We were confident because the availability of that process was predicted by Moore's Law and any number of foundries were spending billions to make it happen.
Right, so did you just use Moore's Law or did you look at other factors as well?
What I mean by other factors:
> Trends of the capacity of other recent products? Did you look at teh speeds of CMOS processes from that company over the last 10 years and extrapolate?
> Did you talk to a sales rep or engineer or product development manager at the CMOS process company and **ASK THEM** how fast their upcomming models would be (approximately)
> Do literature review of what academic research groups and possible FOSS (idk if it applies for you) were doing in that CMOS wireless type transciever tech? My former university, Ball State University did research for WiMax coverage and speed for Cisco (before WiMax was ditched)...did you look at any of that to predict the CMOS process capability you needed?
I'm trying to be polite, but I call BS.
If you claim your company made that decision based **soley** on math from Moore's Law....well I have a hard time believe that claim's veracity. You are either fabricating or that company is not very wise. And if you company **did** use other factors, then that kind of invalidates your point and parenthetically supportsy my point...I won't deny that using it **might** have added value, but only IF you also did common practices like I mentioned above...
Seriously...did you use other factors besides Moore's Law?
Like asking the vendor? (or any of the others mentioned above)
Of course we used all kinds of inputs into our planning process. We would have been fools not to.
I feel like you're doing a bit of "move the goal posts" here. First you very emphatically state that "[Moore's Law] is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources"
I gave you a reply from experience that that is not true, and in fact companies do use (or at least used to) use Moore's Law in their planning process (where money and resources are involved).
Now you saying I'm claiming my company invested millions blindly because we had some faith in Moore's Law. Of course we didn't, and I don't think I implied that.
First off, looking at the speed improvements from the foundry over the last 10 years as evidence is pretty much the same thing as following Moore's Law.
Second, as I'm sure you know, sales reps will say "YES" to anything, so Moore's Law helps put things in context. If they are saying something way better than Moore's Law, you have to be skeptical.
Basically, I disagree that the fact that we used a variety of factors (like virtually any company will do for any decision) invalidates my point. You said that Moore's Law isn't fit for predicting things. I disagree.
If you would have said "Moore's Law isn't fit for making significant investments in the absence of other factors or critical thinking" then I would agree with you.
G3 and G4 were Macs using IBM designed (largely) processors. Motorola and IBM jointly produced Power PC chips that Apple used in the mid/late 90s (G3 and G4) but Motorola eventually dropped out and IBM wasn't interested in keeping up with Intel. For a few years, the Apple chips were better than the IBM chips (I didn't own an Apple computer at the time, so I was evaluating this as an engineer). By the time Intel had closed the gap Apple wisely went over to the Intel architecture.
You want to support your theory that its in fact an actual law, here's room for your proof right here:
I didn't claim it was a law. No one even slightly knowledgeable about semiconductors thinks its a law. Did you read my post? The original post stated that "Didn't we already agree that predictions are only useful to talking heads, pundits and hucksters?".
My response was that this was in fact a very useful prediction for engineers and scientists actually doing the work.
So when I said "I don't know about that", it was pretty clear I meant that I didn't agree that predictions are only useful to talking heads et al.
Moore's Law has never been a 'law'...it was a cool statistical novelty that seemed to predict processor advancements...it is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources...it's 'for fun'
I disagree with you a bit here. Moore's Law is an observation, sure, but to engineers that understand the assumptions that go into Moore's Law it has been extremely useful for making predictions involving money and resources.
At my last job I worked in an advanced development/product group working on CMOS wireless transceivers for basestations and handsets. We used Moore's Law explicitly in our planning. The IC business is brutal and you have very little room to miss your market windows. With multi-year development cycles this is tough. Therefore, like a duck hunter, you have to shoot where the technology is going to be, not where it is.
Basically, we started the design using a CMOS process that wasn't on the market yet. We were confident that it *would be* by the time we were ready to go to market. We were confident because the availability of that process was predicted by Moore's Law and any number of foundries were spending billions to make it happen.
