The First 5nm Chip

October 20, 2015 by 68 Comments

For almost forty years, integrated circuits have become smaller and smaller. These chips started out with massive transistors in the early 1970s. They shrank to less than 1μm by 1990, and shrank yet again to less than 100nm by the turn of the last century. Now, Imec and Cadence are experimenting with 5nm technology – the smallest technology available for any mass-produced integrated circuit.

The history of microelectronic fabrication over the last decade is a story of failure. Something happened in 2005, and although chips could be designed at ever-smaller technologies, the transition to these smaller manufacturing processes didn’t go as smoothly as in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Just a few years ago, Intel said 10nm chips would ship by 2015. These chips are nowhere to be found, and even 14nm technology is still catching up to the yields found in 22nm technology. In 2009, Nvidia said their flagship graphics card would be built with a 11nm process. The current Nvidia flagship desktop graphics card is built with 28nm technology. Moore’s law isn’t 18 months anymore.

While Imec and Cadence have completed the tapeout on a 5nm device, it’s just a test chip. Before starting manufacturing on a single process node, Intel and others will tapeout a simple test chip to verify their latest process. This 5nm tapeout will not become a manufactured chip, but it does mean we’ll see more talk about the 5nm process in the future.

Disk Hack Creates Persistence Of Vision

October 20, 2015 by 11 Comments

[Adam Antok] was compelled to create this repurposed hard drive persistence of vision hack after seeing a toy of the same nature.

hdd-display-schematicHe used the frame, disk and motor from a drive and added LEDs under the spinning disk as the light source. The disk has 8 small holes drilled equidistant around the disk, and spiraling slightly toward the center. As the holes pass by the LEDS they are flashed by the ATtiny2313 processor to create images. To determine the position of the platters a Hall effect sensor is monitored by the 2313 to detect a magnet on the underside of the disk. There is room to display ten characters at one time. Each cursor position can scroll through the character set by rotating an encoder. For all the precision needed to coordinate the LEDs with the spinning holes the electronics and software code are amazingly simple. That’s a really nice job, [Adam]!

Persistence of vision hacks are to hackers like flames are to moths. One really nice thing about [Adam’s] project is that you can interact with it while it’s running. Check it out after the break.

For a novel take on POV, check out this slow swinging pendulum clock.

Continue reading “Disk Hack Creates Persistence Of Vision” →

DIY Computer — 1968 Style

October 19, 2015 by 39 Comments

What does it mean to “build your own computer?” Today, it is likely to mean you bought a motherboard, a power supply, and a case and put it all together. You might even have made an embedded computer using a few chips, including an off the shelf CPU. However, there are those guys (like me) who have built entire computers using FPGAs and some (not like me) who have built computers out of TTL chips, discrete components, and even relays and we have covered quite a few of them.

It hasn’t always been that easy. Components are readily available now and relatively cheap (especially considering inflation). In the 1960’s, simple components cost more than you pay for them today and back then your hypothetical self was making less money. In just about every way imaginable, the cost was prohibitive.

clipSo what did you do if you were a kid saving money from a paper route in 1968 and you wanted to build a computer? Maybe you turned to How to Build a Working Digital Computer a book published in 1968 by [Edward Alcosser], [James Phillips], and [Allen Wolk]. This book did as the title promised: you could build a working digital computer. The components, though, were paper clips, tin cans, thread spools, and other household items. The only real electronic components you had to use were light bulbs and a battery, although you might also use store-bought switches in some places instead of the homemade versions shown in the book.

Continue reading “DIY Computer — 1968 Style” →

Smart Sumo Seeks Central Security

October 19, 2015 by 5 Comments

[David] over at Pololu programmed a mini-sumo robot, Zumo Red, with some extra smarts.

The basic rules of sumo robotics is exactly like human sumo – push your competitor out of the ring. [David]’s robot is special because it not only detects the competition border but measures the robot’s angle to the perimeter circle. Knowing the angle, [David]’s robot can turn and run for the center of the arena, the safest location. Once safe it can attack competitors from a symbolic high-ground. Unfortunately, the robot was a light weight in an already low weight class competition. It failed to push any competitors out of the ring and did not fare well in face-to-face battles. 0J6807.550

[David]’s bot uses a three LED line sensor, pretty common today for line following, to detect the boundary. As the ‘bot is moving an outer sensor will detect the border. It continues to drive forward until the middle sensor gets a hit. That provides the measurements need to calculate the angle. Neat and simple! Knowing the angle, the robot scoots to the center to plan its next attack.

