allegedganon

Ken's reverse engineering articles are always a real pleasure to read, but this one is special in that it looks at an analog chip and how typical analog building blocks (current mirrors, differential pairs) are implemented in silicon.

Also, if you've every looked at an analog IC's schematics and wondered what those weird "double collectors" BJT are (https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/105777/what-...) , there's a pretty decent description in there of what a BJT actually looks like when implemented in silicon.

The recently released film Valerian is based on a 70's french comics Valerian & Laureline that is/was totally unknown in the US.

Even more interesting is how much inspiration a certain George Lucas seem to have drawn from them:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/07/30/are-the-valrian-and-l...

>The schools are better

At the undergrad and graduate level, perhaps, and as another poster commented, probably not for very long.

But for the school years before undergrad, I'm sorry to say, America is in a very bad way.

I don't know how it compares to China, but American public primary and secondary school is definitely not where I'd have my children receive an education

I am not claiming in any way that the problem we face in HW design are the same as the SW folks do. I most certainly agree that RTL is but a small chunk of the overall effort of designing a chip. But I am afraid my point that this chunk is in a terrible place still stands.

You have also entirely ignored my second point :)

While true, it doesn't come naturally given how the average millennial manages his/her life :)

Funny, and beneath the joke lies a nice nugget of truth: the landscape of hardware design languages is a truly sad thing to behold and deeply hinders innovation in the space.

There are numerous attempts at fixing the problem, but all of them ring hollow as the big ASIC design shops basically are all relying on ancient languages.

Another thing that IMO has dealt a grave blow to the whole scene is a cultural one: people in the hardware business still haven't understood and digested the lessons of open source and sharing. The whole industry still operates on notions of "industrial secrets" and spends tremendous amounts of energy trying to hide how what they build works.

I mean if you need a example of how bad it still is, the dominant word still used to describe a chunk of functionality in that world is "IP".

Who in their right mind in the software industry would call a piece of code they wrote "intellectual property", as in "just download my IP and use it in your project" ?

>Well the vast majority of these kids would prefer to stay in the US.

I'm afraid you're making assumptions here.

America is not where opportunity is these days, especially in the hardware manufacturing sector.

It is indeed very american-centric while presenting itself a number of times as applicable everywhere. I don't think it is: for example, I don't think many western European would be able to sort themselves into any of his categories.

The many stories that have been appearing recently on Google's deep cultural changes point to a very basic fact of life: organizations, and even more so, their culture, aren't forever.

As a matter of fact, organization cultural changes can happen very quickly, at the whim of leadership changes.

The trust their users/customers extend these organizations (way too much in the cast of Google) rarely takes this basic fact of life into account.

In the case of Google, the two strong voices of Larry and Sergey held fast the ethical compass of the company for quite a long time and that allowed Google to accumulate massive amounts of goodwill in the market: the average Google user still believes the company is "good" and "can be trusted" and are therefore willing to freely give them massive chunks of their personal data.

Unfortunately, as is wont to happen, the two founders are now sitting on a mountain of money, have pretty much lost all interest in their baby (who wouldn't to be honest) and have for all intent and purposes surrendered the reins to a team of far less ethical-minded, far less principle-guided, far less charismatic, far more greedy set of leaders (Pichai, Green, Wojcicki, ...)

Specifically, when Google hired Diane Green (who's behind the push to work with the military), they totally let the fox in the henhouse.

That SVP has precious little regard for Google's historical cultural tenets (she does pay lip service to them when required, of course, she's smart enough to do that) and is busy doing within Google what she's done previously at VMWare: building a money-making juggernaut (Cloud) using all the tools at her disposal, with precious little regard for the company culture.

She will take on any customers, independent of the ethical aspects of that decision, as long as she's operating within the law.

Consideration such as good or evil (something which, for those who drank the Kool-aid when Google was still young and naive, mattered a whole lot) has exactly zero bearing on her business decisions.

In conclusion: the laws of gravity are what they are, and Google is subject to them like every other corporations. Even if it took longer than for most, they are slowly becoming a standard run-of-the-mill, large, short-sighted, evil corporation with the sole purpose of turning in quarterly profits and making their execs into billionaires.