If we hadn't used Moore's Law in our planning, we would have come out with products using two-year old technology, and our competition would have eaten our lunch.
The problem with the transitions to finFETs is now we have an apples-to-oranges comparison between finFET (or 3D gate or whatever you want to call it) processes and surface FET processes. GlobalFoundries feels they need to stretch the truth to get the point across that the process really is better objectively, even if the minimum feature size hasn't shrunk.
It reminds me of 10 years ago when the microprocessor companies finally stopped the GHz war. For several years, clock speed was a poor proxy for microprocessor performance, and Mac fans used to scream loudly (and rightly) how the IBM chips beat Intel on real-world benchmarks while Intel touted their higher speed.
Hopefully, this "node as minimum gate width" will go away and we'll move to more meaningful process figures-of-merit such as power density, power-delay product, gm/I, transit frequency, Ioff and the like.
I don't know about that. It's been a damn useful prediction in that it gave a pretty ambitious roadmap for engineers to follow. They've been quite successful and meeting the challenge up until quite recently.
A wise proverb that is apropos: If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.
I agree with you. My post was sarcastic. If you look at Obama and Kerry's quotes over the last few weeks, punishment certainly is what they were selling. They don't have the capability to stop Assad from using chemical weapons without a very extensive strike, which they were claiming was not planned.
The USA doesn't have much credibility regarding chemical weapons, especially given the actions of the USA towards Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
I thought the US Administration's goal was to punish Assad for the large-scale use of chemical weapons with a "limited" military strike. How exactly does destroying the weapons count as punishment?
It's a bit like me turning in my guns to the cops if I commit a murder and that being the end of it.
It almost makes one think that this is really about Obama saving face for making a stupid comment about a "red line". Was Obama prepared to kill more innocent people in an ineffectual missile strike to save face? Now the Russians have given him an out are we not going to punish Syria after all? Hypocrisy?
If diet books are a dime a dozen, but *this* diet book is presumably worth $27, then it must be better than $27*(10 dimes/$)*(12 diet books/dime) = 3240 other diet books..
The Computer History Museum already has a few Crays (including the mythic Cray 3), but it would be cool if they could add this emulator to their library.
There are several comic books I'd write for in exchange for zero pay. I worked stage crew for several concerts in college for zero pay, entirely voluntarily. Both examples are for-profit enterprises.
And that would be legal. The issue is the companies are making the "interns" do non-internship related tasks.
For example, say a comic book company takes you on as a "production intern" at no pay. Awesome, right? Then they make you spend all the time cleaning out toilets and they fire the janitor. Is that cool with you?
This Lego creation is really amazing in person. The guy did a stellar job. It's permanently located in the lobby of building 50 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (right next to the cigar box where Glenn Seaborg put the first ever sample of Plutonium). If you go on a tour there or visit an Open House, you can see it for yourself. Here's a site with a lot more details about its construction:
http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~sdube/lego.html
The only reason we have hybrid passenger cars (as well as electric cars) is because the government agreed to pay part of the cost. And the only reason to do that is to hide the total cost.
There is a conspiracy, but it's not what you think. The conspiracy isn't about pollution; it's about money.
I suppose we have competing conspiracies, then. The total cost is hidden for any kind of vehicle. Gas companies are incredibly subsidized. Road maintenance is subsidized. Car manufacturers (gasoline, hybrid, and electric) are subsidized the world over.
I'm not sure I see Tesla's success as a conspiracy, unless everything ever has been a conspiracy.
This really is a big negative of Software as a Service. When you own something, you can run it forever, even if the developer decides to stop using it.
I have some simulation software for electrical design that was last updated in 1998. Still works fine and gets the job done. If it were on the cloud I'd be out of luck and forced to continually move my data between paid services. Too bad.
