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May 16, 2008
The pain of creeping featuritis
Apple's Mail.app is beginning to drive me up the wall. Thanks to a bone-headed decision made in the Leopard update, a nearly useless feature has rendered a very useful addon almost as redundant.
For some reason, a UI genius at Apple decided that it would be just spiffing to have the program jump to an email when you hit a key, using the starting letter of the email's subject line as the destination. Unfortunately, the code conflicts with the handy Mail Act-on from Indev. This piece of donationware which comes from the same company that provides the also-handy tool MailTags, lets you assign macros to keystrokes.
I have three key-commands that I use all the time. One shoves press releases into the Releases bucket folder; one puts emails into the Invitations folder (which is slightly misnamed - it's the folder for everything related to interviews and meetings); and the third does the same but sets a @Waiting tag.
However, since Leopard came out, Mail Act-on now has to fight with the built-in keystroke detector so it works only about 50-60 per cent of the time. On an operating system where you find a lot of add-on software that adheres to the 'wei wu wei' philosophy, this is a real problem. It means having to go back to dragging releases with the mouse or watch the fight between a great little piece of software and some weekend hack that has almost no reason for existing.
You want to see how Mail deals with folders that contain emails from a mailing list - most will start with the same letter. I'm not sure I've figured out the logic of what it does yet.
Posted by Chris at 2:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 14, 2008
Infineon and the nuclear option
Steering a company into a near-suicidal megamerger has to be one of the more creative ideas to get rid of a chief executive that a chairman has ever had. But that seems to be the upshot of the story reported by the Financial Times Deutschland earlier today. The story has no named sources. But, at the same time, Reinhard Ploss, head of operations at Infineon Technologies, had to recruit vice president Eric Mayer to stand in for him at the IET/GSA Semiconductor Forum today while Ploss apparently dealt with things back at base.
According to the story, Infineon chairman Max Dietrich Kley thinks buying NXP Semiconductor, currently owned by private-equity KKR, is a good idea. Chief executive Wolfgang Ziebart disagrees strongly. There is no real way to reconcile these differences so one of them will have to go, and it will probably be Ziebart. As the story in FTD sums up:
Despite Ziebart's competence, "in a shark-tank like Infineon he is out of place," said a senior manager.
Joining from tyre-maker Continental in 2004, after former Infineon chief executive Ulrich Schumacher resigned, Ziebart moved to rid the chipmaker of what would prove to be his albatross: the memory maker Qimonda. However, he didn't move quickly enough. A few years earlier and it might have been possible to flog Qimonda on the public markets. However, under Schumacher, floating off the memory operation was never going to be a starter. The result was that Qimonda emerged into a crunching recession in the DRAM business. Ziebart was left to explain to shareholders why Qimonda was still around and dragging down Infineon's numbers.
Kley, it seems, is keen to blame the situation on Ziebart. But, in case anyone thought Kley might have a handle on the business, apparently has floated the idea of a purchase or merger with NXP. It's not hard to see why Infineon executives would be keen to leak this one: they know a calamity when they see it. The only winner in such a deal would be KKR, which bought NXP when times were good and has now found that any chipmaker would be tough to offload.
The problem with such a combination is not so much that NXP is in dire trouble but that any attempt to take on a merger of this kind would cripple both companies. Not only would you have the problem of resolving huge product overlaps, there would be the slightly crazy situation of Infineon's wireless chip business competing with the ST/NXP joint venture. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that ST would wind up taking on Infineon's communications-chip operation. But, if you were an Infineon shareholder, you would wonder whether handing Carlo Bozotti a further boost in wireless is a good use of your money.
People such as NXP's Frans van Houten and Ziebart seem happier doing much smaller slice-and-dice deals that add a business unit here, lop one off there as they try to find markets they can lead. This is the sensible route in the fab-light world. Slamming two top-20 chipmakers together is an strategy from the last decade.
Posted by Chris at 9:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 13, 2008
Big is the new small
Last week, three of the world's biggest chipmakers decided that they were going to try to move to bigger wafers in the next decade. Today's wafers are the size of vinyl LPs: 300mm across. The next step up is that of a family sized pizza: an impressive 450mm in diameter.
The people who the chipmakers expect to build the equipment to handle these things greeted the news with...very little. They certainly didn't jump up and down, waving to Intel, Samsung and TSMC, shouting out: "Me, pick me!" They might consider investigating the feasibility of boosting wafer size to 450mm if these three were going to pay all of the development costs. But, they had played this game before, with the transition from 200mm to 300mm at the start of this decade and they weren't going to get fooled again.
