Sunday, November 1, 2015
Got up at eight o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Got up at seven forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.
A telephone in a room of the house where I currently live rung followed by some long dial tones particular to connecting with a facsimile twice this afternoon. Probably, somebody dialed the wrong number when using his or her facsimile or computer. I have been frequently troubled with various types of prank calls since the early 2000s, but my telephone has seldom gotten that sort of typical facsimile dial tone.
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
A resolution prepared by Japan for promoting the abolition of nuclear weapons, including a new proposal to draw on the political leaders and tourists to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was adopted by a majority vote at the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, but Russia and China opposed it as before, and Britain, France, and the US abstained from its voting.
Unless some proper reformations of the UN system are incarnated someday, like the proposal of mine that was explained in my diary about a month ago, things won't move forward at a desirable pace. The people who continue to enjoy the benefits of possessing nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear bombs don't easily give them up and therefore can't agree to any positive reformation of the UN system without difficulty. Some of them may justify themselves by claiming that deterrent power hanging in the world balance of nuclear power has been preventing the next Great War from occurring for the last decades, and only by means of these bombs, they may be capable of saving people on the earth from the future apocalyptic meteor strikes, despite knowing the fact that the possibility of a catastrophic terror should increase with swelling the number of nuclear club members. As the world matters with the worsening climate changes, the increasing number of nuclear club members, and the high frequency of terrorism go from bad to worse gradually and gradually, there should be a growing tendency to change the situation at the UN. However, there isn't so in actuality. The news that the US where these matters should be their own serious affairs abstained from voting on a resolution for promoting the abolition of nuclear weapons at this General Assembly is rather disappointing. Probably, they hesitated to agree to a new proposal that was found in Japan's resolution this time. Anyway, making every ceaseless effort to promote the abolition of nuclear weapons while also appealing to people to properly reform the UN system is the way. It's uncertain whether or not a change for the better can be anticipated soon.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
It seems to me that for the purpose of recovering people's spirits to abolish nuclear weapons the invitation of an international sports event, either the committee or association of which is headquartered in Switzerland and has no permanent membership with the veto power, to these atomic bombed cities is easier than the final agreement of a resolution including a new proposal at the UN, which is headquartered in the US where the Manhattan project was formed. There are a number of reasons why governments encourage their people to take part in and/or enjoy sports, e.g. education, health care, recreation, human-right and so on. It can't be denied that the educational purposes of promoting sports should still include a degree of soldiery. Apart from any complicated diplomacy, the invitation of an international sports event to these atomic-bombed cities may be a good opportunity for many patriotic people to revisit the difficult question of whether or not nuclear weapons should be maintained, after correctly and sufficiently understanding this destructiveness and hazardousness.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
For some reason or other, for the last few days, at least my computer was unable to access the website of the credit union in the US and I still maintain my account with only a small amount. It seems that this credit union should have been operating normally because they have continued to send me its bank statements on a monthly basis and has recently sent me the new credit cards. Nowadays it's hard to believe that the modern server system of a bank might have been down for a few days. There is a faint possibility that somebody may have been blocking my access to this website from Japan. Fortunately, it's recovered this afternoon.
Friday, November 6, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
Since the beginning of this month, my computer access to several websites in the US has been obstructed in various ways. In one case, an account was removed, in another case a server was downed, and in another case a service was unavailable.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for dinner. It's fair to cloudy.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a Japanese meal for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a rainy day.
Monday, November 9, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.
The occupation of advertising agencies and the talents for it have been highly thought of by the general public in Japan, like some advanced nations. That trend in Japan has recurred with extravagance since the 1980s. It seems that a noticeable influence of their fishy advertising skills can be found even in the news reports about various topics. It sounds as if an unscrupulous businessman shafts many readers and viewers through those news reports. Both the advertising agencies and the comedic performances should be valued more ordinarily in view of the current situation in Japan.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.
According to some news reports, Wendelstein 7-X, which is one of the advanced helical nuclear fusion reactors, was completed at the Max-Planck IPP in Greifswald, Germany last month. This largest stellarator 5.5 meters in radius is aimed at operating while confining the fusion plasmas in its core for 30 minutes, and as usual, the fuel for it is the pair of deuterium-tritium, which requires the lowest temperature to start the fusion reactions.