It's pretty much impossible to build analog frequency filters with a sharp cutoff (e.g. everything below 20kHz and below gets through, everything above 22kHz is -60dB attenuated), so recording at 44.1kHz sampling requires either being absolutely certain the original sound source has minimal high-frequency harmonics, or heavy analog filtering that cuts well into the audible high frequency range. With 96kHz sampling, it's much easier to build an analog filter that gradually rolls off high frequencies between 20kHz and 40kHz (...producing a >40kHz sound is tricky in the first place), preventing aliasing without the filter cutting into the audible range. Once digitized, it's trivial to make a *digital* filter with a perfect frequency cutoff to downsample the 96kHz to aliasing-free 44.1kHz.
But the fast majority of analog-to-digital converters used for audio use delta-sigma modulation. They are already sampling far above 96 kHz (delta-sigma modulation is a combination of oversampling and quantization noise shaping).
Your argument is specious. If audio converters used Nyquist-rate ADCs I would agree with you, but they don't. The absolute vast majority of audio ADCs are of delta-sigma type so they are already doing your "trivial digital filter with a perfect frequency cutoff to downsample". It's an inherent part of the modulation.
I marched in Orange County, CA just before the Iraq War started. There were at least 100,000 people on Jamboree Blvd. I was there. I saw them. Now, Orange County is one of the most conservative regions of California. It produced Richard Nixon, and usually has Republican representatives. So the fact so many citizens would leave work to march against a coming war was incredible to me.
That night I watched the news. Nothing. Not a single thing. Probably the biggest civil political protest in Orange County history and it wasn't on the news (at least that I saw). It should have been ALL OVER the news.
That's when I knew this "liberal media" was not true. It's really "corporatist media" and because the media in general decided for whatever reason to support the war they ignored the fact that an unprecedented number of regular citizens were against it. I learned a lot about how the world works that day. I really don't think Twitter would have made a difference.
...to have those "mystery" vaccines shot into you which were concocted in those dirty bathtubs by sub-sub-subcontractors in China --- you ever follow the current news, ever?????
Actually, the quality of the vaccine is a critical issue and was one of the main axes the vaccination/anti-vaccination struggle revolved around. In fact, it was addressing exactly this kind of concern that the United States started regulating pharmaceutical companies. The book I linked to "Pox: An American History" goes into a lot of detail about this issue. This is one area where anti-vaccination agitation improved the way we provided vaccine.
It's very interesting... at one point around 1900-1905 the United States had compulsory vaccination, but didn't take responsibility for the quality of the vaccine. We've come a long way since then, but we can still do a lot better.
Anti-vaccination rhetoric is nothing new... in fact at the turn of the 20th century there were huge struggles regarding the smallpox vaccine. It's a fascinating instance of the struggle between liberty and social responsibility and the rights and the responsibilties of the individual with respect to the state.
There's an amazing book about the early-20th-century smallpox vaccination campaigns and the associated anti-vaccination campaign called Pox: An American History.
I can't recommend it enough. Says so much about the United States and how people's opinions have change (and how for some, they haven't!).
Most discrete wire bonding processes are moving from gold to copper. Not due to contamination, but due to cost. Gold costs E700 per km of 23 mu wire, copper costs about 70. Copper is difficult to master though. If you are producing 1 billion SMD transistors a day then the few milimeters of gold wire in each transistor are starting to count.
I agree with you 100%. The original comment indicated gold is not used in semiconductor processing, and I was pointing out that was not true. Our stuff is lower volume so we're still using gold bondwires (can't justify the expensive equipment upgrade).
I'm getting the impression from the article that they are proposing to use this technique to build semiconductor *components* such as standalone transistors, diodes, etc., etc. That seems much more feasible than what is implied by the title of this post.
They aren't really proposing much of anything. They are a bit like the guys working on GaAs and InP in the 1980s... once they got two transistors working on a single substrate they exclaimed "This will revolutionize microprocessors!". It didn't.
Standalone components are SOOOO cheap for the most part now, I wonder how they can possibly be displaced.
