Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

Post by lightedman » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 2:41 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #76

slededit wrote: post #73

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You don't need XRay and your reflow oven can be a toaster oven. I do recommend a cheap microscope and a good pair of tweezers though. With this you can do 0.5mm pitch BGA although that is pushing it. I've made hundreds of prototypes this way. The fear of BGA parts is seriously overblown. The only real expensive part is the finer pitch parts will require tighter tolerances on the PCB which will take you out of the PCB…

Your comment reads as if you equate 'BGA' with 'SMD', a BGA is a ball grid array with up to 1,000 tiny pads that have been pre-dipped in solder. Your toaster isn't going to work.

Post by taneq » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

extralego wrote: post #129

makmanalp wrote: post #113

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> the backoffice engineers would make a build that fixed only those bugs Makes perfect business sense! Those customers didn't pay to get those bugs fixed, so why should they get the fixes??? /s Holy moly.

Seems very similar to how Restaurants and grocery stores throw food out instead of giving it to shelters and homeless people. It’s a common corporate policy in the US. The only justification seems to be that if they gave it away, they might miss out on some otherwise potential sales.

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 2:49 AM UTC

drblast wrote: post #128

WalterBright wrote: post #77

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I designed the ABEL language back in the 80's for compiling designs targeted at programmable logic arrays and gate arrays. It was very successful, but it died after a decade or so. It'd probably be around today and up to date if it was open source. A shame it isn't. I don't even know who owns the rights to it these days, or if whoever owns it even knows they have the rights to it, due to spinoffs and mergers.

Holy shit, around 2005/6 I took an EE class in programmable logic that used ABEL for the labs. I couldn't find any information on it anywhere and all we had to learn the language was an old single-page photocopy of an example that had been re-copied so many times it was barely readable. And the ends of the lines were cut off. Needless to say, the ABEL projects were frustrating...indeed a shame that it's not open sour…

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 3:02 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #135

drblast wrote: post #128

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Holy shit, around 2005/6 I took an EE class in programmable logic that used ABEL for the labs. I couldn't find any information on it anywhere and all we had to learn the language was an old single-page photocopy of an example that had been re-copied so many times it was barely readable. And the ends of the lines were cut off. Needless to say, the ABEL projects were frustrating...indeed a shame that it's not open sour…

I have an original manual around here somewhere, I wonder if anyone would shoot me if I scanned it and made it available :-/ Some more info (I'm surprised at the response here!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Boolean_Expression_La... "The ABEL concept and original compiler were created by Russell de Pina of Data I/O's Applied Research Group in 1981." This is false. I don't know what de Pina did, but ABEL was…

Post by garmaine » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 3:10 AM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #60

aphextron wrote: post #42

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The Space Race bankrupted an already failing command economy in the USSR. However it was a massive economic boon for US capitalists, as evidenced by our aerospace and defense industries today. The great thing about defense spending is that it is almost entirely domestic. We're not running up some huge trade deficit with a foreign power. It creates millions of jobs from Florida to California.

On the other hand, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window .