As someone who has worked in high tech manufacturing in Europe, the US, and Asia this is absolutely true. As an American and representative of a American company my experience was that once we had arduously hashed out the detailed specs and reached an agreement with our European supplier we could be confident they would not try to deliberately sneak anything past us. My experience with an Asian supplier was the opposite. I experienced outright lying on compliance matters and no apology or sense of fault when I had hard evidence to prove my case. It was a case of constant suspicion and need of monitoring. I much preferred working with the Europeans. While we certainly had our differences and heated disagreements, once an agreement was reached it was adhered to. Business-wise it was so much more refreshing to explicitly confront disagreements at the get go before the ink was dry rather than worry about being told yes (our Asian customers always answered yes to every question even when they had no intention of carrying it out) and finding your agreement was actively being undermined.
I work in the semiconductor industry. I don't deal with memory, I deal with ASIC chips but I can absolutely assure you that the current situation in the semiconductor business is exactly as described. Picture this, you are a manager in a semiconductor company approximately one year ago. You are facing an unprecidented once-in-a-lifetime global economic downturn. You can feel it. The press feels it and reports on it non-stop. Nobody knows when the world will pull out of it but it is obvious to everyone that it hasn't ever, in anyone's lifetime, "been this bad". You know, as a semi company manager, that you have *tremendous* capitol costs (a new factory costs in the billions). What are you going to to? Continue to invest billions in capitol for factory expansion and improvement in the face of unprecedented plummeting demand? Your company's billions are already evaporating in the economy. If you keep spending as you were you would quickly exhaust your company's finances and in addition cause a glut in the global supply of chips (where demand is shrinking) driving down prices like a rock. No, you do what every other company in every other productive sector of the economy does. Cut back production to match demand. The thing is, you can't quickly turn the huge ship of semiconductor production. I'm sure you'll find that semiconductor capacity *always* lags demand. I'm sure in the downturn there was a glut as they realized and as quickly as they could (albeit relatively slowly) responded to market conditions. I can assure you that right now we have the problem that we can not produce enough parts. We are leaving money on the table in the form of unfulfilled demand at the moment. Is that ideal? No, better than the alternative but still a problem. Is there collusion in the industry? Hell if I know but in sum, take it from an industry insider that the factors mentioned in the article are absolutely real and more pronounced than they have ever been in my career.
Does anyone know what the technology was for the 4004? (Is that metal-gate, with double-metal, or polysilicon gate with single-poly, single-metal?)
Well, I do look at photomask stacks as part of my job from time to time as a process integration engineer (mask bugs do make it past design rule checking and tapeout sometimes) but I will start with a disclaimer that this chip and process was designed before I was alive.
It looks from the composite drawing that this is a single poly/single metal/self aligned doped poly/source/drain. That should have existed at the time and to my knowledge no metal gate process has been in wide use because of manufacturability and performance problems. It looks like the red is poly (gates and lines), blue metal, and the green is the source/drain/poly doping diffusion. Whether that was done with implantation or glass doping I'm not sure (again before my time, implant was coming into use but glass doping was much cheaper, if not as controllable). It is kind of nice to see such a simple design.
The article does a pretty good job of summing this up, but the quick version is this. There are two main types of inkjet colorants, pigments and dyes. Pigments are more costly, and have a slightly smaller gamut, but they can last longer than traditional film prints. Becuase of the cost, inkjet manufacturers have not been targeting the average consumer with these pigment based printer/ink combination. If you are willing to spend some money, you can get a pigment based printer that will last 100+ years. Also, because the ink sits on top of the paper, the paper you use to print also contributes or detracts from the longevity of the print. Willhelm research, the company mentioned in the article that does longevity testing has some very interesting results; I highly recommend checking out the website. Here is an article from the reserch firm from the article that compares a couple different different printer/paper combinations.
If you take a look at a particular printer such as the HP Photosmart 8450 you can see that depending on what paper you use the lifetime of the print can last from 9 to 108 years. The method that you keep the printed photo will affect its longevity as well. Most printer manufacturers quote the Wilhelm lifetime when the photo is framed under glass. As you can imagine, when kept under glass the prints last longer.