There will be at least one time that some other process came from nowhere and beat silicon litography in nealy all aspects. (The laws of physics almost assure that.)
Not so sure about that. Lithography is one of the most highly developed technologies in the history of the world, and has gone far, far deeper than most people expected as early as the 1980s. Proposal after proposal has been made to replace lithography (e.g. e-beam, MBE, etc) but all have to relegated to niche status.
Semiconductor lithography itself is highly, highly leveraged from printing processes going back hundreds of years. With this much brain power and inertia behind it I would be really, really surprised if something beats it in "nearly all aspects". Some aspects, maybe, and lithography may finally hit a show-stopper, but there won't be an "oh my, what a breakthrough" type thing to replace it. I agree it has to be replaced to maintain Moore's law, but it is already beyond comprehension advanced.
Gold is rigorously excluded from silicon FABS, not even let in the same room.
Actually gold is the highest quality metal for bondwires or top-level bondpad metalization. You're right that gold is a severe contaminant, but it is also a very good conductor, and is easy to work with. It most certainly used extensively in fabs, although care is taken not to contaminate. I used gold interconnect in a chip just a few months ago, in a very up-to-date process.
The vast majority of chemicals used in a fab will severely degrade circuits if they are introduced into the process at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Gold is not a special exception here.
TLDR of the article: "I found something that sucks, quick, lets insert an intermediary and more processes to slow us down!" After all, that's always worked wonders.
I think you misunderstand Brooks' position. He isn't saying there needs to be a "quality" czar who is some kind of gatekeeper. What he is saying is there needs to be one architect of a system who is responsible for its conceptual integrity.
You actually agree with his premise, obviously since you talk about the FreeBSD issue. The problem isn't that people aren't fixing problems, the problem is there is no designer, and design-by-committee leads to cruft.
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ABSOLUTELY! Necessity being the mother of invention and all that.
hey thanks for the response
We were confident because the availability of that process was predicted by Moore's Law and any number of foundries were spending billions to make it happen.
Right, so did you just use Moore's Law or did you look at other factors as well?
What I mean by other factors:
> Trends of the capacity of other recent products? Did you look at teh speeds of CMOS processes from that company over the last 10 years and extrapolate?
> Did you talk to a sales rep or engineer or product development manager at the CMOS process company and **ASK THEM** how fast their upcomming models would be (approximately)
> Do literature review of what academic research groups and possible FOSS (idk if it applies for you) were doing in that CMOS wireless type transciever tech? My former university, Ball State University did research for WiMax coverage and speed for Cisco (before WiMax was ditched)...did you look at any of that to predict the CMOS process capability you needed?
I'm trying to be polite, but I call BS.
If you claim your company made that decision based **soley** on math from Moore's Law....well I have a hard time believe that claim's veracity. You are either fabricating or that company is not very wise. And if you company **did** use other factors, then that kind of invalidates your point and parenthetically supportsy my point...I won't deny that using it **might** have added value, but only IF you also did common practices like I mentioned above...
Seriously...did you use other factors besides Moore's Law?
Like asking the vendor? (or any of the others mentioned above)
Of course we used all kinds of inputs into our planning process. We would have been fools not to.
I feel like you're doing a bit of "move the goal posts" here. First you very emphatically state that "[Moore's Law] is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources"
I gave you a reply from experience that that is not true, and in fact companies do use (or at least used to) use Moore's Law in their planning process (where money and resources are involved).
Now you saying I'm claiming my company invested millions blindly because we had some faith in Moore's Law. Of course we didn't, and I don't think I implied that.
First off, looking at the speed improvements from the foundry over the last 10 years as evidence is pretty much the same thing as following Moore's Law.
Second, as I'm sure you know, sales reps will say "YES" to anything, so Moore's Law helps put things in context. If they are saying something way better than Moore's Law, you have to be skeptical.
Basically, I disagree that the fact that we used a variety of factors (like virtually any company will do for any decision) invalidates my point. You said that Moore's Law isn't fit for predicting things. I disagree.
