Recent content by kjfatl

TSMC has indicated that it is no more that 10% more. Considering their margins, this amounts to about to as little as 3% for the customers. This is good insurance for TSMC. If there is a major earthquake in Arizona or Taiwan that shuts things down for 6 months, they have something to fall back...

The equipment shown in the photo is huge. If the light source is similar in size, would it fit in existing fabs? If not, this would favor a company building new fabs from the ground up over one with a large existing base of fabs.

You must love high prices. AMD is forced to purchase from TSMC or Samsung. Adding Intel Fabs as a 3rd option gives AMD some negotiating power.

If I am required to connect to the internet to set up the router, my assumption is that the device has been compromised. Even worse is the requirement to provide identification such as phone number or e-mail address. I want a router that powers up with no working internet, including WIFI, that...

I'm assuming that 95% or more of these units will be sold to home users serving on average 4 or fewer concurrent users across a 3-router mesh network. I don't see this as a product targeted at business users were installing more that 10 routers in a single network is quite common.

I understand the value of the 10G WAN port, but question the value in having 10G LAN ports. If you have a niche application that requires 10G, why aren't you using fiber?

I would like to see better photos showing which component smoked. It is not clear at all from the photos that the failed component was a capacitor. It looks like something happened under the heat sink which was not removed for inspection.

China, with 1/3 of world manufacturing meets the definition of being a rich county. They are better described as a monopoly with no limits, regularly stealing, or doing whatever else it takes to grow their market share.

The requirement to hire locals means that the only place they can pull workers from is other local semiconductor companies (Intel and Micron). They can't consider candidates form GA-Tech in Atlanta, CMU in Pittsburgh, Global Foundries in New York, or someone from Washington State or Idaho or...

It is no surprise that the majority of workers are Taiwanese. TSMC, following Taiwanese government policy will continue to develop it's technology at its hub in Taiwan, then deploy its older technology in fabs in other nations. If we want leading edge industry of any type in this country, we...

Don't think of the brain as a von Neuman machine. Think of it as a slow, massively parallel computer with 85 billion 'simple' parallel processors called neurons. The results of all of your thoughts are fed into a 'table'. In this table representing the current state of your mind, 10 bits...

10 bits per second is probably accurate. If so, it is poorly defined in the article. I suspect it means 10 conclusions per second. Behind each bit might be 500 billion neural actions done in parallel using about 20W.

I'm having difficulty understanding what is 'new' here that we have not been doing for decades. An close array of vias, plated solid with copper under the 'exposed pad' of part above. What are they doing different? Cutting a hole in the PCB and filling it with a copper slug? If so, they might...

6-9 months for a new part of this complexity on a new process seems like an aggressive schedule. If everything goes right it is reasonable, but I would expect evaluation phases and 2 or 3 loops through the fab to fix bugs and make changes to optimize process yields. This puts it at 9 to 15...

I'm not a fan of useless government regulations. That said, all civilized nation should require a minimal level of security on wired and wireless networks. If any device does not meet this security level, it should not be recognized by the network. Practical implementation of this is not a...