Leibson's Law

Chuck House spent 29 years at Hewlett-Packard and worked in a wide variety of roles at a number of divisions and groups. He’s an IEEE Fellow for logic analysis technology, was President of ACM (the world’s largest Computer Science society), and is an ACM Fellow. He also holds HP’s only “Medal of Defiance,” awarded to him by David Packard for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.” If that sounds like someone you would want to hear speak, your chance is coming nigh because Chuck House has written a book called The HP Phenomenon and he’ll be speaking about HP and the book at the Computer Histo...Read More

Thanks to an emailed idea from Monster.com’s Inside Tech, I’ve got a brilliant use for Twitter. Here’s what people are saying about their bosses right now. Bad, bad idea. So much guilty fun to listen in and Twitter away your valuable time.

• Dear Boss, I'm not coming in today, I'm sending my robot instead: http://bit.ly/P6IWG
• I hate it when the stupid boss at work acts like it's multiple people complaining when it is really just her and her stupidity.

NAND Flash manufacturing cost reductions of 60% per year sustained over nearly a decade have driven many technology changes, developments, compromises, and innovations. Prices have fallen even faster over the past five years, but the precipitous price decline could easily slow due to technical forces and in all likelihood, they will. Further, NAND Flash specifications are changing and will continue to change in predictable and unpredictable ways due to these forces. These changes will create new capabilities for NAND users, will impose extra performance burdens, and may ultimately limit the flexibility of NAND Flash in future device generations compared to what is available today.

This paper describes these trends in a series of warnings, enumerates the steps the semiconductor industry is taking to smooth product transition for NAND Flash users, and highlights development...Read More

NASA finally announced today that the LCROSS experiment conducted on October 9, when a Centaur upper stage rocket and the LCROSS platform itself crashed into the moon’s south pole, has produced data indicating that there’s water in the perpetually dark craters in the southernmost part of the moon. IR and UV spectroscopy both confirm the presence of water. Project scientist Anthony Colaprete smiled and said “We found a significant amount” of water as he held up a two-gallon plastic bucket. Apparently, the creation of a 20-meter crater caused by the Centaur upper-stage impact threw up a vapor cloud containing an estimated 100 kilograms of water, about 25 gallons worth. That’s a significant amount.

Back when I ran the Microprocessor Forum, I created a music video titled “Dare to Embed It” based on the song “Dare to be stupid” by Weird Al Yankovic. Last week, I had dinner with Michael Fisher and his wife Dana. Both worked at Reed-Elsevier with me and Michael did a lot of the audio work, played guitar, and sang backup vocals for the video. The dinner inspired me to dig out the video and post it on YouTube. Here it is. Please rate it highly.

Yesterday, I moderated a panel on green chip design in Newport Beach at the 7^th International SOC Conference. Chances are you didn’t see or hear any of it because there were only 100 people at this conference in total. That’s really too bad because we had a great set of panelists:

1. Michel Laurence co-founded Octasic, which is a Montreal specialist in echo cancellation and has mastered the art of self-clocking or self-timed (asynchronous) logic design.
2. Jauher Zaidi, CEO, PalmChip Corporation, which was in the chip-design business but has now spun off those activities to focus more on SOC platform software.
3. Alan Ruberg, SPMT architect for SPMT, The Serial Port Memory Technology consortium, which is developing a high-performance, low-power, next-generation memory interface to replace the DDR families

The title for this blog is “borrowed” from a Mark Twain story and the content is borrowed—once more—from my favorite Oz video celebrity engineer, David Jones, who does the EE Video blog. In our latest episode, David rants about Microchip’s new PICkit 3 development tool.

