Avendo letto Microcosm e Telecosm, ho pensato bene di leggere anche questo libro di Gilder. Deludente. Uno spottone per la Foveon. Interessante ma non illuminante come gli altri, da cui la delusione.
Almeno fa onore agli italiani di silicon valley.
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The pattern of advances in silicon memory was fewer transis tors per bit. The zero transistor bit? Sure. IBM had already invented the hard drive in 1956, based on magnetic domains. "Look for a technological trend in one area and apply it to another," Merrill said. Using this technique, Merrill was generating patents for National Semiconductor at a pace of some eight a month when in early 1997 he met Carver Mead at a meeting on CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) imagers at the National offices on Lawrence Avenue in Sunnyvale. Since the mid-1980s, CMOS has defined the essential structure of nearly all the digital chips in personal computers and other electronic gear.
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Federico Faggin at the beginning of his career at Olivetti in 1961 in Borgolombardo, Italy, flanked by technicians helping him test a calculator system he built using some one hundred printed circuit boards. At Intel he would put the same computer power on a single chip.
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Many Americans have no idea of who Federico Faggin is, why his arrival at. a company would cause a susurrus of comment and expectation in the Valley. However, to the cognoscenti, who knew enough to pronounce his name Fah-jean, Federico Faggin was a paragon of integrated circuit design, and the man who contrived the basic microchip technologies that enabled the creation of silicon computers and
cameras. If you could see through all the Intel publicity fogs and fabulations-all the sweet smiles and smoke from Regis McKenna FR suits, with their jargon and gentle guidance for journalists and historians-you might understand that Paggin was comparable in his contributions even to the legendary Intel gods, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore.
Working inside Intel, an Italian immigrant, age twenty-three, with skewed English and few friends in the Valley, Faggin had been the true creator of the microprocessor, the central processing unit in nearly every personal computer.
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IT WAS FAGGIN who launched the play, but he and Shima became Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Intel's version of Hamlet. History is written by the winners. Intel is a great company, and among the privileges of greatness is not only to make history but to rewrite it. The company-certified inventor of the microprocessor would be Ted Hoff, the nice owlish man from Rochester, New York, who had conceived the general architecture of the chip. It was not an exceptional architecture at all, based as it was on Digital Equipment Corporation's minicomputer, the PDP-8, and not really a new idea. Expressive of what the industry called 'spaghetti design," the PDP-8 devoted most of its space to metal wires between the components on the printed circuit board. Put those wires on a modem microprocessor, without Faggin's silicon gates, and the thing would sprawl over several blocks of Santa Clara.
Hoff was a smart and creative man who proposed the obvious integrated solution for a calculator chip. He stayed around and didn't make waves, and mused modestly about chips for speech recognition. But Intel was not interested. It had become the microprocessor company, period, and more ideas were supererogatory. Hoff had had his certified idea and he was Intel's man. He would win the kudos, until Intel got bored with Hoff as well and he went off to become a fellow at a research institute.
However, the feisty Federico-FF-was not the "fellow" type. In a Silicon Valley macho moment, he observed: "You aren't really a man until you start a company." If he had come to wive it wisely in Padua and had moved to jive it wealthily in Santa Giara, he had ended up with relatively little money, and a "pushy" wife, so they said at Intel, who thought her husband should get credit for what he had done. Imagine that. Forget Faggin-Faggin outside-was the Intel consensus.
Largely crush-proof, however, Faggin was difficult to forget. And Alvia, a technical writer, was still pushing to make the world grasp her husband's role in the first microprocessor. She would ultimately prevail, but the world of technology was slow in personal matters, and Intel-oriented. In 1986, Faggin thought he might make history yet again, find yet another chance for fame and fortune and enduring achievement, by founding yet another company resolved to replace his first invention with a new one, a company poised to take advantage of the latest innovations in another computer model, the neural network.
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As Misha pointed out in her book, the eye only sees changes, or by changing. It detects the movement of objects or it sees still objects by constantly moving itself. While
digital imagers are bolted down and treat movement as noise, movement is the key signal and guide for a biological imager. If the eyeball, for example, is frozen in one place, it becomes blind.
It sees by moving and focuses on movement. Vision machines that try to remove the noise of movement defy the lessons of nature.
Misha concludes: "Because [in Claude Shannon's theory of information] only changes and differences convey information, constant change is a necessity for neural systems-rather than source of difficulty, as it is for digital systems .... The success of this venture will give rise to an entirely new view of information processing that harnesses the power of analog collective systems to solve problems that are intractable by conventional digital methods."
