As its name implies, “The Drawing Board” column, each month, often discusses innovations that look highly promising in the laboratory but aren’t quite ready for prime time. On occasion, that requires perusing abstracts from scientific journals and browsing through a few Ph.D. dissertations. Many of these innovations never make it to commercial production; others represent […]
The Drawing Board: FPGAs Search for the Killer App
One of the most desirable additions to any technology is the killer app—a function or application that makes it indispensable or clearly superior to competing products, and jump-starts sales. Perhaps the earliest example is VisiCalc, an electronic spreadsheet that debuted in 1979; initially, it only ran on the Apple II and is credited with making […]
The Drawing Board: Power Efficiency Key to Bit Mining Success
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have had more than their share of press over the last few years. Many articles have concentrated on their chaotic price history, but recently journalists have turned their attention to the large amount of power consumed by cryptocurrency operations. Bitcoin analyst Alex de Vries maintains a website, Digiconomist.net that tracks […]
The Drawing Board: Johnny Cab Comes of Age
In 2019, the autonomous vehicle will start to do to the traditional automobile what the horseless carriage did to the horse a century ago: reduce it to a curiosity operated by a small number of enthusiastic hobbyists. And reshape society in the process. Why 2019? After several years of successful real-world testing, marred by several […]
New Technology Confronts An Old Enemy
The US power grid is getting old with parts of it dating back over a century. In fact, 70 percent of transmission lines and power transformers are over 25 years old, and power plants average over 30 years. Consequently, its reliability has been declining for decades. According to the Department of Energy, the “second half […]
Troubled Times Ahead for Supercomputers
In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), supercomputers represent the peak of capability, with performance measured in petaFLOPs (1015 operations per second). They play a key role in climate research, drug research, oil and gas exploration, cryptanalysis, and nuclear weapons development. But after decades of steady improvement, changes are coming as old technologies start […]