Mannerisms

AN off-the-shelf delivery service is now available for STC tunnel diodes. So, 62 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weeekly’s  edition of February 1, 1961 The story continues They were introduced early last year in development form to enable engineers to gain experience in the use of them. Since then further development work has improved the characteristics and has ...

Survey data released by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that while almost 70% of Ukrainians said shortly after the beginning of the war that their country was moving in the right direction, this was now diminished to just 44%. The share of respondents saying the country was going the wrong way increased in the same time frame from ...

Could robots be the NBT? Ed asks his diary. Single-use robots have been around forever, but the big thing now is general use robots which could do the jobs of many workers in many industries. Whether or not, the UK produces such robots is less important than that we have a handle on the IP and some strategic patents on ...

Morris Chang told a good yarn at last Friday’s opening of TSMC’s first fab in Japan. In the 1960s TI lobbied hard to get Japanese government approval to build a fab in Japan. In 1968, when the fab eventually materialised, Chang was a vp at TI. At last Friday’s ceremony  Chang recounted how,  when he first  met Akio Morita, Morita ...

Back in 2015, Intel bought Altera for $17.6 billion and gave it the new snappy monicker of  ‘The Programmable Solutions Group (PSG)”. Yesterday the PSG was renamed ‘Altera”. In 2014 Altera had revenues of $1.9 billion – they had been flat for four years before that. Five years later, in 2019, the last year for which PSG results were announced ...

137 years ago, after a series of botched judicial hangings, the Governor of New York set up a commission to look at alternative means of execution. A New York dentist, mindful of the central tool of his trade, suggested a method which was officially adopted as the state’s preferred method of execution in 1888 and which was first used for ...

English, the internet’s lingua franca, connects people from all over the world. According to estimates from W3Techs, more than half of all websites use English as their content language. While  English is in fact the best bet if you want to maximize your potential audience online, its global footprint is not as large as one might think. According to estimates ...

While 5G has been available since 2019  we’re still in the early stages of the transition to 5G,  according  to estimates from Ericsson’s Mobility Report. The number of 5G smartphone subscriptions worldwide reached 1.5 billion by the end of 2023 and will be past two billion by the end of this year. That would mean 5G reaching that milestone quicker ...

Thanks to Uswitch mobiles forth this one – the nine most 6G-ready countries: The top countries leading the race to 6G: Rank Country 6G Patents Fastest 5G Speed 6G Ready Score 1 South Korea 760 814 8.75 2 India 265 465 7.50 3 United States 2,229 363 6.88 4 China 4,604 142 5.00 4 United Kingdom 115 392 5.00 6 ...

Last year Taylor Swift was the most-streamed artist in the world on Spotify and Apple Music, she had the three best-selling albums in the United States, her “Eras Tour” became the first ever to gross more than $1 billion and the documentary shot during the tour turned out to be the highest-grossing concert movie of all time. To top it ...

Here,62 years ago, the Electroon cartoon in Electronics Weekly’s edition of April 12 191 demonstrates a novel solution to the drink-drive problem:

The number of persons aged 65 and older is expected to double over the next three decades, reaching 1.6 billion in 2050, says the UN Pipulation Division. Asia is at the forefront of this trend, with Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan expected to have the highest share of people aged 65 and older by 2050. While Japan is famous ...

The semiconductor industry is being turned on its head with talk of trillions of dollars being raised to stoke a GPU tsunami but how much will trickle down to me? Ed asks his  diary. If this is the future of the chip business  then I want myself, and the country of course, to be a part of it. We have ...

19 years ago this was the question being asked in Washington. On the opening day of the 2oo4 EDA Tech Forum in San Jose the keynote speaker’s first question was: “Will Asia dominate IT?” Henry Rowen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former member of several US administrations, said: “Asia has billions of brains with growing skills ...

The playbook for a techie with a technology to sell is to go to industrial companies and tell them they’ll become uncompetitive if they don’t buy it. In the 70s, AI software was being packaged as ‘expert systems’ and peddled as indispensable to any company wanting to stay in business. To many CEOs, paranoid about falling behind their competition, and ...

Malcolm Penn (pictured below) CEO of Future Horizons and Europe’s leading semiconductor analyst, has written an insight into the Nvidia phenomenon. Here it is: In what can only be described as a ‘right place, right time’ moment, nVIDIA’s stratospheric ascent over the past year has re-written chip-market history, writes Penn. The fuse was lit on 30 November 2022, when OpenAI ...

In a campaign video Donald Trump has declared that he will “implement a bold series of reforms to completely eliminate dependence on China in all critical areas.” He has already said he may put 60%+ duties on Chinese imports in a move to reduce America’s trade deficit with  China to zero over his term of office, if elected. The video ...

Earlier this week, EC Commissioner Ruud Függ declared Europe’s determination not to let Big Tech  grab a monopoly in the AI market. “We’re going to compete,” stated Függ, “we Europeans are going to beat the crap out of the competition.” Er no . . . . it wasn’t quite like that actually. What actually happened was that, earlier this week, ...

Thanks to  the TIOBE Programming Community for this one – the top 10 programming languages in February 2024: 1.   Python 2.   C 3.   C++ 4.   Java 5.   C# 6.   JavaScript 7.   SQL 8.   Go 9.   Visual Basic 10.        PHP

The big day arrives. You ring up your bank and the voice at the other end says: “Good Morning David. What can I do for you?”  I  say “Transfer £200 to Bloggs” And the voice says: “That’s done. Anything else? “Query the item of £58.20 paid to The Dodgy Dealing company.” And the voice says: “We had already noted it ...