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"Making models of the retina with Gan'er we have to take almost everything out that the biologists think is important. Take out the chemistry, the DNA, the shape, the salt water, the lipids.
In making a silicon model, we take out everything but a few electronic properties that look the same-amazingly the same-as the biological properties and signal paths. But if you dump the chip in salt water it reacts differently. It will short out.
"The biologists do the same thing every time they do a measurement. They take everything out they doni measure. But they don't admit it. So they never develop a clear agenda and a set of, goals for their research." Biologists at Oxford that year in fact were studying the neurons of live cats by probing them with a sensor that could measure their electrical activity on an oscilloscope. But these crude measures yielded little understanding and were very bad for the cats. Misha conceived vision as a complex collective feat of billions of neurons, rendering the blips of one neuron essentially meaningless. But at times she thought that even this bootless torture of cats offered more insight into the brain than her own efforts to create neurodes on silicon.
During the long winter in Oxford, she moved in with her colleague Rodney Douglas, a genial and accomplished English biologist and neuromorph, recently divorced. "I cannot separate my
life from my work," she said. As time passed, though, the work bogged down and other biologists at Oxford outside their little group showed little interest or support. The team was exultant when ETH in Zurich established and endowed an entire new institute to support Misha's work and housed it in a spanking
new building. It is called the Institute for Neuroinformatics.
In 1995, Misha and most of the group moved to Zurich, including Douglas, Martin, and a team of ten scientists. Their goal is familiar: "to identify the computational principles that make the brain so formidably versatile and powerful, and attempt to embody them into a new and innovative type of computer architecture." Their chief achievement is the "canonical cortical microcircuit," a kind of minimal electronic neurode that theoretically could be ganged into groups to perform neuromorphic computation.
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Chiefly engaging Merrill, though, was his denunciation of the new Nikon D-1 digital camera. He had taken the top-of-the-line digital Nikon on a recent trip to Asia down the Mekong River with his Laotian wife, Sang. I was fascinated by this photography lecture. Using standard digital camera CCDs with all their noise, said Merrill, the Nikon was horribly flawed, inflicting ghastly whirls on the pictures where there should have been whorls, and forcing delays and wasting power (no ready plugs in Laos). "You only know you have a real camera when you want to take it mountain climbing," he explained.
After several turns, in the midst of a shameful capitulation
toward Route 101 from Lawrence Expressway Merrill
announced that we had missed the key turnoff and overshot the
mark. Turning onto a backstreet by a company sign with three Xs
in it-whether adult or pre-IPO I could not descry-1 suggested
nervously that perhaps we should return to Poveon and eat in the cafeteria. That will be fine for me," 1 reassured him. I don't eat much lunch anyway." But Merrill still thought we could find the Lion & Compass any moment now, somewhere across 101 just off Magdalena, and we continued to thrash around for a total of some twenty-five minutes.
By the time we reached the restaurant, I knew enough not to
buy a Nikon digital camera, but Merrill had still to explain how Foveon had arrived at its miraculous altemative.
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By dint of the insistence of Alvia, who gentlVbut persistently corrected any journalists or historians who erred in their chronicles of her legendary husband, the world now increasingly recognized Faggin as the true father of the microprocessor and the silicon-gate process that made it possible. As a biological father, proud of their artist daughter, Marzia, and their two sons, he had also done well. Eric, twenty-three, was a graduate in physics and philosophy at Santa Clara, making a leisurely survey of the universe, and the other son, Mare, twenty-four, had done a double major in math and chemistry and then plunged deep in pursuit of a doctorate at Cornell, in nanotechnology. "I'll leave that to him," Faggin said with a smile.
In the Los Altos Hills, he found himself surrounded on all sides by local venturers and investors devastated first by the technology crash and then by the new century's long doldrums in initial public offerings. But Faggin had mostly emerged unscathed. After scoring handsomely in Synaptics, which had the first and only major Silicon Valley IPO of 2002, he had invested some $400,000 in Foveon with New Enterprise Associates (NRA), the eminent venture capitalists led by Richard Kramlich. He looked forward to the success of this promising technology in the midst of a booming market for imagers. Later he joined the board of Blue Are, the preeminent success in hardware for storage networking, a British company initially guided and financed by Italian friend Walter Allesandrini and run by another Italian friend Gianlucca Rattazzi. Faggin also became a director of the Allesandrini telecom equipment start-up, Avanex, which soared during the optics boom, collapsed in 2000, and then morphed into a successful scavenger among the ruins, picking up optical divisions from Alcatel and Corning.
