LISTEN To This Issue.  
     Give your eyes a rest.

Quote of the Week.  
     Who's the master, and who the servant?

Update - The World of the Tiny.  
     Tiny thing will make a huge difference!

Storage Update.  
     Faster than Moore's Law!

From Out of the Ether...  
     Perhaps it IS safe to blink...

On The Road To 3G.  
     It's here -- sort of.

Chips That Go BANG In The Night!  
     You don't want to go there...

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us?  If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, Web-based, MP3 version. 

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So, if you wish, just click on the following link to listen to this issue!  http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020204/20020204.mp3  .

   

Quote of the Week.

 

But are we REALLY moving forward? 

Consider this passage in Chapter 24, "The Book of the Machines," from Samuel Butler’s "Erewhon," brought to our attention by reader Bill McKeeman:

"So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all.

How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day?

Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?"

http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Butler/
Erewhon/erewhon24.html

That sure sounds like the love-hate relationship we have with our PCs, doesn't it? 

The thing is, Butler published this in 1871...

 

Back to Table of Contents

Update - The World of the Tiny.

 

What's big in the excruciatingly tiny world of nanotechnology and related fields, will be of gargantuan importance to us all.  Today's "tiny" baby steps, traversing multiple fields of science, promise entirely new ways of building thing.  Not only new electronics, but entirely new medical devices, and new forms of even the pedestrian materials around us to name a few -- which is why we are keeping an eye on these early, diverse (and sometimes seemingly arcane) advances.  One day, we'll have just the right set of "building blocks" to make a sea change in the first industry, and that will presage a domino effect that will likely change almost everything.  For examples:

 

Don't "Push" -- "Grow!"

This week, reader Sander Olsen points us to work led by University of California 's James Heath; he has demonstrated how future memory may be "grown" (http://www.nature.com/nsu/020128/020128-2.html).  You'll note that I didn't say "built" or "constructed," because they have found a way to convince tiny ropes of carbon nanotubes to AUTOMATICALLY deposit themselves in a "crossed grid" pattern (a checkerboard, where the bottom set of vertical carbon nanotubes is crossed by a horizontal layer) without the painstaking manual intervention needed in the past to, quite literally, push each carbon nanotubes around into just the right pattern. 

Interesting, but why is this important?  Because if the "wires" in one direction are fully-conducting nanotubes, while the "wires" in the other direction are made up of their semiconducting cousins, the junctions where each set of wires cross "...can, in principle, be switched on or off without affecting the others... storing one bit of information at each junction."  And because these carbon nanotubes are so small, the researchers believe they hold the potential for storage density "100,000 times greater than that of a Pentium chip." 

 

Out Of The Box.

Not bad at all.  But that technique, which is admittedly dramatic, simply creates a vastly smaller version of traditional computing elements, and "smaller traditional components" are just the very tip of the incredibly strange iceberg-of-the-tiny that we're getting ready to explore.  For example, consider the possibilities described in Sander's pointer to a Jan. 29 UPI article (http://kevxml.infospace.com/info/kevxml?kcfg=
upi-article&sin=2002012918535203952&otmpl=
/upi/story.htm&qcat
=science&rn=20722&qk=10&passdate=01/29/2002).  By combining previously unrelated fields of science in very new ways, as they're doing at California 's Scripps Research Institute, they've "...discovered a way to attach molecules to the surface of a virus -- tacking-on anything from metal to vitamins."

In effect, they're learning how to turn viruses, usually seen as a scourge of living things, into "...microscopic robots with programmable chemistry, genetically modifying the germs to accept different molecule types."  And these tamed viruses might, one day, carry just the right drug into individual cancer cells, wiping them out without affecting nearby healthy tissue!

But the potential for being able to attach any material to any point on the surface of a virus gets even more interesting, as demonstrated by U.S. Naval Research Laboratory-funded work -- these researchers have found ways to convince viruses to "...spontaneously self-assemble into lines that intersect at right angles on silicon surfaces."  Sound familiar?  They've also figured out how to attach particles of different substances to the exterior of the virus.  So if these long lines of viruses had metal particles attached, they'd become ultra-tiny wires.  And if the viruses' surfaces also contained basic electronic logic blocks -- well, you get the idea; a VERY different way to approach how we "compute."

The bottom line is that as scientists continue to delve into and unlock some of the secrets that nature has evolved over billions of years, we have the potential for unprecedented innovation, which I believe will lead to truly revolutionary, "change the rules" things.

Just in case you thought that things might be slowing down...

Don't Blink!

 

Back to Table of Contents

Storage Update.