Even if the fusion reactions of Wendelstein 7-X may be ignited successfully and the confinement may be maintained for a target span according to the plan, it's still a long way off the fulfillment of a fusion reactor for the practical purpose of power generation. For this purpose, the plasma confinement has to be maintained as long as a reactor operates within its life span, i.e. some decades or longer, by means of an optimum design of coils and some new ideas, the service life of a reactor whose inner parts are unavoidably exposed to the very intense irradiation of fast neutrons and radiations has to be longer than the period when it takes the reactor's continuous operation to become profitable, and moreover the electric power into which the energy gained from the fusion plasmas is converted by using either a conventional turbine or another revolutionary generator must be greater than the electric power which is spent for causing and sustaining the fusion reactions. Therefore, at the present time, nobody knows whether or not its practical use will be fulfilled someday.
The above-mentioned news about a giant doughnut-shaped complex device seems to be reliable though it's difficult to know whether or not their experiments will be successful. The results of their experiments will be announced in the next few years or later.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
A smaller passenger jet MRJ (Mitsubishi Regional Jet) took off for its first public test flight this morning. In view of the current states of foreign and domestic affairs concerning the growing Middle East and Asian markets, the rising necessity for highly efficient passenger jets, the recent revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, the increasing rise of China's armaments, the degree of the US's trust in Japan's confidentiality, and the level of Japan's technologies, a certain degree of Japan's independent development of aircraft should be politic. Of course, there is no Rising Sun painted on the wings of an MRJ.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
Studies on the mobility enhancement of carriers by means of the presence of the stress or the strain in the compressive or tensile direction along the channel of the semiconductor devices have been made strenuously for the last few decades, and the silicon channel devices whose performances are significantly boosted by engineering the stress and/or the strain in the channel have been introduced into the high-performance, low-power, and other applications since the middle of the 2000s. On the assumption that the stress or the strain in the channel can be kept substantially constant for its service life, any problematic performance degradation or shift after operating for an acceptable span shouldn't be expected, as far as reliable materials such as the wafer, the gate dielectric, etc. are used and the transistors are properly designed and formed. This assumption should be reasonable in the case of evaluating the reliabilities of the stress/strain technology for most consumer and professional applications requiring normal operation at the surrounding temperature range of the RT to 85 degrees C, within my knowledge.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
However, I don't know how stably the intentionally introduced stress can be retained under very harsh conditions. The exercise of vibrations or impacts on the VLSI composed of the aggressively strained/stressed devices might cause some reliability problems due to the undesirable relaxation of the stresses by the introduction of some crystal defects when it brings intense external mechanical stresses to it continuously. Such vibrations can be exercised on the VLSI when it's located near the engine of an automobile or an aircraft, and such impacts can be exercised on it when an automobile having it runs on a bumpy road or collides with something. Although the changes of its surrounding temperature within an assumable range in various environments of the Earth shouldn't cause any failures in general when the devices are properly designed with some margins, the frequent and rapid ups and downs of temperature for a long time might also cause because of the relaxation of the engineered stress/strain by the additional transient stresses due to the differences in the expansions rates between the constituent materials, especially at the boundaries near the channel on which the stress is designed to be concentrated and the self-heating has locally a great influence. Let's give a familiar example. As well-known, either by rapidly purring the boiling water into a thin glass that is initially cooled down to the freezing point or below, or by rapidly purring the very cold water into a thin glass that is initially heated up to a few hundred degrees C it may be broken suddenly. When a strong directional stress has been applied to a glass in advance, either way, it's broken by a stronger possibility. The operating VLSI on an automobile that runs in the tropical zone in high summer can be heated up to a few hundred degrees C, and the non-operating VLSI on an airplane that flies at a high altitude can be cooled down far below the freezing point.
Because any recent publications about the experiments on these extreme cases are unavailable to me, I am uncertain whether or not my speculation upon these issues above is probable. It's hoped that these issues are negligible so that the stress/strain technology can be applicable without any difficulty to both the automobile and the aircraft which are the applications that require the toughest reliability tests. Even if some sorts of stress/strain engineering weren't applicable to these heavy-duty applications, it shouldn't be a grave problem when it's foreseen, because the transistor designs can be rather easily modified not to have the intensified strain/stress if necessary.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a rainy day.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Got up at five forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's rainy to fair.
