“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 4 – The 1980s, 1990s, and the end

The 1980s presented many significant challenges to the Heath Company’s kit business. Commercial electronic equipment had become abundant, and automated assembly, especially with the advent of surface-mount technology, drove down the labor costs in many consumer products including stereo receivers, televisions, and Ham gear. Microcomputers and PCs became the main focus of attention. While Heath continued to develop new, more advanced products for the amateur radio … Read More → "“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 4 – The 1980s, 1990s, and the end"

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 3 – The 1970s

Part 3 of this article series covers a period of sustained growth for the Heath Company. The company’s amateur radio equipment kits continued to sell well, but by the end of the 1970s, its most advanced radio kits were already becoming too difficult to build for less advanced kit builders. Meanwhile, the company’s early microcomputer kits quickly started to dominate Heath’s product portfolio.

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Open Standards and the Rise of Embedded Ecosystem SoMs

My podcast guest this week is longtime friend of the show Matt Burns from Samtec! Matt and I chat about the trends driving the adoption of high performance, small form factor open standard SoMs. We also discuss the details of the PCI Express 7 specification and the newest endeavors being developed by the Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies. 

 

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Next-Generation Power Technology for Data Center Accelerator Cards

I want you to put your “imagining hat” on. If you don’t own an “imagining hat,” you’ll just have to imagine that you have one proudly perched on the top of your head. Let’s start by imagining an accelerator card whose core processing device demands 2,000 amps (my eyes are already watering).

Now imagine multiple accelerator cards on a motherboard in … Read More → "Next-Generation Power Technology for Data Center Accelerator Cards"

“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 2 – The 1960s

Part 2 of this article series covers a period of explosive growth for the Heath Company as its amateur radio equipment kits captured a larger and larger share of the market. This article series is based on a presentation by Chas Gilmore (W8IAI), a life-long Ham who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company for more than two decades, … Read More → "“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 2 – The 1960s"

Predictions for Multi-Die System Designs in 2025

There’s a famous saying along the lines of, “Predicting things is difficult, especially about the future.” This quote has been attributed to many people, including Mark Twain, Niels Bohr, and Yogi Berra. In Yogi’s case, however, it’s usually phrased as, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

I know that when I staggered into the current millennium, … Read More → "Predictions for Multi-Die System Designs in 2025"

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featured chalk talk

ADI Pressure Sensing Solutions Enable the Future of Industrial Intelligent Edge
The intelligent edge enables greater autonomy, sustainability, connectivity, and security for a variety of electronic designs today. In this episode of Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton and Maurizio Gavardoni from Analog Devices explore how the intelligent edge is driving a transformation in industrial automation, the role that pressure sensing solutions play in IIoT designs and how Analog Devices is reshaping pressure sensor manufacturing with single flow calibration.
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60,254 views
discussion
Posted on Feb 10 at 11:19am by Steven Leibson
Glad you liked it, metasequoia. There will be two more articles in this series. Then, I think I'll be done telling Chas Gilmore's Heath stories, at least for now.
Posted on Feb 10 at 10:17am by metasequoia
Another great article; thank you Steven
Posted on Feb 6 at 7:42am by Steven Leibson
The tradeoffs here are the added latency and the added incremental cost of CXL memory over local memory (due to extra memory controllers, memory expansion boards, and PCIe switches). If you don't mind either of those, then CXL can be used as a memory pool as you suggest.
Posted on Feb 5 at 11:03pm by sandeepsathe2008
Hi Steven, Very nice article. I read your previous article also. One possible deployment of disaggregated memory in a data center rack can be follows - - PCIe Backplane based rack - CPU blades in the rack will have only nominal DRAM - Rack will also have Memory expander blade(...
Posted on Feb 5 at 1:26pm by Steven Leibson
Thanks Chas. I'm hoping you're posting these articles to those Facebook groups. It'd be a shame for them to miss out. --Steve
Posted on Feb 5 at 11:02am by cgilmore@groupgilmore.com
As I am sure many of you know, there are a number of Heathkit related groups on Facebook. One nice feature of these groups is there are a number of former Heath employees who follow those groups and, from time-to-time they’ll respond to posts providing unique responses that come ...
Posted on Feb 3 at 10:46am by Karl Stevens
Thanks. That is almost the same as having a different compiler. Also I am guessing support for plain old C? C# has recently added conditional assignments which eliminates a lot of if/else/branch statements. So now we have a programming language source syntax that closely resembles the logic expressions ...
Posted on Jan 31 at 8:18am by Max Maxfield
Hi RedBarnDesigner -- I can't wait to hear what you think about "The Story of Earth" by Hazen. It's one of my favorites. A couple of others I always recommend are "The Disappearing Spoon" by Sam Keen, "Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell" by Dennis Bray, and "Life's Ratchet: ...
Posted on Jan 31 at 12:49am by tracker1
Rust is relatively tightly coupled with LLVM which is generally pretty straight forward for supported targets. Embedded use and support tends to vary a lot outside that. https://rust-embedded.org/ Is your best starting point. That said you should get some pretty reasonable code reuse.
Posted on Jan 30 at 1:50pm by RedBarnDesigner
Hi Max, Chris Packham is a naturalist and wildlife advocate and presenter with the BBC. He presented a series some while ago that went through some of the things that you mention from the very early days (geologically speaking) to discussing how humans have affected the planetary ecosystem. What I ...
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