Who you get the ink from also affects the lifetime of the print. The first article I linked examines some refiller cartridges. This is where ink refillers are really weak.; their lifetimes are much shorter.
I used to work at Metricom and I can say that your 56k speed was VERY conservative. I believe they advertised 128k and we would routinely get 192k in the lab. It was faster than ISDN, which was your main option for high speed internet at home at the time (DSL was just starting to be released). Oftentimes the serial speed was limited by the RS232 data speed (I think the RS232 port speeds defaulted to 56k often). Both USB and RS232 were options on the Gen 2 modem and I recommended using the USB to anyone I knew who used the modems. They even worked USB with Linux as far back as 1999; Metricom was an early adopter and user of Linux and the modem enumerated via USB via some standard serial making it easy (well, Linux easy) to get the driver working. This was at a time when USB on Linux was pretty painful too. I must say I did enjoy working there; the technology was pretty exciting to work on.
The CMOS process has also undergone substantial changes to address the problems that you encounter operating devices with smaller geometries. For instance lightly doped drain implants to counter hot electron injection were developed then halo implants for short channel effects. The methods that are used to isolate transisors on an IC (a critical element) have evolved over the years. From the LOCOS process that was prevalent at about that technology node to trench to SOI people just keep picking away at the technological hurdles that stand in their way.
Just as the materials and tooling of photolithography have been improved as mentioned above the CMOS process itself has undergone shifts to help smaller transistors remain operational and reliable. The current CMOS process flow would look very different to a process engineer transplanted from 1989.
I've never even *heard* of Windows being used in production systems anywhere but plants that produce Windows computers.
In my industry, the IC manufacturing industry, all of the wafer proccessing machines are moving to Windows. Right now I have some machines in my care that are OS/2 based and some that are SunOS and HP-UX based. All vendors of semiconductor manufacturing equipment that I have personally spoken with have alreay or have plans underway to switch to Windows. That is the case with our OS/2 furnaces as well as some ion implanters I was responsible for. The implanters currently we have run SunOS but the vendor has told me they are moving to windows. These are machines which handle millions of dollars worth of product a month. Like it or not, it's happening.
I think it's important for men to have a certain quality to their personality that's hard to describe. It's a form of aggression, recklessness, or self-confidence. You have to have the bravery to step up to the plate no matter what you're facing. Because trying matters most, even if you're defeated. You must be willing to put your safety on the line when it matters. That's character.
That my friend is completely and utterly true. Listen up geeks, that is what the ladies really notice. Growing up, I've always known I was a geek. When I entered high school, I was 6'4" and 190lbs, not a small guy but certainly not the most intimidating. I carried into high school the geek tendancies of meekness and introverision that I'm sure many here are all so familiar with. I was quite the geek in junior high, locking myself in my room teaching myself Pascal and assembly on my 286. Junior high was truly cruel, and going to a high school that nobody from my junior high went to allowed me the opportunity to reinvent myself.
I was able to overcome my tendancies and wore a certain air of confidence, balanced with humility. I tried out for and made the swim and basketball teams and before graduation, I was a starting center and captain of the swim team. The best thing I ever did was force myself to put it all out there.
It is truly scary putting it all out on the line, not knowing if you are going to look completely stupid in front of your peers. Even though I still got the occasional crap from folks (it's high school, this happens) for the most part, I received respect from everyone but the complete and utter jerks. Although my size discouraged a lot, a few people picked fights with me in high school. I did not start any, but refused to back down, even if I thought I had an honest chance of getting hurt. I can recall one particular incident where a 300+lb 6"4'+ linebacker was trying to start a fight. When he noticed that I was not going to be intimidated or back down, he let it drop and walked away. Whenever we passed each other afterwards we always had choice words, but he never tried to physically intimidate me again. There was a good chance that he could have completely kicked my ass and I was honestly scared, but did not show it and let my confidence carry me through.