Last time around, the big chipmakers - and there were about three times as many in the club as this time - said they wanted to do the move early, during the late 1990s. Then there was the Asian crisis and the chipmakers decided they didn't want to move after all. Instead, they decided to speed up the development of the processes rather than use bigger wafers, at least until around 2002. And it was the equipment suppliers left wondering how they were going to explain hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D for products that would not be needed for several years.
Since the end of the 1980s, the industry has not liked moving to larger wafers. Back in 1975, Gordon Moore used historical data to predict how big wafers would get - they were about 75mm across then. At the time, wafer size increased at roughly the same speed as the increase in average chip size. Had this trend continued, fabs would be working with wafers 1.5m across by now. In practice, die size increased faster than wafer size for about 20 years then manufacturers worked out that they could not push die size any further, and stopped.
There is still a good reason for going to larger wafers: you can get more chips onto each one. In principle, that cuts costs, especially for the chemical processes, such as etching stuff off and laying down metals. For the photolithography steps - the most expensive parts of the process - there is not that much of an advantage. However, moving to bigger wafers here does not have so much of an effect on equipment cost. With the other steps, because they need carefully controlled conditions, big wafers are a headache. But, if you can crack the problems, you wind up with cheaper chips at the end of the process.
For Intel, Samsung and TSMC the move is potentially a good way to gain a lead over competitors who cannot justify the move to 450mm. You can get 1500 chips, each measuring 1cm-square, on a 450mm wafer, versus around 700 on a 300mm wafer. That favours companies making chips in very high volumes. For Intel and Samsung, which ship bulk processors and memories, respectively, anything that lowers cost in volume is good. For TSMC, the situation is more complex as it serves a wide variety of customers. However, as the world's largest foundry, it has its eyes on the business of the other companies in the list of top-25 chipmakers. With 450mm, it could undercut smaller rivals such as UMC, SMIC and Chartered without denting margins. It's main competition would probably, by around 2012 when the transition is supposed to start, be Samsung.
However, they will have to do a lot of sweet-talking to the equipment makers or simply do a lot of the work themselves - it may be no coincidence that equipment makers' group SEMI just put out a report about getting their technology ripped off by customers. It is tempting to think that consolidation is concentrating manufacturing capacity in a few hands. In fact, Intel and Samsung have lost share since the move to 300mm.
In 2001, the two companies accounted for almost 22 per cent of chip sales. In 2007, that slipped to just under 20 per cent. If you tot up the companies who decided to install 300mm equipment this decade, they accounted for close to 60 per cent of the market in 2001. Estimating TSMC's share of manufacturing is tough, because you have to extrapolate it from what its customers sell. But it's probably close to Samsung's share today. Let's be generous and call it 10 per cent of the market, just for fun. That's a total of 30 per cent of the chip market.
As an equipment supplier, are you going to go with what 30 per cent of the market wants, knowing that it will damage the ambitions of any other companies that want to do their own manufacturing come 2012? If you pretty much want to guarantee that there will only be two foundries by the end of the next decade, you are going to bet on 450mm. But, knowing that a larger, more varied customer base is good for business, you are not going to bet in that direction.
There is a further problem for the big three. Some of the equipment suppliers have decided that markets such as solar power and displays look a lot more attractive right now than waiting for Intel to tell them how much they will get paid. Applied Materials' latest results, for example, show that display and photovoltaic sales have grown in the last year, while sales to their traditional silicon customers have slipped badly.
Posted by Chris at 10:04 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 11, 2008
Quelle surprise: another PR blacklist
If there is one post that's worth reading on the issue of the Gina Trapani PR blacklist it's Jeremy Pepper's. While the priests of the social media press release whiffle on about transparency, accountability and some other eye-crossingly dull commentary that roughly approximates to "we didn't do it and if we did, we're sorry", Pepper gets right to the point and leaves enough room to tell bloggers they need to be careful what they wish for. As I've written before, if you think receiving irrelevant emails is a problem, wait until you get the phone calls.
I'm sure there are plenty of PRs who feel Trapani crossed the line, as they claimed about Chris Anderson of Wired. But while email remains the main delivery mechanism for emails, it is going to keep happening, so get used to the idea of the blacklist. I fully expect another one of these situations to blow up in the next three to six months. And you will have another round of posturing. Why? Because people start banging on about transparency and ethics and training without ever examining what the core problems are. This is where I disagree with Pepper: more training will not solve this problem because I believe it is ingrained in the way that PR is bought and paid for.
