AdaCore also suports SPARK, a cross between a development environment, a tool set and and an Ada subset, which is even more suitable for safety-critical environment than Ada.

Ada Lovelace Day: 7 October 2011

There are lots of EDA data formats with long, illustrious legacies. GDS-II and Gerber are great examples. But a few years ago, a new format to replace Gerber was devised, with the less-euphonious name IPC-2581. But calling it a replacement for Gerber is sort of like calling modern video games a replacement for the old family radio of the ‘20s. There’s a lot more going on than just a one-for-one swap.

Gerber plots simply contain the PCB patterning. But the IPC-2581 format contains, in one place, much more information for the fabrication, assembly, and … Read More → "Gerber Grows Up"

The iPad may already be hitting its midlife crisis. According to financial insiders at JP Morgan Chase, component suppliers and manufacturing partners are being told to scale back their orders for the fourth quarter of this year. If true, that would be the first time that iPad production levels have gone backward.

The cutback is hefty, too: down 25%, from a planned 17 million iPads to just 13 million units. This amid widespread accolades for the latest iGizmo and a lack of any serious competitors. If the iPad was losing ground to, say, HP, IBM, or Amazon tablets that … Read More → "iPad Leveling Off?"

A recent Intel keynote speech noted that the cost of one transistor is less than the cost of the ink in the period dot at the end of a sentence.

Astounding. Semiconductor transistors are one of humankind’s most amazing inventions, yet they’re more plentiful than grains of rice.

I wonder if there are heat issues with stacking memory die like that?

Micron Technology, America’s one-and-only memory manufacturer, has come up with a cool and unusual new type of memory chip. Well, it’s not really a chip. It’s more like a module. It’s a cube, actually.

The company calls it a “hybrid memory cube” (HMC) and it starts out as a set of stacked die within one package. That’s not terribly unusual in itself; plenty of companies have stacked two or more silicon dice on top of each other, and the technique is especially useful for memories. But the HMCs use Read More → "Micron’s Memory Cube"