Let me tell you, the ladies also took notice. That is what they responded to folks, confidence. They do not want to date pussies; they want a man who will stand up for what he is, try his best, and never be ashamed or back down. For as much derision as the jocks get on this website, this is one thing they have figured out and there is no reason that geeks can't learn from this. Although I ultimately went the geek route, receiving my EE in semiconductor device physics, I've never forgotten those lessons in self assurance and confidence and have brought them with me to the workforce. I did have certain physical advantages that helped me to excel at those sports, but I assure you that it was almost purely mental. It may seem impossible, but I am absolutely convinced that anyone can do it.
I have to take issue with the charge that it is more complex. I work in a circuits fab and nothing software developers do is any more complex than anything I do. A change to one part of a device can affect many other areas and processes that go into making that device. People always are changing what requirements they want or what they want the device to do. These chips have to function without fail or error for years upon years. If one company has a bug people are after their ass; one example being the Intel divide bug in Pentiums. I think there are plenty of other reasons why software is not up to snuff, both within and outside of the control of the programmer, but I don't believe for one second that complexity is one of them.
All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe," says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. "It's fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking."
It's good to see that the old alma mater is advancing the state of barnyard ejaculation science. It fills one with a peculiar kind of pride.
As they say, the devil's in the details. When talking about manufacturing circuits there are many other factors to consider. I'm skeptically hopeful that these devices live up to what they claim. I must confess I do not know much about the properties of diamonds, though I work as a device engineer so I know a little about IC manufacturing. What is the electron/hole mobility of diamond? How do various insulating thin films adhere to diamond? How easily is diamond etched through wet chemistry processes? Through plasma processes? How easily can they be implanted/doped? I suspect that the hardness of diamonds so often touted may not be an asset in semiconducting applications. These various details are all why Silicon is still king in the business. Si has the wonderful ability to form an insulator with pretty good properties simply by letting it sit in an environment with oxygen at temperature. This thermal oxide is used to create the crucial gate oxide that dictates how transistors will behave. GaAs as well as Ge and some of the more exotics SiGeC and others haven't been able to replace Si because of these details. I've digressed a bit so I'm just going to sum it up by saying that simply because it is a semiconductor and may now be approaching a cost where we can think about it, it still must cross many hurdles before it is a semiconductor that has proved itself as easily manufacturable.
Why does everyone insist that the printer companies are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The price if ink is fully disclosed when you are going to go buy your printer. There are no secrets or gotchas here. If the average consumer is too lazy or dumb to go analyze the total cost of ownership of their printer, then I don't really feel bad for them. Either the printing companies make the money on the printer, or on the ink. It's not rocket science, and it's not a conspiracy.
Forgive me if I sound a bit naive but wouldn't parallel be faster than serial? Higher bandwidth
It depends. It depends on the several things. Note that when I talk about bandwidth here, I'm talking about the non-bastardized version of bandwidth, in FREQUENCY terms. (Sorry it's a pet peeve of mine and everyone abuses the term.) If you have a higher bandwidth (frequency here) available to you, or a high signal-to-noise available to you, you can possibly transmit more bits than parallel, especially with more complex line codes and modulation/demodulation schemes. With modern VLSI the added costs of more complicated mod/demod schemes are quickly becoming less of a factor. It depends on the frequency bandwidth that are specified in the specs. I have no clue what the attenuation specs are on vanilla IDE, but I would imagine that it has much lower passband than Serial ATA. Now I could be way off base on that, and would love for someone to correct me on that, but I am fairly confident in my assumption. Therefore, if regular parallel ATA had the same bandwidth (frequency, remember) available to it that serial ATA had, than yes, parallel would be faster. It just gets trickier when you consider non-ON/OFF line codes.
Ummm... if you are familiar with digital sampling theory, you would know that you must low pass filter your data in order to recover the origional waveform. The act of sampling automatically creates "copies" of the spectra and you must filter that out in order to recover the origional signal. Filter that 22050Hz triangular wave and you get, surprise, a sine wave. I should note that they set the sample rate at 44.1kHz not so that we could render a 22.05kHz tone but so that we could render a 20kHz tone with a nice little gaurd band. This arises from the fact that we can THEORETICALLY recover signals up to f_s/2 but this is with an IDEAL lowpass filter, which is non-causal and unrealizable in any practical sense. Therefore most engineers give themself a gaurd band so that they can construct a practical lowpass filter.