A series of terror attacks claimed more than 120 lives in Paris, and the accidental derailment of a bullet train TGV on trial claimed about 10 lives in eastern France in the last few days. It just happened that one of the scenes where the terrorist groups set off the suicide bombs was the stadium where a friendly match between French and German soccer teams took place at that time, and a bullet train was headed from France to Germany or the reverse. The terrorist groups are composed of French, Syrian, and possibly other nationals.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
The Japanese government announced that Japan's GDP growth rate during the last quarter (7 to 9) continued to be negative. That was –0.8%.
Samsung Electronics recently announced that it would start to mass-produce its 8-core processor Exynos 8 Octa 8890 utilizing the 14nm FinFET technology for the low-power mobile application at the end of this year. According to their briefing, Exynos 8 Octa 8890 has higher performance by more than 30% while achieving lower power dissipation by 10% than its predecessor.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.
The TOP500 project which semiannually evaluates the performances of the existing supercomputers announced the latest ranking of the 500 highest-performance supercomputers in the world at this period of time. The NUDT's Tianhe-2 supercomputer with the Intel Xeon E5-2692 (12 cores, 2.2GHz) and Xeon Phi-31S1P processors utilizing the 22nm Tri-Gate (Triple-Gate FinFET) technology is ranked first in the TOP500 four consecutive times. NUDT is the National University of Defense Technology in China, and Tianhe means Milky Way in Chinese. Although the Tianhe-2 is at the top, any Chinese semiconductor manufacturer doesn't have the ability to produce processors comparable to Intel's processors on its own currently. However, a South Korean electronics manufacturer and/or a Taiwanese semiconductor foundry may have the technology. If the US government asks Intel Corp. not to provide NUDT with their high-end Xeon processors, NUDT may enter into a contract with either a South Korean electronics manufacturer or a Taiwanese semiconductor foundry instead. The Chinese government should want to keep a good relationship with either or both of these neighboring countries.
Last six consecutive times, Cray's Titan supercomputer with AMD's Opteron 6274 (16 cores, 2.2GHz) processors utilizing the 32nm SOI technology and the Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs, the IBM Blue Gene project's Sequoia supercomputer with the Power BQC (16 cores, 1.6GHz) processors utilizing the 45nm SOI technology, and the Riken's K supercomputer with the Fujitsu's SPARC64 VIIIfx (8 cores, 2.0GHz) processors utilizing the 45nm SOI technology are ranked second, third and fourth, respectively. The fact that the top three supercomputers have a set of more advanced device technology and circuit design of the processors manufactured by only the US chip makers, i.e. Intel, AMD, or IBM is a relief to the engineers who work for the Japanese ones. Simply because the Intel processor on the Tianhe-2 and the AMD processor on the Titan are more advanced in terms of both device technology and circuit design than the Fujitsu processor on the K by two and one technology generations respectively, the Tianhe-2 and Titan are much faster than the K. The IBM processor on the Sequoia is somewhat faster than the Fujitsu processor on the K though both use their individual 45nm SOI technologies and RISC architectures and the clock rate of one core of the IBM processor is lower than that of the Fujitsu one, probably because of the 2 X higher number of the cores and some advantages in the circuit design. A recent piece of news about Samsung's new processor (8 cores, more than 130% of the predecessor) utilizing the latest 14nm FinFET technology might upset them, though at present it's intended to be for mobile applications. Indeed, mobile applications are the most lucrative nowadays.
Probably, the government, the supercomputer, and the chip makers of the US want Japanese people either to purchase the supercomputers that Cray or IBM produces or to assemble the new supercomputer from the processors that one of the US chip makers manufactures. If allowed and afford to do so, many Japanese engineers in this field should prefer to pursue their independent development of the supercomputer and the processors for it, rather than follow reluctantly what the above-mentioned American people want.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a rainy day.
Today I am writing my diary by using my old iBook G4 with the PowerPC G4 MPC7447A (1 core, 1.2GHz). The PowerPC G4 is the single- or multi-core processor of Motorola designed for Apple's computers that first used the AltiVec (Velocity Engine) SIMD instruction in the late 1990s, which is a class of parallel computing that has been used for supercomputers mostly. The IBM PowerPC G5 970FX (1 core, 1.8GHz) that my old iMac G5 has also used the Altivec.
