ANSI FANCY

Dick Pountain /Idealog 334/ 06 May 2022 10:01

During the darkest days of lockdown I kept myself amused mostly by practising my jazz guitar chords and by writing Python programs. I write a lot of small, off-the-cuff programs, for everything from updating phone codes or solving maths puzzles, to playing with simulations to do with Games Theory. Python is just the last of a long list of languages I’ve used –  Basic, Forth, Pascal, Lisp, Ruby are just a few of them – but the one I remember with most affection is Turbo Pascal. My programs are so small and ad hoc that it’s never worth investing too much time writing graphical user interfaces, so Windows was a nuisance rather than a liberation. 

Although I played with Visual Basic and Delphi for several years, eventually both metastasized into such baggy monsters that I dumped them. I wrote myself a little toolkit in Turbo Pascal 5 that created simple windows, menus and pick-box widgets from ASCII characters, quite good enough. I shared my code in Byte, and am proud to say I saw it on screens in more than one science lab where they had similar minimalist requirements. Now I use QPython 3.6 on Android, which has no native ability for colour or cursor control, just scrolling teletype output. There are plenty of add-on graphics libraries like Kivy, all way more than I need, and there’s a simple interface to Android dialogs and media components called SL4A which I do occasionally use but it’s still not what I had with Turbo. 

The impulse to recreate my Turbo widgets was finally triggered by of all things, Wordle. I do enjoy playing Josh Wardle’s clever and elegant little puzzle (though I deplore the posting of screenshots on Facebook or bragging about stats…) It’s just difficult enough to maintain an interest, but still simple enough to pose real questions over strategy, which is exactly what I love in a game. I never actually cheat but I do use tools that some purists might consider cheating, namely a mobile version of the Oxford Dictionary with wildcard search, and an Anagram Solver, and once I have three or four letters these will finish the job in a couple of minutes. Getting those three of four letters soon enough is what my Python program does, searching for effective first guesses using the known frequency distribution of letters in English at each position in a five-letter word: it outputs delightful combinations like AUDIT SNORE CLAMP and  CAMEO UNITS GRIND WHELK. I discovered that my old buddy David Tebbutt, one of the founding editors of Personal Computer World, is also fond of Wordle and it was he who sent me the letter frequencies list in a fine example of nerd-aid. (He also has access to Wordle’s own internal word list, but in a fit of hubristic rectitude I decided that was a step too far for me - I’ll make do with the Oxford).  

My Python Wordle Helper program’s scrolling teletype interface became a real bore, and while looking up how to write a clear-screen command using OS calls I discovered how to issue ANSI codes from Python, and hence how to do a 256-colour character-based terminal better than Turbo’s. QPython can in theory access the Linux curses library, but that refuses to work for me (and for quite a few other folk according to the forums) and in any case curses is pretty horrible. I set to and have now written a widget set that does everything I want, enabling single lines of code to invoke a box, a window, pick list, input box, progress bar, table or barchart. 

I very much doubt that my new widgets will prove as popular with nerds in science labs as those Turbo originals were – they were pre-Macintosh days, when IBM-compatible PCs running DOS were still ubiquitous in technical and process control contexts. I know that there are still far too many public institutions like hospitals and libraries which retain such dinosaurs, but they will be at least running Windows XP. Of course anyone under 70 is using a smartphone instead of a computer anyway, and an ANSI terminal on a smartphone screen is about as welcome as a turd on a sushi. So I’ll be keeping my little ANSI world to myself, going back and rewiring some of my old programs using the new interface. My 5-Card Drawer and 5-Card Stud Poker games actually ook rather splendid, and it’s a pity I can’t show you them here. But if for whatever bizarre reason you’re looking for a lightweight interface kit for some primitive device with a 160x36 character display, you know where to look, on my website at http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/home/computing/python-projects/ansi-library

[ Dick Pountain is so thankful that he programs as a hobby, not a job ]

HYBRID HYDROGEN

Dick Pountain /Idealog 333/ 08 Apr 2022 10:08

I write about energy fairly often in this column, mainly in the context of CPU efficiency or the foibles of mobile batteries, but now seems like the time for a wider look. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown the global fossil markets into chaos, while the UK government has just revealed its long-term (not entirely feeble) strategy for increasing nuclear and wind power over the next 8 years. So this time I’m talking about the long run. 

I’ve been a convinced supporter of both nuclear power – fission and ultimately fusion – and the ‘hydrogen economy’ for around 50 years when neither was at all fashionable. I won’t rehash all the problems both face, which are well-known and debated, but will instead present two indisputable facts. Firstly the primary mode of energy delivery in advanced Western economies is turning toward electricity (and demand for it will soon exceed supply); and secondly, hydrogen is an impractical fuel for road, and perhaps for air, transport. It’s terribly inflammable, hard to store and has a knack of diffusing out of containers and pipelines.