 

Apple's iPOD, and similar hard disk-based pocket music players, are marvelous testaments to both our hardware and our software technologies.  Imagine, just a couple of years ago, what you might have thought if someone suggested that you would soon be able to carry 1,000 CD-quality songs in your pocket.  Considering that the only practical alternative for quality portable music was the larger-than-a-pocket CD player that only held ten or so songs, today's pocket players such as the iPOD (http://www.apple.com/ipod/) offer a revolutionary change to portable music.  (As, to a lesser degree, do the new portable CD players that will play a CD that you burn yourself containing around 100 MP3-encoded songs, or perhaps 200 WMA-encoded music files.)

The iPOD performs its 1,000-song magic by storing MP3 and other formatted songs on a tiny built-in 5 gigabyte hard disk.  Yet as impressive as that number is, based on recent announcements from Toshiba (http://www.toshiba.com/taecdpd/news/press44.shtml and http://www.toshiba.com/taecdpd/products/
features/MK2003GAH-Over.shtml) and SonicBlue (http://www.sonicblue.com/company/press.asp?ID=519), we can expect 5,000-song (400 CD!) pockets, for $400, by March!

With the exciting name of MK2003GAH, this new embedded 1.8-inch hard disk is smaller than a credit card yet holds an amazing 20 gigabytes, and that's nothing to sneeze at.  Because even if you're not into carrying 4,000 songs around, imagine what such a device would do for a digital camera, or for a notebook computer or PDA, or for any other portable data application that was "impossible" just a few months ago. 

Moving up from five gigabytes to twenty doesn't feel quite "revolutionary," but it is a wonderful example of the faster-than-Moore's-Law evolution of our hard drives.  And it's not over yet!

Again, Don't Blink!

 

Back to Table of Contents

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Please send your comments to me at  Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com  .

I look forward to hearing from you!

 

And, if you know of other folks who might find value in "The Harrow Technology Report," I'd appreciate your letting them know that they can subscribe at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/signup.asp .

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Back to Table of Contents

From Out of the Ether...

 

·        On The Other Hand, Perhaps It IS Safe To "Blink" -- Referring to our many recent explorations into the incredible growth in semiconductor technology (that shows every sign of continuing far into the future by one means or another), reader Ron Sailors, Head of Marketing, and North American General Manager for the semiconductor firm Amphion, provides a calming perspective in these exponential waters. 

He describes some of the difficulties involved in bringing this ever-increasing raw computing power out beyond the chip, so that it can actually address our end-user computing needs:

"I discovered your Report in the latter half of 2001 and enjoy it. Part of my job as an executive in the semiconductor industry is to think strategically, and your Report helps me stretch outside of the box.

Your last two reports have been very enthusiastic about the billions or trillions of switching elements that will soon be available in a single compute device. I'm thrilled too. However the path is less rosy than you might think. I'm taking a moment to point out some existing problems that will only get worse.

There are three 'gaps' that have a serious impact on how successfully all those switches can be used.

1) The first is the 'Performance Gap'. This is well known in the industry and has been the reason many companies even exist. This is the gap between what a device can do, and what it actually does. You have a transistor that can run at 10 GHz, but you can only successfully run it at 3 GHz in the system. That's a 70% loss in theoretical performance.  [There is a] huge effort by designers and manufacturers to close this Gap because high speed earns such tremendous premium in the market.

2) Second is the 'Design Gap'. This is also well known in the industry and keeps Design Automation companies alive. This gap is the difference between how many switches are available on a device and how many can actually be used. A team of 200 designers working for one year struggles to use 100 million gates, and that includes the re-use of large portions of previous designs. Timing between all those switches is a nightmare and only gets more complicated as geometries shrink. Lower power switches ease problems with signal integrity, but not completely.  And what's the point of building a chip with mega functionality providing 50,000 inputs/outputs, when the best package available only supports 10,000 I/O's? Another big challenge is verification -- once you've organized all of those switches into something useful, how do you verify that everything truly works as it should? The more complicated the systems, the more difficult this task is. Today, verification and debug already consume greater than 60% of the design cycle, and the effort is getting worse. So you can see, the more switches you've got, the more difficult it is to herd them.

3) Third is the 'Architecture Gap'. This is a less recognized but growing problem. This gap exists because, in a growing number of applications, even if you could make use of all the switches and do so with 100% performance -- you still wouldn't have enough compute power to finish the job on time. It's hard to fathom when considering trillion gate terahertz designs, [but] ...one reason is that software -- which is inherently flexible in the functionality it can provide -- is also inherently power hungry and difficult to code in large systems.  Complexity rears its ugly head again. There needs to be a judicious mix of hardware and software combined into better compute platforms than exist today.

These three Gaps have a taming effect on how rapidly we experience improvements in computing. The technology may be improving exponentially, but the real end-user experience is only improving linearly.  Certainly the improvements in technology will lead to exciting advances in computing -- but it is probably safe to blink! ;-) "

Thanks for the insight, Ron.

Of course, we may all yet be surprised as inventive scientists and engineers and software designers continue to worry these problems.  From my perspective, that kernel of innovation is a wildcard that has ALWAYS, given time, come through.