According to some news reports, Intel Corp. announced that it would release the 72-core MIC Architecture product with the Xeon Phi utilizing its 14nm technology as either a CPU or a coprocessor, the codename of which is Knights Landing, for the limited server and workstation applications. The clock rate of one core of the multi-core processor is probably in the frequency range of 2.5 to 3.5GHz (3 to 4GHz with the Turbo). For the last decade, the number of cores in a processor for high-end computing applications has increased considerably in order to heighten the value of the new processors by fulfilling the expectations of their processing speed barely from generation to generation. The adoption of various stress/strain technologies may have improved the performance while enabling to delay the transistor scaling by one or two generations in the latter half of the 2000s. The delay in the transistor scaling by one or two generations was recovered to some extent by adopting some new materials for the dual metal gates and the high-k gate dielectric in the late 2000s. By the grace of adapting the new 3D device structure of the FinFET utilizing the Tri-Gate configuration and probably a low-k insulating dielectric material, a considerable improvement in the processing speed and power dissipation was achieved in the early 2010s. Since then further transistor scaling has become possible by reducing the thickness of the fins simultaneously. However, it can't be denied that, because of the fading gain in the NMOSFET performance only the scaling of the gate length, the pace to improve the clock rate of one core of it, which is still a meaningful indicator to evaluate the performances of the processors for the same architecture and a given number of the cores, has been somewhat slowed down comparing to that during the good old rushing period of time when the transistor scaling was easier and the performance gain with it was very promising. Nevertheless, the transistor scaling even beyond the 45/32nm technology node still improves the PMOSFET performance and the circuit speed and certainly reduces the gate capacitances and the power dissipation.
As the number of cores in it increases, the performance of a parallel computable processor should improve. Very roughly speaking, however, the cost to manufacture a processor is proportional to the size of it and accordingly the number of the cores in it. Therefore, the number of cores in a processor for inexpensive consumer PC and mobile applications can't be actively increased. The restraint on the size of a chip should be tight for mobile applications. Consequently, it's still in the range of 1 to 8. Nowadays, semiconductor manufacturers are making more efforts to reduce the power dissipation for these applications by enjoying the advantage gained from the reduction in not only the gate capacitances but also the operation voltage following the scaling rule, because it meets the needs of the time. It's rather surprising to know that the processing speed is still improving certainly while also scaling the operation voltage when advancing from the 32nm technology node to the 22nm technology node and then to the 14nm technology node, though the gain in the transistor performances by means of the traditional scaling method has been getting tougher and the reduction in the operation voltage should slow down the processing speed. It's certain that, when the operation voltage of the 14nm-node Xeon processors is increased up to that of the 32nm-node processors, the processing speeds and the clock rate of one core of the 14nm-node processors should be much better than those of the 32nm-node counterparts though the improvement in the power dissipations of these fades away to some extent. Without knowing the details of the device structure and circuit design of their 14nm-node processors, it's difficult for me to guess further.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
In the 1990s, it seems to me that although in terms of the semiconductor technologies IBM and Motorola, the Semiconductor Products Sector of which became Freescale Semiconductor, were comparable with Intel, in terms of the circuit design the Apple, IBM and Motorola alliance's PowerPC RISC architecture somewhat exceeded the Microsoft's Windows and Intel alliance's x86 CISC one. However, the marketing strategies including the aggressive advertisements of the Wintel overwhelmed the time-honored challenge of the AIM alliance those days.
Intel's processors have dominated the PC chip market for the last few decades as well known, and have also topped the supercomputer performance ranking for the last few years. Because Apple has energetically grown the mobile computing market worldwide and its revenue by popularizing smartphones and tablets for the last decade, the existing Wintel-dominated PC markets have been gradually shrinking from the prime. This trend has also started impacting Intel's ripened profits somewhat negatively. Intel is eagerly attempting to regain its bullish profits by expanding its share in the mobile chip market and others. TI, Samsung and the US fabless - Asian foundries are currently Intel's competitors in this profitable market. The ever-growing demand for mobile applications for lowering the power dissipation as low as possible has created a vantage ground for Intel's mobile processors that are successful in it. Samsung's new mobile processor should be one of the strongest opponents of Intel's. Actually, Intel has been the most profitable semiconductor company for the last twenty-three years, and Samsung is the second most profitable company for the last thirteen years. So, there have been enough accumulating funds for them to invest in some future breakthrough technologies in their depositories. Therefore, this tendency will continue for the time being unless a convulsion of nature or world affairs occurs. Toshiba may have possessed the ability to develop processors comparable to Intel's and Samsung's processors, but a series of recent negative news including a large-scale restructuring of its semiconductor sector overshadowed a possibility to be comparable.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's rainy to cloudy.