Sunday night, also about 7:20, a fireball with a long tail of green, orange and purple flames was seen across the Western sky
Hmm.... this sounds a lot like the missile launch that I remember seeing here in Nor Cal that took off from Vandenberg AFB back around 2000 when they were testing the missile defense shield whatever. Sounds like they could possibly be up to some tricks again.
I've got the YP-700. Pretty nice although a little on the expensive side. It has 128MB built in and with the 128MB SmartMedia card I put in it, I have enough space for ~6 albums. It also can record (I used it to record lectures, with 256MB free you can record ~20hours) and will play back for over 10 hours, 20 with the little AAA battery pack. It also comes with a FM tuner in case you get bored of your MP3s. The only downside is the interface software (clunky) and the price. I'm pretty happy with it though.
The Oxidation I can not see as a big problem.... as far as Silicon goes, not to many people realize it, but Si oxidizes on contact with air thus becoming an insulator SiO2. Silicon chips are never allowed the chance to contact air with the way they are sealed/packaged. This helps to seal out oxygen, water and Sodium, some of the most notorious Si contaminants. I don't think it will be a big problem for them to extend the process to nanotubes. I admit my expertese isn't in nanotubes, though I have worked with them in the lab as field emitters.
Only that if a company is going to *manufacture* Joe Schmoe's design, they'd better be pretty confident in it. Success in the fabrication field is measured in percentages of yield and volume. Small runs of every custom processor that come along are simply not economically feasible. That was my point, not that it's impossible for Joe Schmoe to come up with a good design, just that fab houses will *never* jump at the chance to manufacture every Joe Schmoe's design. There is a tremendous ammount of capital invested into the fabrication of a single chip design and I was commenting on the previous post's hope that there may be a market for cheap "quick turn" chip fabricators.
Good luck.. as a fab engineer I can attest that the last thing companies want to do is to make a die for every Joe Schmoe that comes along. The name of the game in fab is yield, yield, yield. As like a recipe for different cakes, each chip design has it's own recipe that must have the kinks worked out of. There is an enormous ammount of overhead going into starting a process and an enormous ammount of money going into improving the yield of a process. In short, the companies care about the bottom line, and unless people had millions to pony up for their custom designs it isn't going to be happening anytime soon. A company isn't going to let hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment run Joe Schmoe's home grown microprocessor when they could be churning out far more profitable Pentiums, etc. It's just like Boeing or Airbus, as someone mentioned earlier. Boeing can't afford to build a plane from scratch (ie VHDL) for everyone who had $800, it's just not feasible.
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As someone who has worked in high tech manufacturing in Europe, the US, and Asia this is absolutely true. As an American and representative of a American company my experience was that once we had arduously hashed out the detailed specs and reached an agreement with our European supplier we could be confident they would not try to deliberately sneak anything past us. My experience with an Asian supplier was the opposite. I experienced outright lying on compliance matters and no apology or sense of fault when I had hard evidence to prove my case. It was a case of constant suspicion and need of monitoring. I much preferred working with the Europeans. While we certainly had our differences and heated disagreements, once an agreement was reached it was adhered to. Business-wise it was so much more refreshing to explicitly confront disagreements at the get go before the ink was dry rather than worry about being told yes (our Asian customers always answered yes to every question even when they had no intention of carrying it out) and finding your agreement was actively being undermined.
The 4004 is VLSI? I don't think it means what you think it means...
