I'm not in the car industry, but I am in the electronics industry and I have definitely felt the chip shortage. Some of my parts just aren't available, and lead times are 3-4 months. Seems to be the result of production stopping at the beginning of the pandemic and they still haven't caught up.

I was on a call with our Future Electronics reps yesterday and they more or less said the same. Every CM is booked to capacity as well. They said it's a combination of stopping production for almost 3 months and then an explosion of latent demand for consumer devices + WFH demand.

Btw, another interesting ramification of both the trade war with China and the travel restrictions is that a lot of low/mid scale electronic manufacturing is being moved to Mexico.

> Btw, another interesting ramification of both the trade war with China and the travel restrictions is that a lot of low/mid scale electronic manufacturing is being moved to Mexico.

That's a first I have seen manufacturers moving to a country with similar wage levels. Last I heard, wasn't a lot of manufacturing shifting to Vietnam, Malaysia and to some extent, India?

It's true for a lot of commodities too. The prices for Steel have increased to over 45% of the price levels seen in January 2020. Capacity isn't coming up fast even enough to meet the demand, and manufacturers won't invest in new capacity because they know the demand is transient.

Yeah, definitely noticed this. For example, I designed something (low volume) at the start of 2020 with a precision gyroscope that was easily available with over a hundred in stock each at Digikey, Mouser, Avnet etc. and when it came to starting building them around October/November, nobody had any parts of any of the variants in stock and the lead time said 22 weeks...

Although looking now for that part at least the shortage seems to be easing - there are about a dozen showing up as available across a few places on Octopart and the lead time seems to have dropped back to eight weeks.

And that's where the term "tape out" comes from, and the term is still used to this day (although mostly just in IC design).

Am I the only one who can smell these pages as I look at them?

The data itself isn't 60 GHz, you're just modulating it onto a 60 GHz carrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation

You can order trinitite from United Nuclear. I stuck some in an HPGe and was able to learn some interesting things: https://www.hscott.net/analyzing-trinitite-a-radioactive-pie...

That's a very fine write-up!

This is really exciting. I've thought about building a datapath on an FPGA that uses partial reconfiguration to synthesize new hardware blocks based on the math being doing at a particular instant, and it sounds like DARPA wants to do that on steroids. Server CPUs coupled with FPGAs are already being used for a lot of interesting things and I think it makes a lot of sense to integrate together even tighter. I'm also really happy to hear that they're funding new EDA software that is actually smart. The best we have right now is some whitelist based rule checking for schematics and layout. I want full simulation, a perfect, proven parts library with symbols, footprints, 3D models, non-ideal SPICE models, and a thermal model for every part in existence, smart rule checking that looks not only for things like unconnected nets, but logic level mismatches and clock edges that are too fast.

Little pieces of this exist already, but in my opinion, software for creating hardware is way behind software for creating software.

Correction: their last day is tomorrow, April 8th.

Thanks, I updated the title.

While this page is mostly about sound waves, here's a great talk using similar tools to explain RF: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUGr_Z04SKs&t=12m31s

Here's the interactive slides to play with: http://visual-dsp.switchb.org/

There's no evidence that nonionizing radiation like microwaves can cause cancer. I think that was probably more likely due to the fact that everyone back then smoked about 4 packs a day.

Plus that bug was a backscatter radio. It didn't actually emit radio waves on its own, it just resonated in response to a carrier wave. The Soviets had to illuminate it with a 330 MHz radio signal from outside, but that's not ionizing.

If you look at the design of said device (invented by Lev Sergeivich Termen aka Leo Theremin), you'll suspect that it will require a pretty powerful microwave beam to work.

[Probably] not enough to cause any harm. RF isn't dangerous until it is powerful enough to cause local heating and obviously this wasn't that powerful. I can't really find much info on how much power Theremin's bug took, but modern backscatter radios usually operate at very low power, at the level of ambient RF from normal radio etc but can transmit 10 km or more. Based on other designs I've seen I suspect it wouldn't actually take much, though that is just an educated guess.

One guy had pancreatic cancer and another guy had leukemia, if I googled the right people.

Doesn’t sound like cigarettes?

According to German cancer society, leukemia is associated with smoking but majority of leukemia cases cannot be attributed to a specific cause (https://www.krebsgesellschaft.de/onko-internetportal/basis-i...), and 25% of pancreatic cancers attributed to smoking, with alcohol abuse greatly increasing the risk (https://www.krebsgesellschaft.de/onko-internetportal/basis-i...).

Smoking (and excessive drinking) kills in many ways... and if your family has a cancer history, risk is even higher. Wonder how long I'll live, a relative died after years of battling liver, lung and other cancers due to smoking+drinking.

Non-ionizing radiation does kill at ultra-high level, but not through cancer, just plain old burning. That's exactly what your microwave over does.

Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the subway.