What kinds of technologies should be introduced to the processors specialized in the auto application may be quite different from those in the supercomputer, consumer PC & gaming, or mobile application. Because of the increasing necessity to develop higher-performance processors that are capable of assisting a driver in the handling of a car in various aspects and situations, the attention of many people in the auto and semiconductor industries may have been strongly attracted to the development of these processors. The request for the development of AI to realize a fully autonomous car may also demand a significant improvement in the performance of the reliable future AI processors specialized in the auto application, which may be much different from the present conventional processors.
Let's use a process of elimination. The processors specialized in the application of supercomputers to which all the kinds of existing booster technologies should be introduced may be a good starting point. Let's find out what kinds of technologies have to be eliminated from it next. If necessary, the technologies that may cause reliability problems should be removed or replaced after the tough reliability tests appropriate for this purpose. In order to redesign the auto transistors to be more reliable, it may be necessary to replace some materials with other reliable ones and/or to eliminate the sources of some stresses/strains incorporated into the transistor structures. After determining what kinds of materials and levels of stress/strain should be maintained, an appropriate range of semiconductor technology nodes has to be chosen in view of the scalability of the transistors with these usable materials. Parallel computing should be indispensable for this higher-performance auto application. The optimum number of the cores of a processor should be identified, by taking into consideration the tradeoff relationship between the cost and the performance. It seems to me that the invention of the ideas that allow reducing the manufacturing costs of the multi-core processor not only relying upon the enlargement of the wafer size or the outsourcing of the manufacturing from the overseas foundries, which have been two of the traditional methods to reduce the cost per die, should be the key to succeed in the development of the smart auto chip. Needless to say, a slumping company can't choose the way to enlarge the wafer size, which has been periodically carried out when a major capital investment was injected into the construction of a new-generation semiconductor plant. Because these auto processors can be diverted smoothly to various applications of the munitions industry, the progress of the overseas foundry business in this area may need closer attention than before, in view of the current state of world affairs.
The lower the manufacturing cost of a multi-core processor can be, the greater number of the cores and the higher the speed it can possess for a given affordable manufacturing cost. Of course, the restraint on the size of a chip shouldn't be tight for the auto application. The necessity for the reduction of the power dissipation should depend upon the type of power system that a car has. For an electric car with a rechargeable battery, the power dissipation of the main auto processors is one of the important factors, but for a conventional gasoline engine car or an electric car with a fuel cell, it isn't so. Although the sensor that's embedded in the backend of a simple peripheral microcomputer may be applicable to some objectives, it isn't necessary for the sensor to be embedded in the higher-performance auto processors.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Got up at seven o'clock in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Japanese pasta for dinner. It's a cloudy day. A suggestive advertisement left in my voicemail the day before yesterday motivated me to rewrite the sentence that my wife and I have never bought any lottery ticket and have never gambled since 2006.
Monday, November 23, 2015
Got up at seven-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's fair to cloudy.
A small time bomb exploded in a public convenience at the Yasukuni shrine this morning. Fortunately, that explosion didn't sustain any casualties.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a cloudy day.
In June 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced the vision for its future System on a Chip (SoC) utilizing the photonic device technology that's capable of performing the mass data transmission between the system core and the memory banks through the integrated optical fibers in order to significantly improve the processing speed of the system on the whole. By virtue of cutting down the undesirable self-heating and the parasitic capacitances of the wirings, the power dissipation of the system can also be significantly reduced. This sort of partially-photonic-integrated circuit is not only beneficial to the data transmission inside the SoC but also to that inside the multi-core processors. It is to be hoped that the practical uses of the partially-photonic-integrated circuit that is potentially very advantageous to high-end computing, consumer PC & gaming, and mobile applications will be realized in the course of time and that the fully-photonic-integrated circuit will be someday in the future. To my knowledge, the photonic-integrated circuit technology isn't so vulnerable under the conditions that the SoCs and the multi-core processors for the auto application encounter routinely. Indeed, by substituting the optical fiber wiring for the conventional metal wiring, the reliability problems related to the high self-heating and electric field in the wiring, which have become more serious with scaling down the backend minimum dimension when advancing the technology node, can be eliminated without relying on the reduction in the operating voltage. This shouldn't be an idea to help reduce the manufacturing cost of the multi-core processors. However, the potential performance improvement of the SoC and the multi-core processor by bringing it into play should also be very advantageous to the auto application as well as many other applications.