I work in the semiconductor industry. I don't deal with memory, I deal with ASIC chips but I can absolutely assure you that the current situation in the semiconductor business is exactly as described. Picture this, you are a manager in a semiconductor company approximately one year ago. You are facing an unprecidented once-in-a-lifetime global economic downturn. You can feel it. The press feels it and reports on it non-stop. Nobody knows when the world will pull out of it but it is obvious to everyone that it hasn't ever, in anyone's lifetime, "been this bad". You know, as a semi company manager, that you have *tremendous* capitol costs (a new factory costs in the billions). What are you going to to? Continue to invest billions in capitol for factory expansion and improvement in the face of unprecedented plummeting demand? Your company's billions are already evaporating in the economy. If you keep spending as you were you would quickly exhaust your company's finances and in addition cause a glut in the global supply of chips (where demand is shrinking) driving down prices like a rock. No, you do what every other company in every other productive sector of the economy does. Cut back production to match demand. The thing is, you can't quickly turn the huge ship of semiconductor production. I'm sure you'll find that semiconductor capacity *always* lags demand. I'm sure in the downturn there was a glut as they realized and as quickly as they could (albeit relatively slowly) responded to market conditions. I can assure you that right now we have the problem that we can not produce enough parts. We are leaving money on the table in the form of unfulfilled demand at the moment. Is that ideal? No, better than the alternative but still a problem. Is there collusion in the industry? Hell if I know but in sum, take it from an industry insider that the factors mentioned in the article are absolutely real and more pronounced than they have ever been in my career.
Does anyone know what the technology was for the 4004? (Is that metal-gate, with double-metal, or polysilicon gate with single-poly, single-metal?)
Well, I do look at photomask stacks as part of my job from time to time as a process integration engineer (mask bugs do make it past design rule checking and tapeout sometimes) but I will start with a disclaimer that this chip and process was designed before I was alive.
It looks from the composite drawing that this is a single poly/single metal/self aligned doped poly/source/drain. That should have existed at the time and to my knowledge no metal gate process has been in wide use because of manufacturability and performance problems. It looks like the red is poly (gates and lines), blue metal, and the green is the source/drain/poly doping diffusion. Whether that was done with implantation or glass doping I'm not sure (again before my time, implant was coming into use but glass doping was much cheaper, if not as controllable). It is kind of nice to see such a simple design.
If you take a look at a particular printer such as the HP Photosmart 8450 you can see that depending on what paper you use the lifetime of the print can last from 9 to 108 years. The method that you keep the printed photo will affect its longevity as well. Most printer manufacturers quote the Wilhelm lifetime when the photo is framed under glass. As you can imagine, when kept under glass the prints last longer.
Who you get the ink from also affects the lifetime of the print. The first article I linked examines some refiller cartridges. This is where ink refillers are really weak.; their lifetimes are much shorter.
I used to work at Metricom and I can say that your 56k speed was VERY conservative. I believe they advertised 128k and we would routinely get 192k in the lab. It was faster than ISDN, which was your main option for high speed internet at home at the time (DSL was just starting to be released). Oftentimes the serial speed was limited by the RS232 data speed (I think the RS232 port speeds defaulted to 56k often). Both USB and RS232 were options on the Gen 2 modem and I recommended using the USB to anyone I knew who used the modems. They even worked USB with Linux as far back as 1999; Metricom was an early adopter and user of Linux and the modem enumerated via USB via some standard serial making it easy (well, Linux easy) to get the driver working. This was at a time when USB on Linux was pretty painful too. I must say I did enjoy working there; the technology was pretty exciting to work on.
The CMOS process has also undergone substantial changes to address the problems that you encounter operating devices with smaller geometries. For instance lightly doped drain implants to counter hot electron injection were developed then halo implants for short channel effects. The methods that are used to isolate transisors on an IC (a critical element) have evolved over the years. From the LOCOS process that was prevalent at about that technology node to trench to SOI people just keep picking away at the technological hurdles that stand in their way.
Just as the materials and tooling of photolithography have been improved as mentioned above the CMOS process itself has undergone shifts to help smaller transistors remain operational and reliable. The current CMOS process flow would look very different to a process engineer transplanted from 1989.
In my industry, the IC manufacturing industry, all of the wafer proccessing machines are moving to Windows. Right now I have some machines in my care that are OS/2 based and some that are SunOS and HP-UX based. All vendors of semiconductor manufacturing equipment that I have personally spoken with have alreay or have plans underway to switch to Windows. That is the case with our OS/2 furnaces as well as some ion implanters I was responsible for. The implanters currently we have run SunOS but the vendor has told me they are moving to windows. These are machines which handle millions of dollars worth of product a month. Like it or not, it's happening.