...Read More

After 40 years of working on phase-change memory (PCM), researchers announced...another incremental step towards creating devices that can compete with the current king of the non-volatile memory hill: Flash EEPROM. Certainly, there are PCM devices on the market now (see this blog and this one). However Flash memory, already the cost/bit memory leader by far, has threatened to leave all other memory technologies far, far in the dust as it evolves from single-layer cells (SLC) to multi-layer cells (MLC). But there’s trouble visible on the far horizon for Flash memory. The number of electrons stored in a Flash cell drops with each new lithography node and we w...Read More

I’ve just started to write a blog for AgigA Tech, a maker of non-volatile memory subsystems for embedded systems and servers. Today, I posted a fun blog entry with a bunch of photos of leaking batteries destroying the equipment in which they’re installed. Seemed like a good Halloween treat, and a reminder to check your batteries and your assumptions about them. You’ll find the post here. My good friend and AgigA Tech CEO Ron Sartore calls the photos absolutely “Joule-ish.” Funny, they don’t look Joulish to me.

You may be aware that a Northwest Airlines commercial flight overflew its destination, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, by 150 miles last week taking the 144 passengers on a bit of a joyride. Worse, the radio silence caused NORAD to scramble fighter jets from two separate locations, just in case the airliner had been hijacked by terrorists. I’ve just read of the reason for the overshoot, courtesy of CNN. The pilot and copilot were both engaged in working on their laptop computers and didn’t notice that it was time to land. The aircraft was on autopilot while the copilot was reportedly showing the pilot something related to crew scheduling on his laptop. The pilot’s laptop was also reportedly in use.

It’s not clear to me...Read More

I'm chairing a panel on Green Chip design at the 7th International SOC Conference next week. What would you ask the panelists about green ASIC/FPGA design if you were there? Here's a list of panelists:

“Green Chips: Technology, Trends, and Challenges in Low-Power Multicore SoC Designs” (http://j.mp/1D0hfW)

1. Dr. Barry Pangrle, Solutions Architect, Low Power, Design and Verification, Mentor Graphics.

2. Dr. Sho Long Chen, President, CEO, Founder and Chairman, Vweb Corporation

3. Michel Laurence co-founded Octasic.

4. Jasbinder Bhoot, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, eASIC Corporation.

5. Jauher Zaidi, CEO, PalmChip Corporation

6. Alan Ruberg, SPMT architect for SPMT, The Serial Port Memory Technology consortium.

The IEEE Consultants Network of Silicon Valley is holding the second of three 3-hour Webinars on the topic of successful selling as a business consultant. (I reviewed the first such Webinar here.) Again, the speaker is the immensely knowledgeable Mike Johnson and the price is a paltry $49 if you’re an IEEE member. Go here to register. If you’re a consultant, even an experienced and successful one, you should register for this event now. I can guarantee that you will make back 100x the cost of the Webinar if you apply Johnson’s principles.

Nine years ago, on August 28, 2000, after visiting the Intel Developers Forum (IDF), I published these words in the Microprocessor Report about what was then Intel’s XScale processor: “On day two of IDF, Intel launched its new name for StrongArm-2—XScale—and at long last demonstrated working silicon. The new name refers to the processor's "extraordinary ability to scale," which it indeed has. (Unlike the old name, the new name also is one that Intel can trademark.) The early XScale silicon at IDF ran at 50MHz while consuming 10mW and at 1GHz running at 1.5W. The very same piece of silicon operated at both extremes, although the more conservative data sheet will span only 50MHz at 10mW to 800MHz at 900mW. Incidentally, standby power is 0.1mW and XScale jumps from standby to full operation in less than 20µsec.”

Six years...Read More

• Do you design ASICs or SOCs?
• Do you work on a team that designs ASICs or SOCs?
• Do you manage a team that designs ASICs or SOCs?

Let me ask you a question then. What’s the one thing you will do from now to the end of the year that will put you or your team ahead of the rampant, cutthroat global competition it will face in 2010? Do you even know?

Let me give you the typical answer, the answer that I know I’d get from most of the engineers, designers, managers, and executives in this industry. It’s a one-word answer. I know it because I’ve heard this answer over and over again. That answer is... nothing.

What!?!?!

Absolutely, positively nothing.

The depressing reality of the SOC design industry is that it has been on cruise control for years. It’s been on...Read More