·        On NOT Preserving Our Data -- Following up on our recent discussion about how difficult it can be to erase data from our hard disks when we "absolutely positively" want it to be "gone" (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020121/20020121.htm#_Toc535993817), reader Michael Bruce reminds us that we'd best also look in another place:

"Regarding destruction of data - you can wipe the hard drive all you want, but unless you destroy all your backups, it is likely that the data can be reconstructed from the tapes you create for disaster recovery."

Yup.  If we do the careful thing and keep backups (on-site and off), they too represent recoverable repositories of our bits.  And of course, if you've ever Emailed a file, or FTPed it, or if you use any of the online backup services...

It turns out that a bit can be a very difficult thing to lose, should we really wish to do so...

 

Back to Table of Contents

On The Road To 3G.

 

The lure of "3G," or Thrid-Generation wireless networks, is that of broadband data to our pockets (and notebooks, and "tablets," and...), essentially freeing the Internet from the surly wired bonds of Earth.  Although it's been a bit slow in coming, especially to U.S. shores, if recent murmurings from Sprint, described in the Jan. 21 LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-
000005332jan21.story?coll=la-headlines-technology) come to pass beginning this June, things could get interesting indeed:

"The first upgrade for Sprint PCS will give customers always-on connections to the Internet or corporate networks at speeds of up to 144 kilobits per second--more than double the speed of the fastest dial-up modem.

By the end of the year, the division will complete a second upgrade that will double the network's top speed to 288 kilobits per second, with a jump to movie-capable 3-megabit speeds tentatively set for 2004."

What could you do with such wireless connectivity?  What new services could you offer, or consume?  And what new pocket products might pervasive broadband birth?  And if Sprint does begin offering such services, how could their competitors not follow (even though, according to the article, those competitors will have a tough time matching Sprint's nimbleness)?  

Well, Verizon has decided to lead, having just launched its 144 kilobits/second service (40 to 60 kilobits/second typical - similar to a dial-up modem), but only in selected areas (not "everywhere at once" as Sprint is planning to do); it's called "Verizon Express."  (http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/verizn012802.htm and http://news.verizonwireless.com/proactive/
newsroom/release.vtml?id=69834)  Their 3G service will cost a premium and will require a 3G-capable PDA or appropriate notebook card. 

There are several different views as to what "really" constitutes "3G" (see http://www.internetnews.com/wireless/article/0,,10692_964581,00.html).  But regardless of the various definitions and the marketing-speak, the push towards faster, more pervasive wireless data has begun.  And as 3G does build-out, handset manufacturers expect that:

" Superior infrastructure [will enable] us to roll out leading-edge products,"

according to Phillip Chung, a Samsung vice-president describing plans for Korea 's forthcoming "digital city" in the Feb. 4 BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_05/b3768067.htm), brought to our attention by reader Bob North.

It's too soon to tell just how well these new capabilities will be implemented, and how (or if) people will make use of them, especially since the Verizon announcement indicates that "...customers [can] use any of their airtime allowance minutes for voice or data, for an additional $30 per month."  And that makes it clear that initial charging will be "by the minute," which doesn't seem compatible with the benefits of "always on" connectivity.  They do, though, indicate that they anticipate charging by the kilobyte in the future.  Personally, I think that a flat-rate plan would do the most to encourage people to use these new 3G services.

The bottom line is that based on the fact that the beginnings of 3G are here now, and especially as the competition heats up, it may soon become a very interesting, very wireless Internet!

Back to Table of Contents

Chips That Go BANG In The Night!

 

Finally, reader Alok Lal brings our attention to what could, I expect, send the airline security folks into a real tizzy. 

It seems, according to the Jan. 2 New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991795), that Michael Sailor and friends at UCSD have found a way to convince silicon, which forms the basis of our chips, to explode on-command; they do this by adding a tiny amount of gadolinium nitrate to the chip, later detonating the silicon electronically!

This could actually be useful for, say, booby trapping the electronics in military planes or ships -- if they were captured, the sensitive electronics could be rendered useless in seconds (remember the spy plane that landed in China ).  Or, consider the potential for making stolen cell phones or notebooks not worth a thief's time (cell phones seem to be the focus of a significant amount of street theft in the UK ).  After being reported stolen, the next time the device was turned on and reached out to touch its network, a "kill" message might be received over the air or via the Internet causing it to display the message: "This unit will self-destruct in ten seconds" -- and really mean it!

Of course, as I mentioned, this would probably not sit too well with airline security -- if such self-destruct capabilities were actually built-into consumer devices (potentially triggering the new explosives "sniffers," this could prove to be a real problem.  Indeed, if we extend this concept, a pound of "explosive silicon" hidden in an otherwise operational notebook might create a big enough bang to have very serious security implications.

But -- in yet another case of art predating science, isn't it nice to know that Mission Impossible's famous self-destructing audio players had it right, all along?

   

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