It just sounds stupid doesn't it? PRs routinely send out badly targeted rubbish. Not all of them and not all the time. But you don't have to look far to find it. How come? For years, it was never an issue. Hacks quietly seethed about it but did very little about for three simple reasons: one is that the horse might actually learn to sing and one of the no-hopers topping up the inbox will do something interesting; second is that, other than filling up inboxes, these releases are not doing that much harm; and third, complaining about it never actually had an effect.
The reason why the trash just keeps pouring in is the result of the first reason. Throw enough stuff at the wall and eventually something will stick. Actually, that's not quite true: there is some stuff that I have routed automatically to the bin because it's never going to come good. Don't worry, if you're a PR and reading this, it's probably not your stuff.
Here is where the bloggers need to face up to reality: if you have a position of influence, someone somewhere is going to want to influence you. They are probably paying people to do that job. But it's worse than that. The people they are paying probably only have five minutes, if that, to spend on influencing you. That's because it's a numbers game. There will be a core list of people who will get a lot more time spent on them because a result in their magazine or blog will net more exposure than going to Johnny C-list. The rest will probably be culled from a media directory or a fairly low-level account executive sifting through sites and media packs to get contact details and then matching them up with clients. (I don't know this first-hand - PRs may see this differently, but this does not feel as though it is too far from reality).
This is where it really starts to go wrong. The second issue, as far as I can gather, is that the tools for PR are pretty ropey. Not even that good. It seems that it is very difficult for PRs to customise how they send things to individual bloggers and journalists because the standard tools they use just can't handle the idea of sending out individual messages and formats even if they wanted to. And they don't want to, because there isn't the time to do it for more than a few. With more media outlets in action, the proportion of people getting the personalised treatment is just not going to go up. So, most people get the cookie-cutter pitch and release and deal with low-level account executives who just don't know the client or the media they are trying to sell to.
The sensible thing for PRs to do would be to restrict the number of people they actively try to promote to and put more resources into dealing with reactions. Bloggers are good at picking up on stuff from each other. Why not use that? However, I can see a problem here that probably explains a lot. As I understand it, clients don't actually pay for reaction, they pay for set jobs, such as bunging out three releases a month, or whatever. And those releases go to a list. And when they've gone out, a pile of time is spent writing reports on who got what and what they did with it. This seems to lead to the temptation to push stuff out as widely as possible because it's a numbers game: the more people who get the stuff, the more likely something - anything - happens that can then go in the report. From what I've gleaned from PRs over the years, those reports are more important to keeping clients than what you might think is the core job: getting publicity.
A second, probably easier path is to push more of the material to channels such as RSS or even Twitter. People can then choose to sign up for those streams of stuff and unsubscribe just as easily: not something that is easy to do with the bulk of emailed material. Personally, I would much rather that all press releases I dealt with were channelled through RSS, preferably using full feeds. Email could then be restricted to introductions and invitations. However, I can see the problem here. Because it's so easy to unsubscribe, there are going to be plenty of companies who don't actually have what amounts to a media-distribution list: everyone just gets bored and goes away. So, again, that's probably not going to happen.
Posted by Chris at 9:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 6, 2008
The trouble with wireless power
Splashpower, the UK company that launched several years back with a popular promise - to banish the proliferation of power adapters in business baggage - is no more. Having gone into liquidation just over a month ago, its patents have been bought on behalf of competitor Fulton Innovation by its parent Alticor.
Fulton has its own wireless charging technology that it calls eCoupled. The Splashpower purchase means it gets a second tranche of patents, just in case this business ever takes off.
The problem that Splashpower faced, and which Fulton still has, is convincing electronics OEMs that they should dump a cheap charger, that uses cables, and replace it with something more expensive. Yes, there is the vague promise that, if lots of manufacturers go with inductive charging, you need only take one charger and its associated power pad with you on a trip to keep music players, cellphones, laptops and PDAs all nicely topped up. Just as long as all the manufacturers sign up to the same system.
The problem with this kind of charger is that all the real IP is in the protocol that gets the charger to talk to the gadget. With one less player in the market, that is more likely. But it's not guaranteed. And the promise of fewer chargers only works if lots of OEMs all sign up for the same system. When you consider that the main component of the IP is a communications protocol, that's a lot of power you give to the power supplier. And it's a big shift from today's market where you have 500 different Chinese manufacturers all happy to give you a very good price on a custom power adapter.
