The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

当看着伴侣一天天的老去，而自己一天天的年轻。。是一种很难形容的滋味。。应该会很心痛。。很无奈。。这就是Benjamin 跟 Daisy的离奇故事。。其实也就是生死。。不同的只不过是不能一起老死。。

deadly glide

亚特兰大

刚刚从亚特兰大赶回家，虽然累，可是非常高兴。。两天的fullday meeting with nasa, boeing, BAE program managers, system architects, engineers..非常的累。。不过获益蛮大。。这是我人生第一次参与high level design decision making。。我想这在英特尔时期是不可能的。。英特尔这种hirarchical management方式。。你需要用十几年的时间才可以参与system level decision making。。

短短一天里，就define好了test plan for final tape out..可以说将所有相关的工程师集中一起讨论是非常有效的。。至少大家在一起面对面。。可以当面了解工程上的细节问题。。比起用telecon/bridge好的多。。至少如今对如何展开system test plan有了很大的进展。。大家都可以visualized。。比方说如何有效地将设计好的电板放入radiation beam dewar里进行proton beam radiation test。。。这些都是很关键。。没有看过dewar真的不知如何开始是好。。

第二天，各个design team 向nasa program manager呈报进展。。也大概讲解了这项计划未来可以engage的方向。。我们这些zhut zai也终于焕然大悟 “哦。。原来我们做的东西是这样的”。。哈哈。。。开始觉得有ohm了。。原来大家也可以对人类未来发展做出些贡献。。。感觉上生命充满了意义。。呵呵。。。

总而言之。。此趟会议。。获益良多。。至少没后悔过来。。虽然工资比外面差的多。。可是此成就是在外面无法体会的。。。就算给我在英特尔design VCO on 22nm process running at 10GHz.. so what??? 我甘愿做一些pioneering stuff..在人类发展史上留下一点点的贡献。。虽然没有人会记得幕后英雄。。不过这也已经是深深印在幕后英雄心中。。。我孩子老爸以后可以跟孩子说，“孩子，你老爸曾参与设计过上saturn 的探测器呢”。。。。。 这就已足矣。。。

Memristor the new circuit paradigm? substituting Moore's law?

A new element is accidentally discovered two years ago in HP lab. However the element hypothesis is being presented 30 years ago by Leon Chua, A prof from UC Berkeley . The discovery of new element or so call 4th basic electrical element is comparable to the discovery of capacitor, resistor and inductor in 18th-19th century. So what is memristor? memristor stand for memory resistor which means a resistor that has memory. WTF? a resistor that has memory? kidding man...but this is all true.

Just think of water flow as current and water pipe as resistor. When water pipe diameter get narrower, obstacle to water flow increases. Same relation apply to current and resistance. For the convention circuit history, the pipe has fix diameter. But now, a memristor is a pipe that changes diameter with the amount and direction of the water flow. When water flow in one direction, the pipe expands (less resistive) but when water send in opposite direction, the pipe shrinks ( more resistive). Somemore memristor can remember the diameter when water last went through. So by turn on and turn off voltage apply, memristor can remember the previous resistance.


Sound like, u can build a memory circuit from memristor right? by construct it in cross bar architecture, you can build a memory circuit and store state (1 or 0). From the data presented, the turn on/off resistance ratio is 1000:1 compare to 10000:1 of convention transistor. Pretty good switching. Memristor can be constructed in such way that titanium oxide is sandwiched by two titanium wires, one in vertical and the other in horizontal. titanium oxide contains two layers, bottom layer is TiO2 which is a perfect titanium oxide while top layer is TiO2-x, which has defection of oxygen in it. A perfect TiO2 acts as insulator, while defection TiO2-x acts as conducting layer. If positive voltage is applied on top titanium wire, O+ in TiO2-x layer is repelled from wire. Hence increase the conducting layer and reduce resistance. reverse behavior applied if negative voltage is applied.

This is a revolution discovery in the mid th of Moore's law bottle-neck. 45nm feature size which has 200 size of atom, eventually will meet its channel length of 1 atom size. Memristor size can be as small as just few nm size. More work need to be done on the resistance on/off ratio to have better performance than convention transistor.