If you would have said "Moore's Law isn't fit for making significant investments in the absence of other factors or critical thinking" then I would agree with you.
G3 and G4 were Macs using IBM designed (largely) processors. Motorola and IBM jointly produced Power PC chips that Apple used in the mid/late 90s (G3 and G4) but Motorola eventually dropped out and IBM wasn't interested in keeping up with Intel. For a few years, the Apple chips were better than the IBM chips (I didn't own an Apple computer at the time, so I was evaluating this as an engineer). By the time Intel had closed the gap Apple wisely went over to the Intel architecture.
I wrote:
It's been a damn useful prediction
You replied:
You want to support your theory that its in fact an actual law, here's room for your proof right here:
I didn't claim it was a law. No one even slightly knowledgeable about semiconductors thinks its a law. Did you read my post? The original post stated that "Didn't we already agree that predictions are only useful to talking heads, pundits and hucksters?".
My response was that this was in fact a very useful prediction for engineers and scientists actually doing the work.
So when I said "I don't know about that", it was pretty clear I meant that I didn't agree that predictions are only useful to talking heads et al.
Moore's Law has never been a 'law'...it was a cool statistical novelty that seemed to predict processor advancements...it is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources...it's 'for fun'
I disagree with you a bit here. Moore's Law is an observation, sure, but to engineers that understand the assumptions that go into Moore's Law it has been extremely useful for making predictions involving money and resources.
At my last job I worked in an advanced development/product group working on CMOS wireless transceivers for basestations and handsets. We used Moore's Law explicitly in our planning. The IC business is brutal and you have very little room to miss your market windows. With multi-year development cycles this is tough. Therefore, like a duck hunter, you have to shoot where the technology is going to be, not where it is.
Basically, we started the design using a CMOS process that wasn't on the market yet. We were confident that it *would be* by the time we were ready to go to market. We were confident because the availability of that process was predicted by Moore's Law and any number of foundries were spending billions to make it happen.
If we hadn't used Moore's Law in our planning, we would have come out with products using two-year old technology, and our competition would have eaten our lunch.
The problem with the transitions to finFETs is now we have an apples-to-oranges comparison between finFET (or 3D gate or whatever you want to call it) processes and surface FET processes. GlobalFoundries feels they need to stretch the truth to get the point across that the process really is better objectively, even if the minimum feature size hasn't shrunk.
It reminds me of 10 years ago when the microprocessor companies finally stopped the GHz war. For several years, clock speed was a poor proxy for microprocessor performance, and Mac fans used to scream loudly (and rightly) how the IBM chips beat Intel on real-world benchmarks while Intel touted their higher speed.
Hopefully, this "node as minimum gate width" will go away and we'll move to more meaningful process figures-of-merit such as power density, power-delay product, gm/I, transit frequency, Ioff and the like.
I don't know about that. It's been a damn useful prediction in that it gave a pretty ambitious roadmap for engineers to follow. They've been quite successful and meeting the challenge up until quite recently.
A wise proverb that is apropos: If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.
I agree with you. My post was sarcastic. If you look at Obama and Kerry's quotes over the last few weeks, punishment certainly is what they were selling. They don't have the capability to stop Assad from using chemical weapons without a very extensive strike, which they were claiming was not planned.
The USA doesn't have much credibility regarding chemical weapons, especially given the actions of the USA towards Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
I thought the US Administration's goal was to punish Assad for the large-scale use of chemical weapons with a "limited" military strike. How exactly does destroying the weapons count as punishment?
It's a bit like me turning in my guns to the cops if I commit a murder and that being the end of it.
It almost makes one think that this is really about Obama saving face for making a stupid comment about a "red line". Was Obama prepared to kill more innocent people in an ineffectual missile strike to save face? Now the Russians have given him an out are we not going to punish Syria after all? Hypocrisy?
