Articles – Page 49

A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 2: The Texas instruments TMS1000

November 21, 2022

As with many first-of-a-kind devices, the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS0100 calculator chip family was a narrowly defined microcontroller, mostly good for making calculators. However, the first chip in the TMS0100 family, originally called the TM1802NC and later renamed the TMS0102, incorporated everything a microcontroller requires to be a microcontroller: a CPU, RAM, ROM, and I/O. Granted, it was a specialized microcontroller. Its I/O was application-specific and designed to be attached to a matrix keyboard and a seven-segment display. Nevertheless, the TMS1802NC was a microcontroller.

Originally conceived … Read More → "A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 2: The Texas instruments TMS1000"

Are You Ready for PCIe 6.0?

by Max Maxfield

November 17, 2022

I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel a little frazzled around the edges, as it were. Things are now progressing so fast that I’m finding it difficult to keep up. I still hear people boasting “We now support PCIe 4.0,” even though PCIe 5.0 is roaming wild and free, and now the folks at Rambus are briefing me on their PCIe 6.0 offerings. Pass me my smelling salts because I’m too young for all this excitement!

Just to ensure that we’re all tap dancing to … Read More → "Are You Ready for PCIe 6.0?"

What Can One Do with an Array of 250,000 Ultrasonic Transducers?

by Max Maxfield

November 15, 2022

I am obliged to admit that I’ve not spent as much time as perhaps I should, cogitating and ruminating over what I could do with an array of 250,000 ultrasonic transducers. Now, however, after chatting with Xavier Rottenberg, Fellow Sensors and Actuators at IMEC, I find I can think of little else. … Read More →

A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 1: Calculator Chips Came First

by Steven Leibson

November 14, 2022

Gary Boone, who worked in the Texas Instruments (TI) MOS Department, devised the first chip that can be called a microcontroller because he was becoming bored with his job and in trouble with his family. He’d joined TI in 1969 just when calculator chips were getting to be big business. During the 1960s, electronic calculators replaced the electromechanical Marchant and Frieden calculators that had owned the market for decades. Semiconductors made it possible to replace the hundreds of intricate metal and plastic parts in these electromechanical calculators, first with hundreds of transistors and diodes, and then … Read More → "A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 1: Calculator Chips Came First"

Will X9 Spider Computer Systems Power the US Army in 2030?

by Max Maxfield

November 10, 2022

A couple of weeks ago as I pen these words, I heard that the folks from General Micro Systems had taken home three “Best of Show” awards from the recent AUSA 2022 annual meeting and exposition, which was held 12-12 October in Washington DC, and whose purpose was to highlight computing innovations for building the Army of 2030. … Read More →

In Memoriam: Dave Cochran, an Engineer’s Engineer

by Steven Leibson

November 9, 2022

Sadly, my friend Dave Cochran passed away on October 7. You’ve likely never heard of Dave Cochran, but if you ever owned a scientific calculator, you owe him, big time. Cochran was “Mr. Algorithm” at Hewlett-Packard starting with the earliest days of HP’s desktop scientific calculators in the late 1960s. He developed the arithmetic and trigonometric algorithms for HP’s first calculator, the HP 9100A desk calculator, using numerical calculation methods and approximations that had been around for hundreds of years. Then Bill Hewlett pestered him regularly for years until Cochran and his colleagues at … Read More → "In Memoriam: Dave Cochran, an Engineer’s Engineer"

DARPA Funds Space Lasers to Bring Non-Sectarian Internet Communications to Outer Space

by Steven Leibson

November 7, 2022

Have you noticed that low-Earth orbit (LEO) is getting crowded? Several companies are developing globe-spanning satellite networks to provide Internet access to every square inch of the Earth’s surface. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink may be the most visible venture, but other entrants in this derby include Amazon’s Project Kuiper, SpaceLink, Viasat, and Telesat. On the one hand, it’s going to be very handy to have multiple companies competing to spread Internet-based communications everywhere. On the other hand, there’s an issue of compatibility that’s raising its ugly head. All of … Read More → "DARPA Funds Space Lasers to Bring Non-Sectarian Internet Communications to Outer Space"

O-M-Gosh, I’ve Been Zeked! (Part 3)

by Max Maxfield

November 3, 2022

As you may recall from my previous “O-M-Gosh, I’ve Been Zeked!” columns, 11-year-old Zeke is on a mission to talk to the astronauts and cosmonauts orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station (ISS). He started by getting his ham radio license when he was only 8 years old, and now he’s working on getting his 10-foot helical antenna to track the space station. … Read More →

How Long Until We See Whales in Classrooms?

by Max Maxfield

November 2, 2022

Do you remember all the hoopla about the company Magic Leap a few years ago? I’m trying to remind myself of the timeline. The company was founded in 2010 but was in stealth mode until around 2015. In 2016 they released a teaser video that showed what purported to be augmented reality (AR) in the form of a whale surprising school students by jumping into a gym. … Read More →

Looming Crypto Crisis Rides In With Quantum Computing

by Steven Leibson

November 1, 2022

It seems, increasingly, like writing technology articles is becoming nothing more than covering a long list of unfolding crises. The crisis du jour is the imminent breakdown of cryptographic security, thanks to the expected arrival of quantum computers. Today’s cryptography relies heavily on implementations of RSA public-key cryptography, which is now used pervasively for data encryption and decryption in networking and computing. RSA encryption – named after its inventors: Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman – relies on the difficulty of decrypting the encoded data without a key, which requires some bodacious math to factor large numbers if you … Read More → "Looming Crypto Crisis Rides In With Quantum Computing"