[David’s] made the code for his bot’s brain, an Arduino compatible ATmega32U4, available so it will be interesting to see if the competition picks up on this trick.

Zumo Red meets Sumo Necko and a few more competitors in the video after the break.

Continue reading “Smart Sumo Seeks Central Security” →

Why Starting A Kickstarter Could Kick Your Butt

October 19, 2015 by 59 Comments

So you’ve come up with a great idea and now you’re thinking about starting a crowdfunding campaign – and why not, all the cool kids are doing it. Now, let’s say you already have a working prototype, or maybe you even built a small run for friends online. You’ve made 10 here, or 20 there. Sure it took some time, but making 1000, or 10,000 would be so much easier once you get all the orders in, right? Wrong.

Before you even think of setting up something like a Kickstarter, we would like to invite you to have a seat and watch this series of videos covering the things many people don’t know about manufacturing. It’s going to cost you 7 hours of sofa time, but if you’re serious about getting something to production these seven hours will pay in spades. Dragon Innovation has had many notable clients over the years – Pebble, Sphero, Makerbot, to name a few. They help startups find their way through the manufacturing mine-feild, for a fee of course. The founders are former iRobot employees, and have quite a bit of hard fought, yet free knowledge to share.

You’ll learn about how important decisions early on can make huge impacts on the success or failure of a product. There’s quite a bit of raw technical info on injection molding, design for manufacture, testing, pricing and everything under the sun. So do yourself (and everyone else) a favor, and before you click submit on that Kickstarter campaign, sit back and enjoy this free seminar.

We’re really enjoying the manufacturing oriented videos which have been popping up. Just a couple of weeks ago we came across a pair of hardware talks from [Bunnie Huang] that were a pleasure to watch. At 20 minutes this might be a good primer before you take the plunge with the playlist below.

Continue reading “Why Starting A Kickstarter Could Kick Your Butt” →

Mostly Non-Volatile Memory With Supercapacitors

October 19, 2015 by 26 Comments

Back in the days of old, computers used EPROMs to store their most vital data – usually character maps and a BASIC interpreter. The nature of these EPROMs meant you could write to them easily enough, but erasing them meant putting them under an ultraviolet light. Times have changed and now we have EEPROMs, which can be erased electronically, and Flash, the latest and greatest technology that would by any other name be called an EEPROM. [Nicholas] wanted an alternative to these 27xx-series EPROMs, and found his answer in supercapacitors.

[Nick]’s creation is a mostly non-volatile memory built around an old 62256 32k SRAM. SRAM is completely unlike EPROMs or Flash, in that it requires power to keep all its bits in memory. Capacitor technology has improved dramatically since the 1980s, and by using a supercap and one of these RAM chips, [Nick] has created a substitute for a 27-series EPROM that keeps all its memory alive for days at a time.

The circuit requires a small bit of electronics tucked between the EPROM socket and the SRAM chip; just enough to turn the 12 Volts coming from the EPROM programming pin to the 5 Volts expected from the SRAM’s Write Enable pin. This is accomplished by a few LEDs in series, and a 0.1F 5.5V supercap which keeps the SRAM alive when the power is off.

As for why anyone would want to do this when modern technologies like Flash can be found, we can think of two reasons. For strange EPROM sizes, old SRAMs abound, but a suitable Flash chip in the right package (and the right voltage) might be very hard to find. Also, EEPROMs have a write lifetime; SRAMs can be written to an infinite number of times. It’s not the best solution in every case, but it is certainly interesting, and could be useful for more than a few vintage computing enthusiasts.

This project makes us think of another where an LED may have been supplying keep-alive power to some volatile memory.

Rod Logic And Graphene: Elusive Molecule-Scale Computers

October 19, 2015 by 23 Comments

I collect slide rules. You probably know a slide rule is a mechanical calculator of sorts. They usually look like a ruler (hence the name) and have a sliding part (hence the name) and by using logarithms you can multiply and divide easily by doing number line addition and subtraction (among other things).

It is easy to dismiss old technology like that out of hand as being antiquated, but mechanical computing may be making a comeback. It may seem ancient, but mechanical adding machines, cash registers, and even weapon control computers were all mechanical devices a few decades ago and there were some pretty sophisticated techniques developed to make them work. Perhaps the most sophisticated of all was Babbage’s difference engine, even though he didn’t have the technology to make one that actually functioned (the Computer History Museum did though; you should see it operating in person, but this is good too).

Continue reading “Rod Logic And Graphene: Elusive Molecule-Scale Computers” →