "still exist". The analog IC market is growing faster than it ever has. But I would be hard pressed to call the analog subtractor in a Pipelined ADC an "analog computer", nor would I call the mixer in a mobile phone (a circuit that multiplies two analog waveforms) an "analog computer" either.
It's not analog in the sense that we use op amps, we still use gates
What's the difference? A gate is just a high speed high gain ultra high distortion opamp.
Op amps have differential inputs, for one thing. They also generally have much, much higher gain than a gate. Do a voltage transfer characteristic of an inverter in the process of your choice and look at the slope when it is in its linear region. The case won't be any larger than 10 - 15 Volts/Volt. Can't hardly use *that* as an op amp.
Of course, if they managed to do this using digital IC fab technology (analog ICs are very "big" when you compare to modern digital deep submicron technology), that'll be a huge breakthrough.
That actually wouldn't be a breakthrough at all. I've been designing analog ICs in digital deep submicron technology for 8 years. Some really big companies (Broadcom, Marvel, etc.) have built their businesses on it. I'm currently working on a Pipelined ADC in 65nm CMOS. You may be thinking about Bipolar Analog ICs, which are still important in the marketplace. But, for communications or imaging systems work, the vast majority of analog circuits are on digital CMOS (with or without a special capacitor option).
As an aside, I read recently that they still make close to 100 million 555 timers every year. I wonder what they're used for.
Carl
Actually, the article doesn't say that at all. In fact, it gives virtually no indication about how these new devices work. An analog computer uses op amps to solve differential equations. I highly, highly doubt that is what this new device is doing.
Bit out of date I think. Analog Devices closed their fab in San Jose, CA, several years ago.