Leibson's Law

I’ve written about graphene before. It looks like the single-atom-thick carbon sheets may well be the semiconductor of choice in the future. Now comes news that it’s theoretically possible to trap cobalt dimers (pairs of cobalt atoms) vertically within a hexagonal carbon ring in the graphene and that trapped dimer will exhibit ferromagnetic characteristics. In other words, the cobalt dimer serves as a 2-atom magnetic memory bit contained within a 6-atom framework.

Currently, there are experimental cobalt ferromagnetic memories based on 8nm cobalt nanoparticles (clumps of about 50,000 cobalt atoms), but a cobalt dimer in a graphene hex ring measures much less than 1 nm. You can get the details from Technology Review and from this ...Read More

Jim Elliott, VP of Memory Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor must have a pretty tough job. He spoke at last week’s MemCon 09 and his talk was titled “Memory: What it Takes to Turn the Corner.” I knew the memory vendors had it tough, but didn’t realize how tough until Elliott rolled out this slide:

The slide shows that the spot price for Gbit DDR2 memory chips dropped 95% from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2008. Wow! That’s 95% in two years. What kind of business could survive that sort of price erosion?

Note:This blog entry is one of several covering last week’s MemCon 09 conference.

Sometimes, an idea is so blindingly elegant that it needs no marketing spin. That’s what I thought when EasyCo LLC’s CTO Doug Dumitru stepped up to the podium and started to describe his company’s software. It fixes a big problem with NAND Flash memory. This first graph shows the problem:

Sequential reads and writes and random reads work OK and transfer rates scale well with block size. Random writes, on the other hand, do not. However, that’s not the whole story....Read More

(Note: Psion officially trademarked the name “NetBook” a while ago and prefers that the term not be used generically but I don’t think the Web community is cooperating.)

Time was, many years ago, any PC that you would really want cost $5000. That statement held true for a good 15 years from the PC’s introduction in 1981 to the mid 1990s. Prices for machines fell, but new features continued to appear so that the price of a well-featured machine stayed around $5K. Then the prices started falling, rapidly. Today, that number’s probably between $500 and $1000 and is likely to fall again because of the subcompact notebook, the diminutive PC that’s everything most people really need in a PC. The graph below, taken from a talk at MemCon 09 given last week by SanDisk Corporation’s Senior Strategic Marketing Manager Anu Murthy, tel...Read More

Lexar Media has announced that it will be producing 32Gbyte SDHC cards based on Micron’s 32Gbit MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash chips fabricated with Micron’s 34nm process technology. The new SDHC cards ship this September. Moore’s Law continues and here’s the latest proof. The new SDHC card has sufficient capacity to store 12 hours of HD video. The new NAND Flash chip features an ONFI 2.1 synchronous interface that delivers a maximum transfer rate of 200Mbytes/sec. By comparison, older SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash memory interfaces are limited to 40 Mbytes/sec.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.—Vernor Vinge

You are to be forgiven if you have yet to hear of the coming singularity. It’s a science fiction premise espoused by SF author Vernor Vinge back in 1993. Boy genius Ray Kurzweil put meat on the bones of the idea by writing multiple tomes on the topic. The premise of The Singularity is that soon, perhaps within one to four decades, we will be able to build machines with something rivaling human intelligence. Shortly after that happens, the age of humans will end as machines evolve like...well machines, and leave us to choke in their dust. Of course, that’s not how Vinge and Kurzweil see it. They’re optimistic that the machines will serve us. Or at least tolerate us. Apparently, they haven&rsquo...Read More

Processor clock rates leapt from a few MHz to a few GHz over the past two decades and we’ve become jaundiced about speed. “How much speed do you need to run Microsoft Word?” is the frequently asked question. I’ve just finished a couple of days at Denali’s MemCon 09 conference and will be writing more about what I learned there. For now, here’s a counterpoint to the increasingly relaxed attitude towards speed. Think servers.

In his Tuesday keynote, Numonyx CTO and VP Ed Doller cited the following three server statistics, which quantify the value of system speed:

• Amazon found that 100 msec of extra server latency costs the company 1% in lost sales. (Amaz

The ideal technology (any technology) delivers high performance and low cost. To hear new flat-panel display maker Pixel Qi (that’s pronounced “chee” as in the Chinese life force) tell it, their new LCD-based flat-panel technology is pretty darn close to ideal. Here are the opening remarks from the home page of the company’s Web site:

We are a fabless developer of a new class of screens that use standard LCD manufacturing materials and processes. 

The screens will be available for mini-laptops and ebook readers in high volume mass production in late-2009. Our mainstream laptop screens will be available thereafter based on demand.  

The readability and legibility of our new screens rival the...Read More

The HP calculator enthusiast community has long had calculator emulators running on the PC. Now HP itself has entered the market with multiple offerings running on PCs and Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. “We just felt that HP calculator emulators should really come from HP,” said HP’s Director of Calculator Product Development Sam Kim.

HP 15c calculator emulation running on an Apple iPhone

The first calculator emulations from HP that run on the PC include:

• HP 12c
• HP 12c Platinum edition
• HP 20b
• HP 35s

The first calculator emulations...Read More

The Hubble Space Telescope’s new Science Instrument Command and Data Handler (SIC&DH) computer—a decade’s-old spare freshened up, taken into space, and installed by the last Shuttle repair mission—locked up on June 15 thus cutting the flow of commands transmitted from ground control to the Hubble’s scientific instruments and the flow of data from the instruments from the earth. After recognizing that no telemetry was coming from the instruments, ground controllers ordered all instruments into safe mode. The SIC&DH computer ignored NASA’s “request.” Ground control then followed standard engineering procedure and pushed “the big red button,” shutting off the SIC&DH’s power supply. Once power was restored, telemetry data started flowing. NASA did not report this event until June 18 although one of the regu...Read More

It was inevitable. With the 3:1 or 4:1 cost differential between rechargeable OEM camera batteries and cheap knockoffs and with some spectacular flaming battery incidents with laptop batteries, it was clear that vendors would find a way to prevent customers from using less expensive batteries. Panasonic is one of the first, if not the first, to enforce use of Panasonic branded batteries in its digital cameras through a firmware update to sixteen of its digital camera models because “some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses.”

Conceptually, this is not a hard feature to add to a battery-powered device because genuine branded batteries all have thermal sensors to prevent overcharging disasters and most ...Read More

We’ve been waiting on flying cars for a long, long time. Tom Swift’s Triphibian Atomicar and George Jetson’s flivver from the 1960s got us prepared. It’s been a long wait. Here’s the latest “real” entry, from Terrafugia:

One of my favorite story types describes how canny researchers take a page from nature and do something wonderful. This story is like that. Rahul Sarpeshkar, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and his graduate student, Soumyajit Mandal, designed an RF receiver chip to mimic the inner ear, or cochlea, but to receive electromagnetic radiation instead of sound vibrations. The chip uses a spiral array of scaled inductors and capacitors to perform an analog RF spectrum analysis the way the ear’s cilia analyze the sound spectrum of incident mechanical pressure waves. The RF Cochlea is a big step towards the development of a universal radio architecture.