Category Archives: Blog

My last post (on asynch resets) wasn’t exactly light summer reading. So I thought that, as the summer winds down, I’d give you a break by focusing on a couple of recent EE Times articles that are a bit more fun. (Not that asynch resets can’t be fun…)

The first piece took a stroll down the memory lane of minicomputers, workstations, and early microcomputers. These were showcased – and were the subject of a number of panels – at Vintage Computer Festival West, which was hosted by the Computer History Museum. (Remind me to visit next time I’m in Mountain View.)

Remember minicomputers? Well, yes and no. They were pretty much on the decline by the time I began my professional career as an engineer, and I was never in the business app space where they were so prevalent. But a friend in Massachusetts fondly remembers the days when mini-makers DEC, Wang, Data General, Apollo, and Prime – none of which exist anymore –  were the technology kings (and major employers) of that state. But IBM’s still around and, amazingly, there are still tens of thousands of companies that still rely on their workhorse mini, the AS-400. The article I saw on the event didn’t actually talk about the AS-400, but just the mention of minicomputers put me in mind of it.

More up my alley were the microcomputers – which is what PC’s were originally known as (even though all microcomputers weren’t PC’s…). I loved seeing the picture of this Osborne portable computer. Pretty clunky, huh? And to think that these were state of the art (sort of) back in the day. Anyway, you’ve gotta love the two floppy drives with the storage space for diskettes beneath them. But because the screen and keyboard were all-in-one with the CPU, these computers were, indeed, portable – even though they were so heavy you could hyper-extend your forearm muscles lugging them.

Even more up my alley was the Heathkit which, as the article’s author (Kevin Krewell) pointed out, was “the original Maker micro.” Almost every engineer of a certain age had a Heathkit, or something equivalent.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun paging through this piece, and seeing all these relics. When I looked at the pictures of old-timey computers, it really struck me just how amazing it is when you consider the computing power that all of us carry around with us in our pockets these days. And think of how much we can actually accomplish on a screen that’s even smaller than that Osborne screen! As I said, amazing.

Another EE Times article on a variation of the vintage theme was Alix Paultre’s piece on “Yesteryear’s Measurement Tools.” He found “an assortment of antique electrical measurement tools at a sidewalk flea market” that accompanied the recent PCIM show in Nuremberg, Germany. Check out the Weston Selective Analyzer, which dates from the 1930’s (and which comes from Alix’s personal collection, not from the flea market).

Just as computing devices have become sleeker and more powerful, so have measurement tools become more sophisticated.

But it’s fun to think about the time when the “old timers” were leading edge. Not to mention that, a few decades from now, someone will be reading an article in EE Times on the ancient technology of the early 21^st century.

A couple of weeks back, the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery – a throwback name if ever!) held an event celebrating 50 years of ACM A.M. Turing Awards. The Turing is pretty much considered the Nobel Prize for computing, and it would sure have been interesting to be there for its 50^th.  As part of the conference that surrounded the awards ceremony, there was a panel on Moore’s Law.

Rick Merritt discussed the panel, “Moore’s Law Is Really Dead: What’s Next?” in an article on EE Times, which I’ll summarize here.

Moore’s Law – which holds that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit roughly doubles every couple of years – held up for a good 25 years, but actually began slowing down a decade or so ago. It’s now running up against the limits of physics.

Some panel members believe that Moore’s Law has a few good years left before it EOL’s, and that, for some applications, performance will continue to accelerate. For Doug Burger, who works on FPGA accelerators at Microsoft:

“Moore’s Law gave us a free ride and that’s just about over so we are entering a wild, messy time and it sounds like a lot of fun,” Burger said.

Google’s Norm Jouppi – who is one who believes there’s still some life in Moore’s Law, did note that, overall, “the industry is in denial about Moore’s Law, like the vendor in the Monty Python dead-parrot sketch, who insists a bird is “not dead, it’s just resting.” (Let me save you a google search: here’s a link to the dead-parrot sketch.)

Panelists suggested that “DRAMs could be among the first major components to hit a wall”, and that vertical NAND may fill in “the memory gap left by DRAM.” But it would be best not to bank entirely on it.

Whatever comes next, “will be transformational…20 years from now this industry will be unrecognizable,” said Burger.

One thing that a couple of panelists foresee is that generic architectures will be replaced by “domain-specific architectures” aimed at specific market segments (for those segments big enough to support an architecture of their own). Another prediction was that we may be seeing some vertical integration in computing companies “that design everything from silicon to apps.” Apple is one example of a company that appears on this track, with Google up next. This won’t close out the silicon vendors, however. Another thing noted was the free ride that software developers got by being isolated from chip changes by the instruction set architecture is about to end.

What will replace Moore’s Law? Quantum computing, which we recently posted about.

“The good news from a physics perspective is [quantum systems] are amazingly close to being real. A 50-100 qubit machine could be available in a year or two and some say they will write programs for them delivering a speed up over classical systems,” [Princeton’s Margaret] Martonosi said.

The bad news is so far only a few narrow apps are known for such systems. “There’s a huge gap between the number of qubits needed [for many broad apps] and the number we can build into reliable systems anytime soon… it’s not clear who will pay [for systems with thousands of qubits] and for what apps,” she added.

