I’m a simple man. It’s very kind of you to say that you agree with everything I just said, but I hadn’t fully finished my thought. What I was going to say was that I’m a simple man and I like a simple story. Sometimes I finish an interview with someone and—as soon as the video conference call closes—I burst into tears and/or maniacal laughter (figuratively, not literally, you understand… although sometimes it’s been a close call). …
Read More → "Something M-azing This Way Comes"Microchip now offers a Flash-based microcontroller with an integrated programmable-logic block for less than half a dollar in volume. The nine members of the Microchip PIC16F13145 family (the ‘113, ‘114, ‘115, ‘123, ‘124, ‘125, ‘143, ‘144, and ‘145) sport the same 8-bit RISC microprocessor architecture as other members of the 16F family, but they also incorporate a new programmable-logic block called a Configurable Logic Block (CLB). …
Read More → "Tiny FPGA in Microchip’s latest PIC16 microcontroller adds real-time speed, sells for less than 50 cents"After seeing what I’ve just seen, you can consider (what I laughingly call) my mind to be well and truly blown. My poor old noggin is now full of ideas, each one triggering a cascade of considerations. Some of these meandering musings may even be germane to what I’m about to reveal. As usual, of course, we will all have to weed through my rambling … Read More → "First Text-to-Speech, Then Text-to-Image, Now Text-to-3D-Animation"
The industry lost yet another pioneer last year, and his passing seems to have been largely unheralded. Don Lancaster was a prolific writer whose books and articles going back to the 1960s taught generations of electronics hobbyists and budding engineers how to use analog and digital integrated circuits, how to program early 8-bit microprocessors – particularly the MOS Technology 6502, how to use Adobe’s PosScript page description language … Read More → "Don Lancaster: The Electronics Industry Lost Another Pioneer Last Year"
During a Zoom meeting of the Computer History Museum’s (CHM) SemiSIG earlier this year, our fearless leader Doug Fairbairn mentioned that he was having trouble contacting Ray Holt to arrange a recording of his oral history. CHM’s SemiSIG records oral histories of past and present luminaries in the semiconductor industry, and Holt’s history is a rich one. After getting his EE degree at Cal … Read More → "Ray Holt and the Lost History of the First Multi-Chip Microprocessor"