The Register is right on the money here talking about USB as a more likely unifier for the one charger to rule them all. For starters, there is already a burgeoning aftermarket in USB charging adapters. And, even if gadget makers can't agree on which USB connector to use, it's a lot more convenient to take a few small adapters on a trip than a bag full of wall warts.
So, what happens to wireless power? Stays right where it is: in situations where you don't want exposed power connector pads. Fulton's eCoupled technology started off in the water treatment business where corrosion would quickly destroy electrical contacts. And there are plenty of electric toothbrushes on sale. Why? Because they get wet too.
The one wild card in this business is the idea of microwave power transmission: beaming electrical power and signals to things like bookshelf speakers and light fittings from a transmitter in your living room. It sounds like a great way to get rid of wiring clutter. But just wait until the electrosensitives get stuck into that one.
Posted by Chris at 3:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 2, 2008
Toys for the front line
It was a with a hint of disdain that Raglan Tribe nodded across at the teams placed next to his company’s table. "You see some of the other teams? You have one right here. They have all this equipment. We have just got this one vehicle," he said, pointing to the small battery-powered car sitting beside him.
Until Tribe and his colleagues at consultancy Mindsheet stripped it down and gave it a new electronic brain, it was a regular toy car. Now, it’s a wheeled robot that is meant to find guerilla marksmen hiding in alleyways and buildings. But Mindsheet was flanked by two teams that are not taking any chances in the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge final in the summer: they have one-time nuclear-waste inspection and bomb-disposal robots that are meant to work alongside purpose-made aircraft and off-the-shelf gliders. The venue was a conference to show off what Grand Challenge teams had developed so far to visiting military chiefs and researchers.
The Mindsheeet vehicle was meant to be small and easily portable, not like some of the vehicles sitting nearby, including a UAV with a 1.5m wingspan. Tribe said his team talked to soldiers who fought in conflicts such as Afghanistan to find out what they needed. Soldiers are pretty consistent in what they want: something light, easy to assemble and reliable.
At a seminar last year to kick off the competition, which is meant to uncover robotic technologies that can detect threats in the kind of wars that the British Army is now fighting, in countries such as Afghanistan, soldiers talked about the problem. They want to be able to see a lot more when on patrol. But, when your pack already weighs 70kg, anything else that goes in has to earn its keep.
The armed forces found that the large UAVs they have used are not always that effective. It is often difficult to book time on them and they can't see everything. The problem for the army in Afghanistan is that it is often working around the walled compounds found in the country's towns.
The current UAVs work best in rural areas. Major Giles Timms, who commanded B Company on a tour in Afghanistan, said the UAVs they had access to could not see through the tree cover present in many of the environments his soldiers had to patrol in Sangin Valley.
Timms said the company had used the Desert Hawk UAV made by Lockheed Martin but that it was "a bit hit and miss with us. It was quite difficult in that terrain. With big, thick heavy canopy, the enemy can hide easily. It has utility but it has limitations".
In towns, soldiers want roving eyes that are smaller and more agile, able to see over walls but keep below the trees and get closer. "How do I tell the difference between a gunman, someone with an RPG or someone carrying scaffolding poles. Very difficult to do with [today's UAVs]," said Lt Col Ian Thompson of 3Para last year.
That is where the Grand Challenge comes in: find companies with designs for much smaller, cheaper and manoeuvrable robot vehicles. However, the reality is that any robot vehicle that goes out on patrol probably won't have to displace equipment in a backpack. "Where I believe we will end up is with a piece of equipment that [is carried around] inside a helicopter," Thompson said.
At the end is a trophy, cast from metal taken from a Spitfire. Unlike the US Grand Challenge competitions there is no cash prize: HM Treasury rules don't allow it. But the aim of most of the 11 teams taking part is not to win the trophy but to pick up the research-and-development contracts that will result from any piece of technology that piques the interest of defence users. The Grand Challenge is not so much a competition as a showcase for technology the MoD might not otherwise find. And some teams want to make sure they have all their bases covered.
The two teams that flanked Mindsheet had at their disposal ground robots and gliders. The Stellar team’s entry will use a land robot built on the chassis of a bomb-disposal vehicle that will work with not one but two different UAVs. The Silicon Valley team has two robotic vehicles from Moonbuggy - one of them used for surveying radiation-contamined land - and an regular model glider fitted with cameras under the wings and GPS receiver.
