Taking the Measure

What’s the fate of trade shows given the state of the economy and the cost and inconvenience of travel? Crowds in the hallways and booths at Vision 2008 two weeks ago and Electronica last week suggested to me that trade show interest, at least in Germany, remains high. A statement released by Messe München International (MMI)today confirms that my impression of Electronica, at least: “Electronica 2008 attendance was remarkably stable despite the difficult financial situation facing many exhibitors and attendees. The well-known trade fair attracted around 2800 exhibitors, 58% of whom came from abroad, and around 72,000 attendees. These numbers are essentially unchanged from electronica 2006.”

MMI adds that the number of attendees from Central and Eastern Europe, Taiwa...Read More

MUNICH, GERMANY. Who cares about semiconductors? Maybe only the trade press and its readers, suggested Brian L. Halla, chairman and CEO of National Semiconductor, at a press conference today on the eve of Electronica. Politicians don’t seem to care, he said, recounting a visit to Washington with Intel Chairman Craig R. Barrett on behalf of the SIA. He said the two pushed for expansion of the H-1B visa program and for more support for research, including full funding of the America Competes act, mostly to no avail. The semiconductor industry ranks fifth or sixth, he said he was told by ...Read More

Driven by economic forces, five ATE makers came together yesterday under the CAST banner in an effort to foster precompetitive collaboration. Representatives of the nine companies supporting the CAST initiative so far—Advantest, Amkor, Infineon, Intel, LTX-Credence, Qualcomm, Roos Instruments, Teradyne, and Verigy—took the stage at the International Test Conference yesterday to discuss their reasons for forming CAST, which stands for "Collaborative Alliance for Semiconductor Test."

Debbora Ahlgren, VP and chief marketing officer of Verigy and co-chair of the CAST planning group, said, “The industry has got to point where quite frankly we need to work together to achieve greater efficiency, so what we’ve done is pull together a foundational team,” in...Read More

I’ve commented previously that an engineering career isn’t an easy sell to students in the US, and I applaud the efforts of organizations that are trying to instill an interest in technology in young people. Those initiatives range from the Lego WeDo platform, which adapts National Instruments’ LabView graphical design environment for the grade-school set, to the US Department of Energy’s EcoCar competition, which provides computer-modeling and hands-on experience for future automotive engineers. Addressing age groups in between is the FIRST program, which brings the excitement of sporting even...Read More

Two-dimensional semiconductor process technology has had a successful 50 year history since Gordon Moore designed the first commercial planar transistor. And there is no end in sight, as firms such as ASML continue to develop innovative photolithography equipment and research organizations like IMEC focus on sub-32-nm process technologies. Nevertheless, 3D semiconductor structures are emerging that serve a variety of application areas, and in fact older-generation 2D lithographic equipment can often be adapted to form 3D structures.

Presenters at research review meetings held last week at ASML in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, and at IMEC in Leuven, Belgium, discussed innovations in 2D and 3D technologies. For...Read More

LEUVEN, BELGIUM. In the latest twist on data acquisition, IMEC has developed what it calls an ambulatory arousal monitor. In a presentation at the IMEC Annual Research Review Meeting October 14, Bert Gyselinckx said that such a monitor can have applications ranging from entertainment to health care.

Gyselinckx, who is program director for IMEC at the Holst Centre—an independent R&D center established in 2005 by IMEC and Netherlands-based TNO—suggested that entertainment seems to be the primary application for precursors to the IMEC technology. He cited the Emotiv Systems mind/game interface as an example. But there are be practical applications as well. As an example in this category, he cited the ...Read More

At EDN, we are analyzing data from a salary and job-satisfaction survey of electrical engineers worldwide. We’ll publish the results next month. But by coincidence, I just got a call from a reporter at Monster.com who wanted to talk about salary trends among electrical engineers.

I couldn’t divulge specific information from the forthcoming report on our global survey, but there are some interesting results worth commenting on in the August issue of IEEE Spectrum ("Engineers Are Doing Well by Doing Good," p. 64), which survey various engineering disciplines. Practitioners in computer science scored the highest salaries—at $90,000 for systems engineers and $80,000 for applications engineers. Electrical engineers came in at ...Read More

Conventional wisdom holds that the foundry owns the responsibility to fund and manage the tools and processes associated with semiconductor product quality, says Phil Burlison at Verigy. However, he says, in the newer technology nodes, yield accountability involves more than the optical inline inspection and other related monitoring functions that are an integral part of the wafer-fabrication process. As process geometries shrink, he says, “There is a growing view that the quantitative data generated on ATE can be used well beyond a ‘go/no go’ filter for defects. Integral to this new process are the tools that can analyze and convert test-failure data into meaningful indicators of design/process problems.”

The emergence of such tools poses questions: who pays for them, how is the data that the tools generate promulgated, and to whom? To investigate ...Read More

In a post last week I suggested that engineers and physicists might be better stewards of the economy than are politicians and economists. In an article in Slate, Jordan Ellenberg, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, suggests the economy is actually in the hands of not-too-smart gamblers.

In his post, titled “We're Down $700 Billion. Let's Go Double or Nothing!” Ellenberg likens the “complex derivatives behind the current financial havoc” to the martingale game—a “sure fire” way to make, for example, a hundred dollars on a coin-toss game. You bet $10...Read More

Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky, and Ultra Hal are undoubtedly spending every waking moment cramming for the Turing test slated for Sunday October 12 at the University of Reading, under the auspices of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. One or more of them hope (if I may ascribe human emotions to them in advance of passing the test) to answer the question—as an article in the Guardian puts it, “Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.”

The go...Read More

Should we leave the economy to politicians, financiers, and economists, or might physical scientists have something to contribute to the topic?

In a New York Times column titled “This Economy Does Not Compute,” Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, questions the wisdom of the former group, writing, “A few weeks ago, it seemed the financial crisis wouldn’t spin completely out of control. The government knew what it was doing—at least the economic experts were saying so—and the Treasury had taken a stand against saving failing firms, letting Lehman Brothers file for bankruptcy.” Unfortunately, he adds, the Lehman collapse was quickly followed by “the rescue of the insurance giant A.I.G., the arranged sale of ...Read More

As I reviewed John McCain’s responses to Science Debate 2008 yesterday, I came across this statement: “Under my guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park.” That formulation seemed awfully close to Al Gore's March 1999 statement: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet," which was widely misinterpreted as a claim that he had invented the Internet.

Would pundits misattribute to McCain the claim that he invented cell-...Read More

John McCain has responded to questions from Science Debate 2008, saying he would appoint a White House science and technology adviser. He also called for building 45 new reactors by 2030.

Here is a summary of how McCain responded to seven questions (of Science Debate 2008’s 14 total) that I highlighted (and paraphrased) in an earlier post ("For candidates, computer literacy optional, answers mandatory"):

• What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

“My policies will provide broad pools of capital, low taxes and incentives for research in America, a commitment to a skilled and educated workforce, and a dedication to opening markets around the globe,” McCain says, adding that he would wor...Read More

Salt Lake City, UT. What’s the role of test equipment in today’s military? Test equipment should have become obsolete by now, quipped Dan Christenson as he addressed the plenary session of Autotestcon 2008 (www.autotestcon.com), which convened here today. Costly ATE systems, he said, should have been driven out of existence by built-in test. Christenson, who is affiliated with the Air Force Global Logistics Support Center and serves as the Autotestcon general chairman, delivered his remarks while introducing keynote speaker Mark D. Johnson, the executive director of the Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base (www.hill.af.mil).

Johnson addressed the fact that ATE continues to play a big role in the Air Force and other service branches. He began his speech citing “&hel...Read More