Framing It: 12.17.2019

The tiniest capacitors! Glitter bombing porch pirates! Very tiny solid state LiDARs! ARM servers!

Very Small Capacitors!

• Murata has released a tiny, tiny, tiny capacitor. It’s a 0.1uF in 008004 package (or 0.25mm x 0.125mm).
• Capacitors, especially 0.1uF caps, are absolute necessities in electronic engineering. Sprinkle them on your circuit, and when you have enough, your circuit will work.
• However, it’s very hard to get caps of this value this small. With this size reduction, the footprint of the circuit goes down, and logically the size of the device gets smaller.
• No, you can’t hand solder these.

A Smaller LIDAR

• Intel has released a new depth camera in the Intel RealSense line. The RealSense LiDAR Camera L515 is a tiny MEMS LIDAR with less than 3.5W of power consumption, weighs about 100 grams, and has a 9 meter maximum distance.
• This makes it perfect for applications for robotics in the home or warehouse.
• Total cost is about $350, shipping next April.

ARM, moving to servers

• Amazon has announced the upcoming release of ARM-based servers for AWS.
• Although deliveries of ARM chips have ballooned over the past decade, servers still mostly consist of x86 chips, supplied by Intel (and recently AMD). ARM chips make up only about 1% of the server market.
• The new AWS ARM chip is called the Graviton2, and uses 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS built on a 7nm process.

It’s almost Christmas, which can mean only one thing

• It’s the busiest shipping time of the year, which means porch pirates are ready to steal your packages. Don’t worry, because Mark Rober is back with the Glitter Bomb Trap 2.0.

• This video has a cameo from Macaulay Culkin.
• But Glitter Bomb Bait Package is hard to build and a little expensive. You could do it the easy way and fill Amazon boxes with trash.