Neato used to have a straight edge with 90 degree corners on both front edges. My Neato D7 is thr best robot vacuum I had. Unfortunately they shut down their cloud services, so it's useless now.
As an engineer in semiconductors in the Netherlands, I hear from a lot of my friends working at ASML the typical red flags of the rot. They have a very thick middle management layer. Nobody feels like they are working at a high tech company with cutting edge solutions. I believe the customer support roles are very dynamic and satisfying.
I have been buying an Asus laptop with Intel for our employees in the last 1.5 years, an ASUS ExpertBook P5 90NX0861-M007X0 to be precise, and it did not see even a cent of price increase.
I suspect this is because of its CPU, Intel Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB RAM directly soldered on the CPU package, being overstock or something, or Intel secured the RAM supply upfront. I don't know but it's wild that this laptop is still early 2025 prices.
You can and this is absolutely done for GPUs. It's often more feasible to jump to the next gen GPU at this point while the old part goes into the refurbished market. I believe China buys a lit of parts like these. You will never know how much lifetime is left in them though, as there's no history of the chip.
Chips age and fail with age. You can check hot-carrier injection, bias-temperature instability and electromigration as they are the main aging mechanisms. All if these are a linear function of time but exponentieal of temperature. 90-100C these chips are running at are really tough, so they are likely to fail at couple of percent to 10% range in 2-3 years depending on the margins they have in the design.
The solder joints are notorious to fail at a high rate too.
Wow this is a nice read. I never thought injection moulding precision, relative to the dimensions of the object, to be in the same ballpark of what you can achieve with photolithography in chip manufacturing. This of course makes sense because we are at the end limited by the same principles of mechanical inaccuracy.
Even in late 90's the IP wasn't waponized. Most start-ups were just a bunch of employees leaving a company to compete with them while improving upon the previous IP.
Nowadays even start-ups are paranoid and starting a semicon company is orders of magnitude harder..
This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.
This is plainly wrong. I'm a chip designer. There's no way to implement a DFF operating at 12 GHz in 180nm, period. This isn't an optimization problem, it is physics.
Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition.
It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering but I've seen companies doing it to their own dies too.
Things get more blurry at the board level, the combinations of suppliers and service providers are endless.
That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.
Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.