U.S. power: Down but still unrivaled

BOOK REVIEW

Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America, Authors: Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane.

By Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane – Hard power. Soft power. Smart Power. Superpower. This is the language of foreign affairs, full of meaning but empty of measurement. Vagueness is, of course, purposeful in the hands of skilled diplomats and politicians, but it can signal shallowness, ignorance or worse. Lacking clear metrics for power, the U.S. national security establishment speculates about possible rivals while being led astray by trendy catchphrases.

The United States itself has a larger GDP and higher productivity than 10 years ago, but its long-term growth rate has slowed by half. That’s a reflection of internal imbalance – budget deficits, heavy taxes that hinder incentives to work and innovate, unfunded entitlements and more.

Existential threats hide in plain sight. If the United States wants to be a superpower for another century, it needs to focus on the barriers to economic growth within — not phantoms abroad. more> http://tinyurl.com/q8yjmvl

Robot Bartender Would Not Be Complete Without LEDs

By Keith Dawson – Rob Kaye and Pierre Michael, the two principals at Party Robotics, have been developing Bartendro for nearly three years.

As it turns out, dispensing liquids precisely and automatically is not easy. There were no suitable pumps available at hobbyists’ prices when Rob and Pierre started — they were all precision manufactured for medical or industrial markets, and cost hundreds of dollars each. So Pierre ended up procuring a CNC milling machine and designing and manufacturing pumps, valves, flow meters, and other parts for Bartendro in his garage. The partners claim that the current iteration of the Bartendro design can dispense liquids to within milliliter tolerance. more> http://tinyurl.com/d9gj79m

Related>

• Bartendro – A Cocktail Dispensing Robot, Party Robotics, kickstarter.com

The Evolving Interconnect

By Ann Steffora Mutschler – Chip interconnect protocol requirements are evolving as designs move to 20nm and below process geometries, and not always in predictable ways.

The basic concept behind cache is that data is stored closer to processor for faster access. Cache coherence allows copies of that data to be stored in multiple places. But to be coherent, it also has to be updated regularly at all places where it is stored, and that means the interconnects have to keep up with this whole process.

“So suddenly, instead of just talking to memory you’re talking to local memories, and those local memories are talking to other people’s local memories to try and make sure whenever you need something you’ve got the right version,” Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics said. “That has a big impact on what happens at the interconnect fabric level on these chips.” more> http://tinyurl.com/cf5xgsj

Updates from SIEMENS

Chuck Grindstaff on how Siemens gets the core of PLM right

By John Hayes – This video on Siemens is the fourth in a series of interviews on the future of PLM.  Verdi Ogewell talks to Siemens PLM President Chuck Grindstaff about the future for Siemen’s Teamcenter, NX and Solid Edge. He also includes commentary from analysts Mark Halpern of Gartner and Joe Barkai from IDC. Others include:

• Jim Hepplemann, CEO of PTC about their vision to bring Service Lifecycle Management and Application Lifecycle Management to users
• Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk on PLM in the Cloud
• Bernard Charles, CEO of Dassault Systemes about the future direction for CATIA, Solidworks and how the rest of the Dassault PLM suite will enable unique 3D experiences.

more> http://tinyurl.com/bnuhmm2

Unknown Signoff

By Graham Bell – Continued increases in SOC integration and the interaction of blocks in various states of power management are exacerbating the X problem. In simulation, the X value is assigned to all memory elements by default. While hardware resets can be used to initialize registers to known values, resetting every flop or latch is not practical because of routing overhead. For synchronous resets, synthesis tools typically club these with data-path signals, thereby losing the distinction between X-free logic and X-prone logic. This in turn causes unwarranted X-propagation during the reset simulation phase.

Lisa Piper, from Real Intent, presented a solution to the X-propagation problem that is part technology and part methodology. more> http://tinyurl.com/d77nhcg