"We have got our eyes on what comes after the competition and designed our whole architecture around that. The system has got a lot more built-in functionality that would be used in more representative scenarios," said Steve Fernandes of Selex Galileo, which is part-funding the Stellar team. "What we have been doing is engaging the military customer to look at the scenarios and how the system could be deployed. We have tried to look across all the lines of development. We have tried to look at logistics and how the system fits in with other military equipment. And, most importantly, how it would link into the large systems currently deployed, such as Bowman."
But the link into the military networks has not escaped Mindsheet, as some companies involved with the Grand Challenge also want to see what small robots can do. Two teams, and Mindsheet is one of them, took up an offer from MBDA to have its cars hook into the defence-technology supplier’s network to download the data they capture.
Many of the teams have adapted off-the-shelf hardware. Some, like Mindsheet are using adapted toys. Model helicopters are particularly popular, although their petrol-driven engines are noisier and will attract more attention from a marksman than the custom-designed battery-powered aircraft that were on show. Teams went with the readymade hardware because time was tight – the competition did not launch officially until the spring of last year – but also because a lot of the focus is on sensors and getting the vehicles to work autonomously. How much time vehicles can keep running is a problem – many of them will run for no more than a couple of hours on a full charge – but teams believe they can work on that later.
Bill Bailey, a consultant to Selex Galileo and former head of intelligence in Afghanistan, explained: "They are just platforms. If someone comes out with a better platform, we can use that. And they have to be cheap because they will need to be replaced."
August is when these machines will be put through their paces in what is something of an experiment for the MoD as it tries to get smaller companies and universities to supply it. A total of 11 teams have made it to the final. Some will be happy to compete for just the trophy, but most are hoping that what they really get is an R&D contract.
Posted by Chris at 11:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 1, 2008
Resistance to memory
It's taken more than 35 years to find, but it looks as though HP Labs has found a cousin to the resistor and the capacitor hiding in the delicate thin films of metal oxides.
Naturally, HP Labs talks up the prospects of the memristor. One application the researchers have put forward is as a potential successor to devices such as the venerable DRAM. On the face of it, this is arguably the worst place to go. The industry is littered with 'nearly there' memories that have better properties than those apparently on offer with the memresistive approach. The HP labs team namechecks a bunch of materials in the Nature paper that show memresistive-like effects. However, at least three major categories are already in production or have multiple teams working on them, with varying degrees of success.
Chalcogenides are the materials that go into phase-change memories of the kind being pushed by Numonyx - the JV formed by Intel and STMicroelectronics. To give you an idea of how long it can take to get a memory technology off the ground, phase-change memories have been around about as long as Leon Chua's theory of the memristor. And you still can't buy one in the shops. On top of that, the phase-change memory is meant to be non-volatile: it doesn't forget stuff when you take out the battery.
The memristor will not be a non-volatile memory but only semi-non-volatile, according to the researchers. It seems that, like a capacitor, these things 'leak' a little. Leave it too long, and it will have forgotten what you told it.
This is a problem that afflicts the latest new memory technology: metal oxide, which is also being touted as a possible candidate for the memristor treatment. Metal-oxide memories are programmed by heating. Unfortunately, right now, just storing them at room temperature provides enough energy after a few days, or even hours, for them to reset themselves.
Then you have the perovskites, such as barium titanate. These are already in use in ferroelectric memories. You can go out and buy these but it's another memory technology that never quite made it to the mainstream.
However, it seems that something like memristor behaviour has been seen in organic materials. This may be the way forward as it points to the possibility of being able to print memory devices using organic chemicals. These kinds of material make pretty rubbishy transistors, but they might perform better as memristors.
The part that might lead to radical changes in computer design is the observation that memristors work in a similar way to the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the neuron.
One big problem with nanoscale electronics is variability: these things are so small that there's way too much of it. This makes it tough to build reliable binary switches: the primary use of a conventional transistor. But, what if you don't want to make a switch? This is the kind of work being performed by researchers such as Professor Steve Furber's group at the University of Manchester with the EPSRC-funded Spinnaker project. The idea behind the project is that you dump binary logic in favour of a system that lies on statistics. In that kind of environment, manufacturing variability is not necessarily your friend, but it's way less of an enemy.
The inspiration for the work is the brain and the way that neurons communicate with each other. In Prof Furber's model, you use a bunch of them together to effectively vote on a calculation. The overall elements wind up bigger but you use the elements to process more information than just binary bits. Right now, the team is using arrays of ARM processors to model neurons. However, if the work pays off, it might point to a simplified system that could be implemented using either nanonscale transistors or elements such as memristors, which have the advantage of working more like a neuron out of the box, as it were.
Posted by Chris at 9:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
