Framing It: 8.13.19
Meme Telepathy
Last month, Elon Musk live streamed his latest foray towards the future of humanity. Neuralink is the latest in Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) and in the last few weeks researchers have weighed in on the viability and practicality of a computer that can read your mind.
Before last month, the record holder for the most electrodes in a Brain Computer Interface was the Utah Array, clocking in at 128 or 256 electrodes in the brain. Neuralink is looking at putting more than ten thousand electrodes in specific areas of the brain.
The key insight of the Neuralink presentation is that the technology of reading individual neurons in a brain is very lacking. Neuralink is working to change that with custom silicon that can read thousands of individual neurons and write to a good proportion of them. Because it’s 2019 and Neuralink is in the Bay Area, they’re doing this with machine learning, or basically throwing a bunch of data at a bunch of statistics.
Aaaaaymd
AMD is going gangbusters again. AMD announced Google and Twitter would be customers for their second-generation EPYC server chips. Right now, Intel is the king of the datacenter with 90% of chips in Google’s data centers being manufactured by Intel’s bunnymen. Intel has had difficulty fabricating their new server chips, leading to delays until the end of the year.
Even Smaller LEDs
The greatest achievement in semiconductor engineering, massive blinky, is getting even smaller. A while back we caught wind of 2mm square addressable RGB LEDS from Worldsemi. These are WS2812s, or NeoPixels, or whatever you call addressable LEDs of that nature. They’re also much smaller — normal WS2812s are 5mm square.
Now there’s an even smaller LED, only 1mm square. Cree UHD1110-FKA LEDs are the smallest RGB LEDs we’ve seen, and they’re tiny. The package is only 1mm by 1mm by 0.6mm tall. No, they’re not individually addressable, they’re just common anode RGB LEDs, but these are the smallest full-color blinkies available.
The particular package for the UHD1110-FKA is a PLCC-4, a package that’s seen in a number of other RGB LEDs that have come onto the market in recent months. The difference between these LEDs and others is the price: at a quantity of 10,000, these other LEDs cost $0.20. The Cree version costs just $0.05. That’s extraordinarily cheap, and we’re looking at a future of even cheaper RGB LED panels.
