Another day, another patent lawsuit. It’s just one of the many tools in the Silicon Valley (and any other global Silicon Situ) toolbox. So an announcement by Nikon that it is suing ASML and Zeiss shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows, right?

Well, yeah, except that, in this case, Nikon might as well be saying that they have a patent on sand. And… as with all things legal, I should probably clarify my meaning there. I’m not saying that … Read More → "Nikon vs. ASML"

Over the past five-plus decades, Moore’s Law has taken us on a remarkable rocket ride of complexity. With the number of transistors on a chip approximately doubling every two years – and we’re up to 26 of those “doublings” now – we’ve seen an increase on the order of 67 million times the number of transistors on a chip, giving us processors with over seven billion transistors, FPGAs with over thirty billion transistors, and memory devices with over a hundred billion transistors, as of 2016. It’s an absolutely remarkable explosion in complexity. But, during those same fifty years, … Read More → "Magnitudes of Mystery"