Sounds like an interesting panel. And sounds like we’re in for what might be a wild and messy ride. If we want to take our minds off of it, we can always replay the dead-parrot sketch…

I’m just catching up on some reading, and one of the things I’m just catching up on is the MIT Technology Review for March/April 2017.  Each year, they feature what they view as the greatest tech breakthroughs of the prior year, and one of the technologies that made the cut this year was “the fabrication of stable qubits, the basic unit of quantum computers.” As a result of this breakthrough, quantum computers will become not only wildly more powerful, but more practical as well.

The Tech Review article notes that, for a while now, they’ve been looking at quantum computing as a possible candidate for their annual breakthrough list. And, until now, they’ve decided ‘not quite yet.’

This year, however, a raft of previously theoretical designs are actually being built. Also new this year is the increased availability of corporate funding—from Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, among others—for both research and the development of assorted technologies needed to actually build a working machine: microelectronics, complex circuits, and control software.

If you’re not familiar with quantum computing, it has its center, has the quantum bit (qubit), “a basic unit of information analogous to the 0s and 1s represented by transistors in your computer.” Only much more powerful. That’s because they can simultaneously represent both 1 and 0, and because of something called quantum entanglement, through which qubits can affect other qubits, even when they’re not physically adjacent. “That lets quantum computers take shortcuts to the right answers in certain types of calculations.”

With their tremendous computational power will be used for applications that use large numbers. Those apps include encryption, AI, complex scheduling, materials science, and pharma research.

What’s held quantum computing back is how sensitive they are to “the slightest disturbance, like vibrations or fluctuating electric fields.” That sensitive makes it difficult for qubits to maintain their ability to represent both 1 and 0, and to achieve entanglement. Having qubits that aren’t subject to breaking down will decrease power requirements and let quantum computers more easily scale.

The stable qubits are still on the horizon. They won’t be available for another 4-5 years. So far, researchers have achieved stability for five-qubit computers, and have test systems at the 10- to 20-qubit level that aren’t quite so stable. The real computational breakthrough – taking quantum computers beyond what classical supercomputers can do – will come when stable 50 qubit computers are achieved.

Eventually, expect 100,000-qubit systems, which will disrupt the materials, chemistry, and drug industries by making accurate molecular-scale models possible for the discovery of new materials and drugs. And a million-physical-qubit system, whose general computing applications are still difficult to even fathom? It’s conceivable…

This is above and beyond – way above and beyond – what our applications need in terms of their computational power. But we have also seen remarkable increases in what our SoMs can do. Whether we’re talking about quantum computing or DSP, FPGA, and ARM boards, all I can say is that someday we’ll take today’s breakthroughs for granted!

In my last post, I summarized the first six views from 12 Views on the Future of Electronics an EE Times roundup of what was on the minds of speakers at the recent Imec Technology Forum.  Here’s my summary of the second six views. (All the titles/headers are Rick Merritt’s; he’s the author of the original roundup.)

Future systems open AR, VR doors
Kazumasa Nomoto of Sony – he’s their chief user interface researcher – spoke about virtual reality and augmented reality, which he views as the way in which “we interact with tomorrow’s large-screen and mobile devices, respectively.” The technology to support this isn’t quite here yet. For VR, what’s needed is a higher rez screen with faster frames per second display, improved color support, and “better sound and haptics support with natural input devices.”

Making wires out of thin air 
Marcus Weldon, the president of Bell Labs, spoke about wireless beam forming, saying that with it, “we’re creating the equivalent of wires in the air.” This is based on pretty much all links using “some form of EFDM and QAM modulation with forward-error correction.” And he provided a schematic to illustrate his point.

Is it just me, or is there something comforting about seeing a schematic that looks sort of old school?

Duo makes a 100G serial link
BiFast is a startup where Timothy Keulenaer and Arno Vyncke have designed “two tiny ASICs that fit on the end of an active cable. The transmit-and-receive chips merge four of today’s 25G lanes into a single 100G serial lin for the fat pipes inside data centers. They’re taking a different – and more cutting edge – approach than far bigger and household name players. Recent university grads, they’re looking for investors. (Good luck, fellows!)

16 antennas form beams at 60 GHz
Imec, which is located in Belgium, is an R&D center focused on nanoelectronics and digital technologies. At their conference, they introduced “a working 60-GHz system including a baseband chip and an array of 16 antennas for wireless beam forming.” And they’re upping the ante, working on a 256 antenna array version.

Powering up new paths to cellular IoT
Another area where Imec researchers showed off their work is the IoT, specifically in the emerging market for Narrowband IoT. They’ve got a test board with “a 40-nm power amplifier with a 27-dBm peak. It’s the first of a set of blocks to include an all-digital PLL, ADCs, and sub-GHz analog front-ends that they aim to complete and integrate into an SoC by sometime next year.”

Software scales legacy video to HDR
Researchers at Ghent University are working on “algorithms that will scale existing content to HDR.” With television manufacturers now building in high dynamic range capabilities, this is a welcome development. Philips for one is deploying parts of Ghent’s algorithms in FPGAs. While I may like those old school schematics, I’m definitely on board with improving the television picture.

Bottom line: this looked like an interesting conference, with a lot of interesting things going on.