An interesting post at Altera is discussing what to do at the end of Moore’s Law. Accelerators are nothing new to me who is used to ultra low power designs.
Category: Silicon
ZL70103
ZL70102 is an IC (MICS-band Transceiver Chip) that I was very much involved with when I worked at Zarlink Semiconductor.
In 2011 Zarlink was sold to Microsemi and the design center in Järfälla was closed, so I had to find a new job. The office in San Diego continued working with the design. Now you can buy an updated version called ZL70103 from Microsemi. (You can still buy the older chips if you want to.)
The difference between the chips are that 2 low-speed data-rates have been added (18.18 and 40 kbit/s). This was something that we already had developed and tested (but not activated) for the ZL70102. (For the ZL70102 the data-rates was 18.18 and 36.36 kbit/s.) So for some reason they have made the chip more complex by adding an additional barker divider without gaining very much.
The plans we had before the Järfälla design center was closed was to add lots of new functionality and call the new chip ZL70110. But I think Microsemi made the right decision (since the original design-team wasn’t working for Microsemi) by just adding something that was already developed. Now they had a new chip with new functionality (and with some “features” removed) without doing a major redesign.
10nm IBM style
Lars Liebmann of IBM talks about challenges with 10 nm at DAC.
Silicon
SIlicon- Image from wikimedia. – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license.
Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. XKCD once published a comic (or graph) showing the size of silicon atoms on a log-scale.
Silicon is used in semiconductors, and that is partly what this blog will be about. I also intend to post some science/engineering jokes.