If diet books are a dime a dozen, but *this* diet book is presumably worth $27, then it must be better than $27*(10 dimes/$)*(12 diet books/dime) = 3240 other diet books..
Wow. This must be a great book.
The Computer History Museum already has a few Crays (including the mythic Cray 3), but it would be cool if they could add this emulator to their library.
Or the petroleum engineers. Right out of college making 6 figure incomes designing drilling programs.
Maybe the OP doesn't want to work in porn.
There are several comic books I'd write for in exchange for zero pay. I worked stage crew for several concerts in college for zero pay, entirely voluntarily. Both examples are for-profit enterprises.
And that would be legal. The issue is the companies are making the "interns" do non-internship related tasks.
For example, say a comic book company takes you on as a "production intern" at no pay. Awesome, right? Then they make you spend all the time cleaning out toilets and they fire the janitor. Is that cool with you?
This Lego creation is really amazing in person. The guy did a stellar job. It's permanently located in the lobby of building 50 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (right next to the cigar box where Glenn Seaborg put the first ever sample of Plutonium). If you go on a tour there or visit an Open House, you can see it for yourself. Here's a site with a lot more details about its construction: http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~sdube/lego.html
The only reason we have hybrid passenger cars (as well as electric cars) is because the government agreed to pay part of the cost. And the only reason to do that is to hide the total cost.
There is a conspiracy, but it's not what you think. The conspiracy isn't about pollution; it's about money.
I suppose we have competing conspiracies, then. The total cost is hidden for any kind of vehicle. Gas companies are incredibly subsidized. Road maintenance is subsidized. Car manufacturers (gasoline, hybrid, and electric) are subsidized the world over.
I'm not sure I see Tesla's success as a conspiracy, unless everything ever has been a conspiracy.
This really is a big negative of Software as a Service. When you own something, you can run it forever, even if the developer decides to stop using it.
I have some simulation software for electrical design that was last updated in 1998. Still works fine and gets the job done. If it were on the cloud I'd be out of luck and forced to continually move my data between paid services. Too bad.
It's pretty much impossible to build analog frequency filters with a sharp cutoff (e.g. everything below 20kHz and below gets through, everything above 22kHz is -60dB attenuated), so recording at 44.1kHz sampling requires either being absolutely certain the original sound source has minimal high-frequency harmonics, or heavy analog filtering that cuts well into the audible high frequency range. With 96kHz sampling, it's much easier to build an analog filter that gradually rolls off high frequencies between 20kHz and 40kHz (...producing a >40kHz sound is tricky in the first place), preventing aliasing without the filter cutting into the audible range. Once digitized, it's trivial to make a *digital* filter with a perfect frequency cutoff to downsample the 96kHz to aliasing-free 44.1kHz.
But the fast majority of analog-to-digital converters used for audio use delta-sigma modulation. They are already sampling far above 96 kHz (delta-sigma modulation is a combination of oversampling and quantization noise shaping).
Your argument is specious. If audio converters used Nyquist-rate ADCs I would agree with you, but they don't. The absolute vast majority of audio ADCs are of delta-sigma type so they are already doing your "trivial digital filter with a perfect frequency cutoff to downsample". It's an inherent part of the modulation.
I marched in Orange County, CA just before the Iraq War started. There were at least 100,000 people on Jamboree Blvd. I was there. I saw them. Now, Orange County is one of the most conservative regions of California. It produced Richard Nixon, and usually has Republican representatives. So the fact so many citizens would leave work to march against a coming war was incredible to me.
That night I watched the news. Nothing. Not a single thing. Probably the biggest civil political protest in Orange County history and it wasn't on the news (at least that I saw). It should have been ALL OVER the news.
That's when I knew this "liberal media" was not true. It's really "corporatist media" and because the media in general decided for whatever reason to support the war they ignored the fact that an unprecedented number of regular citizens were against it. I learned a lot about how the world works that day. I really don't think Twitter would have made a difference.
