Mannerisms

UNTIL now the piezomagnetic transducer has offered a much higher efficiency than the piezoelectric in most applications. So, 65 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition if October 19 1960 The story continues: The recent announcement by Bell Telephone Laboratories of materials with up to four times as great an activity as quartz may well mean a much ...

It always looked inevitable that the semiconductor industry would end up having one leading edge logic fab.  The problem is if you don’t make money from one generation you haven’t got enough money to invest in a fab for the next generation, which is why so many companies have become fabless over time. Back in the 1980s companies like IDT, ...

The over-build of mature node capacity and consequent foundry utilisation rates of 70-75% present an opportunity to secure future fab capacity at advantageous rates, Ed confides to his diary, and I have set u a fund to do it. My strategy is to get every UK semiconductor company, design house, university, R&D institute, startup, individual designer or student to come ...

Designer viruses may one day produce nano-scale logic speculated researchers at a Kavli Futures Symposium in 2011. “In my dreams, I can imagine some environmentally safe virus which, by design, manufactures and spits out a 64-bit adder,” said Donald Eiger, the scientist that spelled the letters IBM in xenon atoms in 1989. “We then just flow the virus’s effluent over ...

48% of Americans aged 13 to 17 say that social media has a mostly negative effect on people of their age, up from just 32% two years earlier, according to a survey of U.S. teens conducted by the Pew Research Center in autumn 2024. Only 11% of teenagers in the U.S. described the impact of social media as mostly positive, ...

326 years ago a Berkshire farmer’s son invented this: It started a revolution in agriculture Moral: The urge to automate beats strong in the human breast    

A major roadblock to wider use of driverless cars is safety which led to the suspension of the driverless testing permits for General Motors’ AV subsidiary Cruise in San Francisco in 2023 after an accident with a pedestrian. The safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is also, in part, reflected in their crash/collision rate compared to all motor vehicles. In 2023, ...

This week, Tesla launched its first  robotaxi service with 24 cars and safety drivers  in Austin. On Tuesday,Waymo, which already operated in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix without safety drivers, added Atlanta. In China, Apollo Go owned by Baidu has 1,000 robotaxis on the road in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and several more Chinese cities. A handful ...

Thanks to TrendForce for this one – the top ten EV vendors in Q1 2025.

Last year, 45% of  ICE car models in China and 39% of EV modecost under $25,000, according to the International Energy Agency . For cars costing $50k and more, 21% were ICE and 15% wereEVs. In Europe,  3% of EV models and none in the U.S. were priced below $25,000 last year. Only 6% in Europe and 3% in the ...

65 years ago, this was a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of December 12 1960

A recent survey by Patriotic Millionaires UK shows that a majority of millionaires in G20 countries supports a 2% tax on wealth. When asked if any millionaires with a wealth of more than $10 million should pay the tax, 58% of the more than 2,000 millionaire survey participants said yes. As part of the same survey, 75% agreed that billionaires ...

Some would think I’m lucky get two lunches at the Ritz in a fortnight, but you’ve got to take account of my hosts – lobbyists for the water and arms industries – smooth guys but depressingly inhuman, Ed confides to his diary. The arms guys were more generous than the water guys, ordering up the Poulet de Bresse en Vessie ...

‘A tour d’horizon of the challenges facing the IC industry was delivered by Ravi Subramanian, CEO of Berkley Design Automation, to the 2011 Globalpress Summit Conference in Santa Cruz. ‘Subramanian started at the macro level, pointing out that where GDP is growing the fastest in the world, per capita income is low. “In the next three or four decades people ...

Tesla’s Robotaxi  launch in Austin could be more a sign of technological weakness than a demonstration of technological prowess.. Analysts say that 60% of Tesla’s stock market valuation derives from its expertise in autonomous driving. But whereas Waymo has 1500 vehicles in five cities offering paid-for robotaxi trips in fully autonomous vehicles without a safety driver, Tesla has 24 cars ...

There was once a prodigious scientist, a President of the Royal Society who was  created a baronet  and who, in the year 1808, discovered  five elements including calcium and boron. He created the first incandescent light, discovered the properties of nitrous oxide, invented electrochemistry, was friends with Coleridge and Southey, wrote over 160 poems and painted pictures. Late in his ...

I expect you know by now that generative AI search engines come up with loads of bollox in their answers to questions about current affairs. It’s good to have your own experience validated by research and the Columbia Journalism Review quotes a study by the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism which has found a substantial proportion of inaccuracies in answers ...

Due to its large reserves and strategic position,  Iran plays a significant role in the global oil market, giving the country a valuable bargaining chip in international negotiations. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iran produced roughly 4,700 million barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids per day in 2024, making it the world’s sixth largest oil producer. ...

Thanks to TrendForce for this one – the top ten OSAT companies:

The Dreamliner in the Indian plane crash was 12 years old which is older than the average age of Air India’s fleet which is 8.1 years, according to Planespotters.net 8.1 years is relatively young in comparison to other major airlines around the world – an average age of 12 is not uncommon with major carriers. United Airlines, Lufthansa and Air ...