Taking the Measure

October 9, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

At EDN, we are analyzing data from a salary and job-satisfaction survey of electrical engineers worldwide. We’ll publish the results next month. But by coincidence, I just got a call from a reporter at Monster.com who wanted to talk about salary trends among electrical engineers.

I couldn’t divulge specific information from the forthcoming report on our global survey, but there are some interesting results worth commenting on in the August issue of IEEE Spectrum ("Engineers Are Doing Well by Doing Good," p. 64), which survey various engineering disciplines. Practitioners in computer science scored the highest salaries—at $90,000 for systems engineers and $80,000 for applications engineers. Electrical engineers came in at ...Read More

October 7, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Conventional wisdom holds that the foundry owns the responsibility to fund and manage the tools and processes associated with semiconductor product quality, says Phil Burlison at Verigy. However, he says, in the newer technology nodes, yield accountability involves more than the optical inline inspection and other related monitoring functions that are an integral part of the wafer-fabrication process. As process geometries shrink, he says, “There is a growing view that the quantitative data generated on ATE can be used well beyond a ‘go/no go’ filter for defects. Integral to this new process are the tools that can analyze and convert test-failure data into meaningful indicators of design/process problems.”

The emergence of such tools poses questions: who pays for them, how is the data that the tools generate promulgated, and to whom? To investigate ...Read More

Industries: Design, Production Test, and Yield

October 6, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

In a post last week I suggested that engineers and physicists might be better stewards of the economy than are politicians and economists. In an article in Slate, Jordan Ellenberg, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, suggests the economy is actually in the hands of not-too-smart gamblers.

In his post, titled “We're Down $700 Billion. Let's Go Double or Nothing!” Ellenberg likens the “complex derivatives behind the current financial havoc” to the martingale game—a “sure fire” way to make, for example, a hundred dollars on a coin-toss game. You bet $10...Read More

October 5, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky, and Ultra Hal are undoubtedly spending every waking moment cramming for the Turing test slated for Sunday October 12 at the University of Reading, under the auspices of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. One or more of them hope (if I may ascribe human emotions to them in advance of passing the test) to answer the question—as an article in the Guardian puts it, “Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.”

The go...Read More

October 3, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

MIT will celebrate the 50th Smoot-aversary tomorrow, Saturday, October 4. The event honors Oliver Smoot, who served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and as president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2004. He also famously served as his own “calibration standard”—with which the Harvard Bridge was found to measure 364.4 smoots (plus or minus one ear) in length. By the way you can use Google's online unit-conversion calculator to determine that semiconductor process geometries are approaching the 15-nanosmoot node.

Industries: Bench and Modular Instrumentation