(Retouch on July 17, 2017: The conversion efficiencies of the photonic devices on the integrated circuit are insufficient, the energy losses from converting electricity into light and vice versa at a high frequency lead to a bottleneck in terms of its energy efficiency. To be honest, I don't know how Hewlett-Packard achieved very low-power communications of mass data inside its SoC prototype.)
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's cloudy to rainy.
A Turkish F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet shot down a Russian SU-24M Sukhoi bomber jet over Syria near the border of Turkey yesterday. A Russian CSAR helicopter that stayed on the ground near the skirmish scene for the purpose of a rescue mission was blown up by a Syrian rebel group. It seems that a portable missile that a rebel group used is more advanced than the Stinger. According to some news reports, what a rebel group used is the BGM-71 TOW anti-tank guided missile. By a curious coincidence, the American-made elderly weapons destroyed the Russian-made bomber and helicopter in the borderland of Syria a few days before Thanksgiving Day. It's unknown whether or not Turkey will be pardoned.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's cloudy to fair.
Not only in the semiconductor and computer industries but also in the munitions industry, the US major companies have still coerced other countries under the pretense of rather weariness. Most possibly, the exhausted stance of the US government may change awhile after the presidential election next year. Although one of the Japanese-made supercomputers is in the top 5 of the supercomputer performance ranking, the present Japanese-made weapons are far from being comparable to the American-made weapons, without mentioning the basic technologies. Officially, Japan has never successfully developed any modern stealth jet comparable to the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lighting II, or any modern interceptors such as the satellite-/laser-guided missile, laser cannon, and rail gun. It's even uncertain whether or not the US government will permit its US munitions companies to sell these modern weapons to the Japanese government at no distant date. Currently, they want to sell mostly troop transport planes like the V-22 Osprey, which has the capability of the VTOL, to the Japanese government, instead of the latest multipurpose stealth plane the F-35 Lightning II.
The American-made weapons and the Russian-made counterparts have been rivals for the world market share in the munitions industries for the last several decades. The Chinese-made weapons have been vigorously expanding their share recently, leaving the German-made weapons behind.
Friday, November 27, 2015
Got up at six-fifteen in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's fair with occasional snow.
With advancing the semiconductor technology beyond the 32nm node, the scaling down of the thickness of the gate dielectric has no longer been expected as it was, because of the limitation on reducing the effective gate dielectric thickness set by the indispensable interlayer whose physical thickness can't be reduced further. In order to go forward, the configuration of the double-gate, the triple-gate, or the gate-all-around has to be adopted. Instead of reducing the gate dielectric thickness, the thickness of the fin of the FinFET/TriGate has to be reduced when scaling beyond the 22nm node at which the FinFET/TriGate technology was first introduced. As the thickness of the fin is scaled down, the aspect ratio of the fin should naturally increase when the height of it is let be. In general, as the aspect ratio of the fin increases, it should be more difficult to shape the right-angled parallelepiped fin exactly using the photolithography and etching processes. When the semiconductor technology is scaled down to the 14nm node or beyond, the height of the fin may be somewhat reduced inevitably as well. Therefore, in order to maintain the effective width of the FinFET/TriGate as designed, it should be inevitable to increase the number of the fins a multiple-fins FinFET.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Got up at six forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Got up at seven-thirty in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast and a Japanese meal for lunch. Went out shopping this afternoon. Ate a dish of Italian pasta for dinner. It's a fine day.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Got up at seven forty-five in the morning. Ate a piece of bread for breakfast, a bowl of Japanese noodle soup for lunch, and a Japanese one-pot meal for dinner. It's a fine day.
At the present time, the world's largest GDP country is the US, and the second largest is China, according to some international organizations. The third, fourth, and fifth largest countries are Japan, Germany, and the UK, respectively. The US banks and the Chinese banks have been in the top stream. Of course, the trend in the economy of either world's economic superpower should immediately influence that of other countries, whether it's good or bad. The recent instability of China's stock markets has often made others uneasy.