...to have those "mystery" vaccines shot into you which were concocted in those dirty bathtubs by sub-sub-subcontractors in China --- you ever follow the current news, ever?????
Actually, the quality of the vaccine is a critical issue and was one of the main axes the vaccination/anti-vaccination struggle revolved around. In fact, it was addressing exactly this kind of concern that the United States started regulating pharmaceutical companies. The book I linked to "Pox: An American History" goes into a lot of detail about this issue. This is one area where anti-vaccination agitation improved the way we provided vaccine.
It's very interesting... at one point around 1900-1905 the United States had compulsory vaccination, but didn't take responsibility for the quality of the vaccine. We've come a long way since then, but we can still do a lot better.
Anti-vaccination rhetoric is nothing new... in fact at the turn of the 20th century there were huge struggles regarding the smallpox vaccine. It's a fascinating instance of the struggle between liberty and social responsibility and the rights and the responsibilties of the individual with respect to the state.
There's an amazing book about the early-20th-century smallpox vaccination campaigns and the associated anti-vaccination campaign called Pox: An American History.
I can't recommend it enough. Says so much about the United States and how people's opinions have change (and how for some, they haven't!).
Anyway, here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Pox-American-History-Penguin-Life/dp/1594202869
Most discrete wire bonding processes are moving from gold to copper. Not due to contamination, but due to cost. Gold costs E700 per km of 23 mu wire, copper costs about 70. Copper is difficult to master though.
If you are producing 1 billion SMD transistors a day then the few milimeters of gold wire in each transistor are starting to count.
I agree with you 100%. The original comment indicated gold is not used in semiconductor processing, and I was pointing out that was not true. Our stuff is lower volume so we're still using gold bondwires (can't justify the expensive equipment upgrade).
I'm getting the impression from the article that they are proposing to use this technique to build semiconductor *components* such as standalone transistors, diodes, etc., etc.
That seems much more feasible than what is implied by the title of this post.
They aren't really proposing much of anything. They are a bit like the guys working on GaAs and InP in the 1980s... once they got two transistors working on a single substrate they exclaimed "This will revolutionize microprocessors!". It didn't.
Standalone components are SOOOO cheap for the most part now, I wonder how they can possibly be displaced.
There will be at least one time that some other process came from nowhere and beat silicon litography in nealy all aspects. (The laws of physics almost assure that.)
Not so sure about that. Lithography is one of the most highly developed technologies in the history of the world, and has gone far, far deeper than most people expected as early as the 1980s. Proposal after proposal has been made to replace lithography (e.g. e-beam, MBE, etc) but all have to relegated to niche status.
Semiconductor lithography itself is highly, highly leveraged from printing processes going back hundreds of years. With this much brain power and inertia behind it I would be really, really surprised if something beats it in "nearly all aspects". Some aspects, maybe, and lithography may finally hit a show-stopper, but there won't be an "oh my, what a breakthrough" type thing to replace it. I agree it has to be replaced to maintain Moore's law, but it is already beyond comprehension advanced.
Gold is rigorously excluded from silicon FABS, not even let in the same room.
Actually gold is the highest quality metal for bondwires or top-level bondpad metalization. You're right that gold is a severe contaminant, but it is also a very good conductor, and is easy to work with. It most certainly used extensively in fabs, although care is taken not to contaminate. I used gold interconnect in a chip just a few months ago, in a very up-to-date process.
The vast majority of chemicals used in a fab will severely degrade circuits if they are introduced into the process at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Gold is not a special exception here.
TLDR of the article: "I found something that sucks, quick, lets insert an intermediary and more processes to slow us down!" After all, that's always worked wonders.
I think you misunderstand Brooks' position. He isn't saying there needs to be a "quality" czar who is some kind of gatekeeper. What he is saying is there needs to be one architect of a system who is responsible for its conceptual integrity.
You actually agree with his premise, obviously since you talk about the FreeBSD issue. The problem isn't that people aren't fixing problems, the problem is there is no designer, and design-by-committee leads to cruft.