“I learned how to measure before I knew what was size.” – Sofi Tukker, “House Arrest”
Let’s start by speaking some truth. Nothing about the “5 nanometer” CMOS process has any real relationship to five actual nanometers and transistor size. That train jumped off the rails years ago, and the semiconductor industry has inflicted tremendous self-harm by perpetuating the … Read More → "No More Nanometers"
“It is easier to write an incorrect program than to understand a correct one.” – programmers’ adage
My first real job was repairing hard disk drives. I’d open up the drives, clean the platters with an alcohol pad, and align the read/write heads using a screwdriver and an oscilloscope. The guy at the bench next to mine … Read More → "Tales from the Debugging Crypt"
Lattice Semiconductor has a knack for finding and exploiting holes in the programmable logic market. Years ago, they gave up chest beating their way into a distant third place in the FPGA market and decided instead to concentrate on the areas that the two dominant players (Xilinx and Intel/Altera) were ignoring. In a broad sense, that meant low-end FPGAs – devices with small form factors, small … Read More → "Lattice Launches Certus-NX"
Most people are familiar with the TNG concept, which sprang from the original Star Trek TV series being rebranded as “Star Trek: The Original Series” when its shiny successor “Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)” appeared on the scene (no pun intended). Well, I’ve just been introduced to the next generation (TNG) of design for test (DFT).
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” — Eric Hoffer
It’s not often that you get to solve two problems at once. Or that one product serves two markets simultaneously. But that’s the clever business strategy behind a new search engine that helps PCB designers find component footprints while also giving component … Read More → "A Google for Components"
“There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.” – Steven Levy
Debugging your code or hardware is rarely seen as the glamorous part of the job. As engineers, we like to make stuff – to design. Any debugging activity is a tacit admission that our designs aren’t perfect; that we didn’t get … Read More → "Debugging as a Career Goal"