That my friend is completely and utterly true. Listen up geeks, that is what the ladies really notice. Growing up, I've always known I was a geek. When I entered high school, I was 6'4" and 190lbs, not a small guy but certainly not the most intimidating. I carried into high school the geek tendancies of meekness and introverision that I'm sure many here are all so familiar with. I was quite the geek in junior high, locking myself in my room teaching myself Pascal and assembly on my 286. Junior high was truly cruel, and going to a high school that nobody from my junior high went to allowed me the opportunity to reinvent myself.
I was able to overcome my tendancies and wore a certain air of confidence, balanced with humility. I tried out for and made the swim and basketball teams and before graduation, I was a starting center and captain of the swim team. The best thing I ever did was force myself to put it all out there.
It is truly scary putting it all out on the line, not knowing if you are going to look completely stupid in front of your peers. Even though I still got the occasional crap from folks (it's high school, this happens) for the most part, I received respect from everyone but the complete and utter jerks. Although my size discouraged a lot, a few people picked fights with me in high school. I did not start any, but refused to back down, even if I thought I had an honest chance of getting hurt. I can recall one particular incident where a 300+lb 6"4'+ linebacker was trying to start a fight. When he noticed that I was not going to be intimidated or back down, he let it drop and walked away. Whenever we passed each other afterwards we always had choice words, but he never tried to physically intimidate me again. There was a good chance that he could have completely kicked my ass and I was honestly scared, but did not show it and let my confidence carry me through.
Let me tell you, the ladies also took notice. That is what they responded to folks, confidence. They do not want to date pussies; they want a man who will stand up for what he is, try his best, and never be ashamed or back down. For as much derision as the jocks get on this website, this is one thing they have figured out and there is no reason that geeks can't learn from this. Although I ultimately went the geek route, receiving my EE in semiconductor device physics, I've never forgotten those lessons in self assurance and confidence and have brought them with me to the workforce. I did have certain physical advantages that helped me to excel at those sports, but I assure you that it was almost purely mental. It may seem impossible, but I am absolutely convinced that anyone can do it.
I have to take issue with the charge that it is more complex. I work in a circuits fab and nothing software developers do is any more complex than anything I do. A change to one part of a device can affect many other areas and processes that go into making that device. People always are changing what requirements they want or what they want the device to do. These chips have to function without fail or error for years upon years. If one company has a bug people are after their ass; one example being the Intel divide bug in Pentiums. I think there are plenty of other reasons why software is not up to snuff, both within and outside of the control of the programmer, but I don't believe for one second that complexity is one of them.
It's good to see that the old alma mater is advancing the state of barnyard ejaculation science. It fills one with a peculiar kind of pride.
As they say, the devil's in the details. When talking about manufacturing circuits there are many other factors to consider. I'm skeptically hopeful that these devices live up to what they claim. I must confess I do not know much about the properties of diamonds, though I work as a device engineer so I know a little about IC manufacturing. What is the electron/hole mobility of diamond? How do various insulating thin films adhere to diamond? How easily is diamond etched through wet chemistry processes? Through plasma processes? How easily can they be implanted/doped? I suspect that the hardness of diamonds so often touted may not be an asset in semiconducting applications. These various details are all why Silicon is still king in the business. Si has the wonderful ability to form an insulator with pretty good properties simply by letting it sit in an environment with oxygen at temperature. This thermal oxide is used to create the crucial gate oxide that dictates how transistors will behave. GaAs as well as Ge and some of the more exotics SiGeC and others haven't been able to replace Si because of these details. I've digressed a bit so I'm just going to sum it up by saying that simply because it is a semiconductor and may now be approaching a cost where we can think about it, it still must cross many hurdles before it is a semiconductor that has proved itself as easily manufacturable.
Why does everyone insist that the printer companies are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The price if ink is fully disclosed when you are going to go buy your printer. There are no secrets or gotchas here. If the average consumer is too lazy or dumb to go analyze the total cost of ownership of their printer, then I don't really feel bad for them. Either the printing companies make the money on the printer, or on the ink. It's not rocket science, and it's not a conspiracy.