Becoming a laureled lion in the Valley, Faggiif even received a call from Jim Thornburn of Zilog, the company begun by Paggin and Masatoshi Shima when they defected from Intel (Shima later returned to Intel to head its Japanese research facility). Faggin had broken entirely with Zilog in 1981 and, until the mid1990s, the company had subsisted on sales of billions of Z-8s and Z-80s, microprocessors embedded in automobiles, toys, kitchen white goods, and microwave ovens. Then Texas-Pacific Corporation decided to cash in on the telecom boom by taking the company private and relaunching it into the hot new market for network processors-microprocessors used to run networks.
Milking cash from the Z-80 to support entry into the communications chip business where it had no special competence, Zilog built a $700 million wafer fab and nearly went bankrupt. Thorbum asked Faggin for guidance in returning the company to its roots as an embedded microprocessor firm based on the Z-8. Engaging in a rare Silicon Valley success in the enterprise of nostalgia, Faggin enjoyed helping in the revival of his design from some thirty-five years before.
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Still, Foveon in Vegas was chiefly in demonstration mode. The new point-and-shoot camera did not spring from some brilliant new partnership with Kodak or Sanyo or Nikon. It bore the
somewhat tarnished name of Polaroid. But it was not made by Polaroid either. Polaroid was emerging from bankruptcy with an array of instant digital kiosk printers, cameras, and Polaroid legacy gear that was finding new life in the digital era. But under the stresses of its financial crisis it had licensed its name for digital cameras to an Italian from Hong Kong named Giovanni Tomaselli, head of a firm called World Wide Licenses Limited. Surely you have heard of WWLL.
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TO FOVRON'S PARTISANS, it was obvious that the company had its rivals surrounded on all sides. You want perfect top-ofthe-line pictures and you get the Sigma 10 for $1,200. You want high-resolution high-accuracy point-and-shoot, with 4.5 megapixels, 12x zoom, RAW files, and PiliLite software, and you can buy that too in the Polaroid x530. You want a camcorder, thirty frames a second of full motion VGA video and you can get
it from that same point-and-shoot device.
Dick Lyon could explain to you the intrinsic inferiority of all the hundreds of other cameras with slightly different features glittering across the pullulating floor. They may have had smaller pixels (and more "megapixels"), but each of those pixels held less electric charge and thus could capture less dynamic range (variation between its darkest and brightest level) and was more sensitive to noise. Plastic color filters over every pixel were a kludge compared to using the silicon itself as a filter. The picture would be worse, as Sony discovered with its new 12megapixel camera-and don't even mention the fiasco of the new I 4-megapixel Kodak.
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Current Gorvis equipment represents an 11,000-fold advance in six years, a rate of well over four doublings every year. Parallelism pays. With more than 1,000 fibers now sheathed in a single cable and 1,000 wavelengths per fiber and 10 gigabits equivalent per wavelength, a single fiber installation will soon be able to carry over a petabit, more than a full day's worth of 2003 Internet traffic, in one second. Emerging will be a global Foveal economy, engaged in dense image traffic, teleconferencing in high resolution, with full exploitation of the parallel advantage of light and image.
As image-bearing wavelengths become asymptotically free, they will be wasted in unexpected ways, enabling global simulations and experiences and transcending the isolation of human beings in time and space. Counting the number of wavelengths needed to accommodate some extrapolation of current bandwidth consumption is tantamount to counting the number of computers needed in the mainframe world of 1960, or tabulating the number of steam engines needed to run mines and factories in 1790.
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The continuing prevalence of the routine digital camera and the digital switch in fact represent a forced stopgap on the way to analog solutions that respond to the physics of the media. An image or a path, a surveiller or a map, a spectrographic calculator or a retinal recognizer, a routing scheme or a pattern matcher, none of these is intrinsically digital at all. In analog form, these calculations happen naturally and instantly. As Misha Mahowald explained to me on our long walk in the mountains of Pasadena, your ears and eyes do it constantly. "'They do not even know its hard."
By the inexorable evolution of the indithtry Foveon's color imaging will become the analog first step in a long process of cerebration that will end in simulating ever larger reaches of the human brain and extending back over fibers into a new global consciousness suffused with color and light.
That was the original dream, and it is the continuing quest.
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