Jul

20

OLPC and 50×15

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The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project is making some pretty good stride recently. Last week, Intel finally put behind its tussle with OPLC in the past and announced that it would join the OLPC for a good cause to produce $100 laptop (Intel press release).

OLPC is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to bring learning opportunities to the most remote and poorest children of the world by providing connected, low-cost and rugged laptops to each and every child in their daily live. The OLPC laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone will generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection. OLPC is based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. The corporate members are AMD, Brightstar, Chi Lin, eBay, Google, Intel, Marvell, News Corporation, Nortel Networks, Quanta Computer, Red Hat and SES Astra. More information on OLPC is available at their official website www.laptop.org.

In parallel to the OLPC initiative, AMD also has established an initiative of 50×15. The mission of 50×15 is to enable affordable, accessible Internet connectivity and computing capabilities for 50 percent of the world’s population by the year 2015. On the recent 50×15 activities, AMD has participated in influential events such as the World Economic Forum Africa and TED Global, where the issue of digital inclusion was brought to the forefront of international agendas unlike ever before. You could learn more about the 50×15 initiative from 50×15 Website and
Track Learning Labs using Google™ Maps Technology

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Jun

11

VideoHistory of Japan’s Semiconductor Industry

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The 2007 VLSI Symposium will be held on June 12-14 (Technology Symposium) and June 14-16 (Circuit Symposium) at Kyoto, Japan. My colleague, Dakshi, is attending the conference this week, and I have to cover for him this week. It is not easy to backup Dakshi since he is an incredibly capable guy and handles many things. His passdown list is so long that I have to print it out and read carefully. So, I will keep my blog short and sweet this week :)

If you are interested in the early history of transistor and Japan’s semiconductor industry, I strongly recommend that you watch the excellent documentaries below. The documentaries give a detailed account of how Japan learned the trade secrets of semiconductor technology from US in the 60’s and 70’s, and became the most dominant electronic forces in the 80s. However, Japan’s semiconductor industry has lost its supremacy in recent years, overshadowed by Taiwan and Korean semiconductor companies. In fact, the current de facto standards for logic technology are IBM and TSMC (Intel is on its own), and the memory technology is dominated by Samsung.

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