Pub Date : 2024-12-05DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779342
Somdeb Majumdar;Uday Mallappa;Hesham Mostafa
CHIP DESIGN has come a long way since 1971, when Federico Faggin finished sketching the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, using little more than a straight-edge and colored pencils. Today's designers have a plethora of software tools at their disposal to plan and test new integrated circuits. But as chips have grown staggeringly complex—with some comprising hundreds of billions of transistors—so have the problems designers must solve. And those tools aren't always up to the task. ■ Modern chip engineering is an iterative process of nine stages, from system specification to packaging. Each stage has several substages, and each of those can take weeks to months, depending on the size of the problem and its constraints. Many design problems have only a handful of viable solutions out of 10 100 to 10 1000 possibilities—a needle-in-a-hay-stack scenario if ever there was one. Automation tools in use today often fail to solve real-world problems at this scale, which means that humans must step in, making the process more laborious and time-consuming than chipmakers would like. ■ Not surprisingly, there is a growing interest in using machine learning to speed up chip design. However, as our team at the Intel AI Lab has found, machine-learning algorithms are often insufficient on their own, particularly when dealing with multiple constraints that must be satisfied.
{"title":"AI Alone isn't Ready for Chip Design: A Combination of Classical Search and Machine Learning May be the Way Forward","authors":"Somdeb Majumdar;Uday Mallappa;Hesham Mostafa","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779342","url":null,"abstract":"CHIP DESIGN has come a long way since 1971, when Federico Faggin finished sketching the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, using little more than a straight-edge and colored pencils. Today's designers have a plethora of software tools at their disposal to plan and test new integrated circuits. But as chips have grown staggeringly complex—with some comprising hundreds of billions of transistors—so have the problems designers must solve. And those tools aren't always up to the task. ■ Modern chip engineering is an iterative process of nine stages, from system specification to packaging. Each stage has several substages, and each of those can take weeks to months, depending on the size of the problem and its constraints. Many design problems have only a handful of viable solutions out of 10\u0000<sup>100</sup>\u0000 to 10\u0000<sup>1000</sup>\u0000 possibilities—a needle-in-a-hay-stack scenario if ever there was one. Automation tools in use today often fail to solve real-world problems at this scale, which means that humans must step in, making the process more laborious and time-consuming than chipmakers would like. ■ Not surprisingly, there is a growing interest in using machine learning to speed up chip design. However, as our team at the Intel AI Lab has found, machine-learning algorithms are often insufficient on their own, particularly when dealing with multiple constraints that must be satisfied.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 12","pages":"38-43"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142777907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-12-05DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779338
Sjef Verhoeven
At a time when we all carry smartphones that can stream high-definition movies into our hands, the romance of listening to old-school analog broadcast radio nevertheless endures. For some it's a break from the cookies, contracts, and terms of service that lurk behind every online activity. For folks like me though, a big part of the charm is the thrill that comes from pulling in a signal from thousands of kilometers away—and doing it the time-honored way: with an understanding of atmospheric conditions, antennas, and electronics.
{"title":"The Ultimate SDR Receiver > This Open-Source, Low-Cost Radio has Ultrahigh Performance","authors":"Sjef Verhoeven","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779338","url":null,"abstract":"At a time when we all carry smartphones that can stream high-definition movies into our hands, the romance of listening to old-school analog broadcast radio nevertheless endures. For some it's a break from the cookies, contracts, and terms of service that lurk behind every online activity. For folks like me though, a big part of the charm is the thrill that comes from pulling in a signal from thousands of kilometers away—and doing it the time-honored way: with an understanding of atmospheric conditions, antennas, and electronics.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 12","pages":"18-20"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142777909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-12-05DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779365
Jeff Perry
Poor communication causes problems, delays, and failures in teams and organizations. As engineers who want to communicate what we are working on and why it matters, we need to work on getting better at it.
{"title":"Careers: Improve Your Workplace Communication: Pro Tips for Talking to Leaders, Clients, and Teams","authors":"Jeff Perry","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10779365","url":null,"abstract":"Poor communication causes problems, delays, and failures in teams and organizations. As engineers who want to communicate what we are working on and why it matters, we need to work on getting better at it.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 12","pages":"21-22"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10779365","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142777535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749724
Allison Marsh
It isn't often that housewives get credit in the annals of invention, but Fumiko Minami earned her place by helping her husband, Yoshitada, invent the first automatic rice cooker. Yoshitada operated a small factory that made electric water heaters for Toshiba, and so he understood the basic principles involved in controlling temperatures. But it was Fumiko who spent five years researching and testing the perfect recipe for rice. She found the key to automating the rice-cooking process was to turn off the cooker after exactly 20 minutes of boiling. Toshiba engineers eventually landed on a bimetallic switch that bent and cut the circuit when the cooker's internal temperature surpassed 100°C. Toshiba began selling the ER-4 denki-gama (electric pot) in December 1955. It was priced at a steep 3,200 yen-one third the average monthly salary in Japan at the time-and yet within the first year, the company was producing 200,000 rice cookers a month. Today, the worldwide annual market for rice cookers is nearly US $3 billion.