I'm just curious how they dealt with the patterning/etching of the metal gates. That whole self aligning feature of using poly is a pretty nice.
It depends. It depends on the several things. Note that when I talk about bandwidth here, I'm talking about the non-bastardized version of bandwidth, in FREQUENCY terms. (Sorry it's a pet peeve of mine and everyone abuses the term.) If you have a higher bandwidth (frequency here) available to you, or a high signal-to-noise available to you, you can possibly transmit more bits than parallel, especially with more complex line codes and modulation/demodulation schemes. With modern VLSI the added costs of more complicated mod/demod schemes are quickly becoming less of a factor. It depends on the frequency bandwidth that are specified in the specs. I have no clue what the attenuation specs are on vanilla IDE, but I would imagine that it has much lower passband than Serial ATA. Now I could be way off base on that, and would love for someone to correct me on that, but I am fairly confident in my assumption. Therefore, if regular parallel ATA had the same bandwidth (frequency, remember) available to it that serial ATA had, than yes, parallel would be faster. It just gets trickier when you consider non-ON/OFF line codes.
Ummm... if you are familiar with digital sampling theory, you would know that you must low pass filter your data in order to recover the origional waveform. The act of sampling automatically creates "copies" of the spectra and you must filter that out in order to recover the origional signal. Filter that 22050Hz triangular wave and you get, surprise, a sine wave. I should note that they set the sample rate at 44.1kHz not so that we could render a 22.05kHz tone but so that we could render a 20kHz tone with a nice little gaurd band. This arises from the fact that we can THEORETICALLY recover signals up to f_s/2 but this is with an IDEAL lowpass filter, which is non-causal and unrealizable in any practical sense. Therefore most engineers give themself a gaurd band so that they can construct a practical lowpass filter.
I've got the YP-700. Pretty nice although a little on the expensive side. It has 128MB built in and with the 128MB SmartMedia card I put in it, I have enough space for ~6 albums. It also can record (I used it to record lectures, with 256MB free you can record ~20hours) and will play back for over 10 hours, 20 with the little AAA battery pack. It also comes with a FM tuner in case you get bored of your MP3s. The only downside is the interface software (clunky) and the price. I'm pretty happy with it though.
Well, since the atomic radii is on the order of 1nm I would guess we'll probably bottom out around 10nm within 20 years.
The Oxidation I can not see as a big problem.... as far as Silicon goes, not to many people realize it, but Si oxidizes on contact with air thus becoming an insulator SiO2. Silicon chips are never allowed the chance to contact air with the way they are sealed/packaged. This helps to seal out oxygen, water and Sodium, some of the most notorious Si contaminants. I don't think it will be a big problem for them to extend the process to nanotubes. I admit my expertese isn't in nanotubes, though I have worked with them in the lab as field emitters.
Only that if a company is going to *manufacture* Joe Schmoe's design, they'd better be pretty confident in it. Success in the fabrication field is measured in percentages of yield and volume. Small runs of every custom processor that come along are simply not economically feasible. That was my point, not that it's impossible for Joe Schmoe to come up with a good design, just that fab houses will *never* jump at the chance to manufacture every Joe Schmoe's design. There is a tremendous ammount of capital invested into the fabrication of a single chip design and I was commenting on the previous post's hope that there may be a market for cheap "quick turn" chip fabricators.
An inexpensive system for creating them
Good luck.. as a fab engineer I can attest that the last thing companies want to do is to make a die for every Joe Schmoe that comes along. The name of the game in fab is yield, yield, yield. As like a recipe for different cakes, each chip design has it's own recipe that must have the kinks worked out of. There is an enormous ammount of overhead going into starting a process and an enormous ammount of money going into improving the yield of a process. In short, the companies care about the bottom line, and unless people had millions to pony up for their custom designs it isn't going to be happening anytime soon. A company isn't going to let hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment run Joe Schmoe's home grown microprocessor when they could be churning out far more profitable Pentiums, etc. It's just like Boeing or Airbus, as someone mentioned earlier. Boeing can't afford to build a plane from scratch (ie VHDL) for everyone who had $800, it's just not feasible.