{"title":"Past Forward: The Automatic Rice Cooker's Unlikely Inventor","authors":"Allison Marsh","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10749724","url":null,"abstract":"It isn't often that housewives get credit in the annals of invention, but Fumiko Minami earned her place by helping her husband, Yoshitada, invent the first automatic rice cooker. Yoshitada operated a small factory that made electric water heaters for Toshiba, and so he understood the basic principles involved in controlling temperatures. But it was Fumiko who spent five years researching and testing the perfect recipe for rice. She found the key to automating the rice-cooking process was to turn off the cooker after exactly 20 minutes of boiling. Toshiba engineers eventually landed on a bimetallic switch that bent and cut the circuit when the cooker's internal temperature surpassed 100°C. Toshiba began selling the ER-4 denki-gama (electric pot) in December 1955. It was priced at a steep 3,200 yen-one third the average monthly salary in Japan at the time-and yet within the first year, the company was producing 200,000 rice cookers a month. Today, the worldwide annual market for rice cookers is nearly US $3 billion.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"76-76"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10749724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748563
Ted C. Fishman
A ALONG THE COUNTRY ROAD that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx of tradespeople who muster for these massive construction jobs. With tech giants, utilities, and governments budgeting upwards of US $1 trillion for capital expansion to join the global battle for AI dominance, data centers are the bunkers, factories, and skunkworks-and concrete and electricity are the fuel and ammunition. ¶ To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank's ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material-mostly concrete-that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.
{"title":"Climate Tech: The AI Boom Rests on Billions of Tonnnes of Concrete: Why Tech's Climate Pledges Require the Reinvention of Concrete","authors":"Ted C. Fishman","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748563","url":null,"abstract":"A ALONG THE COUNTRY ROAD that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx of tradespeople who muster for these massive construction jobs. With tech giants, utilities, and governments budgeting upwards of US $1 trillion for capital expansion to join the global battle for AI dominance, data centers are the bunkers, factories, and skunkworks-and concrete and electricity are the fuel and ammunition. ¶ To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank's ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material-mostly concrete-that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"58-69"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748560
Tom Clynes
FOR A MACHINE that's designed to replicate a star, the world's newest stellarator is a surprisingly humble-looking apparatus. The kitchen-table-size contraption sits atop stacks of bricks in a cinder-block room at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J., its parts hand-labeled in marker. The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.
{"title":"Energy: An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator: Fast Prototyping Revives a 70-Year-Old Fusion Reactor Design","authors":"Tom Clynes","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748560","url":null,"abstract":"FOR A MACHINE that's designed to replicate a star, the world's newest stellarator is a surprisingly humble-looking apparatus. The kitchen-table-size contraption sits atop stacks of bricks in a cinder-block room at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J., its parts hand-labeled in marker. The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"28-39"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-11-11DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748562
Eliza Strickland;Peter B. Meyer
EVERY INVENTION BEGINS with a problem-and the creative act of seeing a problem where others might just see unchangeable reality. For one 5-year-old, the problem was simple: She liked to have her tummy rubbed as she fell asleep. But her mom, exhausted from working two jobs, often fell asleep herself while putting her daughter to bed. “So [the girl] invented a teddy bear that would rub her belly for her,” explains Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson MIT Program. Its mission is to nurture the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. ¶ Anyone can learn to be an inventor, Couch says, given the right resources and encouragement. “Invention doesn't come from some innate genius, it's not something that only really special people get to do,” she says. Her program creates invention-themed curricula for U.S. classrooms, ranging from kin-dergarten to community college.
{"title":"Introduction: Why the Art of Invention is Always Being Reinvented: As IEEE Spectrum Turns 60, We Celebrate Creativity and Chutzpah in Tech","authors":"Eliza Strickland;Peter B. Meyer","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10748562","url":null,"abstract":"EVERY INVENTION BEGINS with a problem-and the creative act of seeing a problem where others might just see unchangeable reality. For one 5-year-old, the problem was simple: She liked to have her tummy rubbed as she fell asleep. But her mom, exhausted from working two jobs, often fell asleep herself while putting her daughter to bed. “So [the girl] invented a teddy bear that would rub her belly for her,” explains Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson MIT Program. Its mission is to nurture the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. ¶ Anyone can learn to be an inventor, Couch says, given the right resources and encouragement. “Invention doesn't come from some innate genius, it's not something that only really special people get to do,” she says. Her program creates invention-themed curricula for U.S. classrooms, ranging from kin-dergarten to community college.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"61 11","pages":"18-22"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10748562","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142600155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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