You only have to remind yourself of the horror of power-cuts, when your phone and laptop batteries have run out, your router and internet connection are down (and maybe your gas central-heating controller is going nuts). Then think about the fact that electric car sales are approaching take-off, thanks to the soaring price of petrol and diesel, concern over air pollution and climate change. You don’t need a degree in economics to figure out what happens to electricity demand if all car users go that route. One solution would be to distribute the generation of electricity more widely, using small-to-medium nuclear and on-shore wind power stations. But I suggest that the solution we need to be looking at instead is a hybrid one, in which we keep electricity generation centralised – perhaps coastal – using nuclear, solar and wind power to generate hydrogen by the electrolysis of water. Then, instead of trying to distribute that hydrogen as gas or liquid, both fraught with danger, use it to make metal hydrides that can be distributed in standardised battery-like modules. The national chain of petrol stations replaces its pumps with hydrogen-pack replacement and recycling, which also eventually displaces the too slowly growing national grid of EV charging points. Such a distribution network of hydride packs would efficiently store and distribute energy produced by intermittent sources like solar, wind and tide, and replace bottled gas in remote rural areas beyond the reach of town gas. Such a system would require bringing two existing research technologies to commercial fruition: metal hydrides and hydrogen fuel cells, and I think that both can be achieved with sufficient investment.

A fuel cell turns a fuel like hydrogen into electricity directly, combining it with oxygen from the air within an electrolyte and electrodes rather than by burning it for heat. Invented way back in 1838 research has been extensive – as so often in history the military have lead the way in search of mobile battlefield power sources, and NASA has used them in spacecraft since the 1960s. 

Metal hydride storage has been around less long and remains more experimental. Hydrogen gas gets combined with a metal to form a liquid or a solid powder that requires neither high pressure nor cryogenic low temperatures to store, and the gas can be recovered by heating. Promising candidate metals include lithium, sodium, magnesium and aluminium, while boron combines with ammonia that can be turned back into hydrogen via a catalyst (the French company McPhy Energy is working on the first commercial product using magnesium). The Metal Hydride Fuel Cell combines these twin technologies into the same container, which gets recharged with hydrogen gas and outputs electricity directly: these are more experimental still, and once again the chief developers are currently the military.

It’s not yet clear what would be the best overall architecture for such a hybrid hydrogen economy: build a fuel cell into the electric car with exchangeable hydride packs; electric car with exchangeable metal-hydride-fuel-cell packs; existing EV with a fuel cell to recharge its conventional battery via hydride packs; even cars with hydrogen internal combustion engines and hydride packs. All sorts of questions over energy densities, performance and safety remain to be answered. 

But the history of the automobile tells us that eventually one architecture would triumph, witness the world-wide network of petrol stations. It’s also likely that an intermediate network of hydrogen liquid or gas to regional hydride recycling centres would need to evolve. What’s certain is that governments ought to be considering advice from people fluent in these technologies, then stump up the research funds that might just save both our current way of life and eventually the planet itself.  

[Dick Pountain has a picture of the Hindenburg disaster on his spare bedroom wall] 

 

      

PC ARCHAEOLOGY

Dick Pountain /Idealog 332/ 03 Mar 2022 09:56

Regular readers of this column will know that I abandoned Windows for a Chromebook back in 2017, and have been extremely happy with my choice ever since (doctors now believe that every Windows upgrade you skip adds five years to your life). However as a columnist for a magazine that has “PC” in its title I can hardly turn my back on Microsoft completely, so I kept my last Windows machine, a Lenovo Yoga touch-screen laptop running Windows 8.1. This still runs my Canon printer and acts as a backup server via a large external Samsung USB drive, accessible from the Chromebook over wi-fi SMB. I once needed it to run a few programs, like Photoshop Elements, but all of those I’ve steadily displaced with Chromebook equivalents. 

But the Lenovo started to show its age, disk accesses got ever slower in that sinister way that suggests excessive error-correction, plus sporadic tussles with an infuriating Windows 8 rogue task called the Runtime Broker that consumes 100% CPU. Eventually it became too much of a chore to boot it up, but I was extremely disinclined to waste good money on a new machine running Windows 11 for the minimal purposes I required. Then I remembered that I still had my last-but-one laptop, a Sony Viao, sleeping peacefully in a closet. It’s the computer I used for half those 13 years I spent in Italy, during which it served without a hitch. It’s not a machine I would ever have bought for myself but was a Christmas present from our late chairman Felix Dennis. An ultra-slim Viao TZ21 with a carbon-fibre case and a very vivid 11" diagonal, 1,366x768 resolution screen, I shrink from imagining what it must have cost him. It’s far, far too good to throw away, I know, I’ll resurrect it! 

After eight dormant years in that cupboard, on plugging in and charging, the Viao booted up straight away, and then the fun began. For starters it’s 32-, not 64-bit, still runs Windows 7 Professional, and its wi-fi adapter is 14 years behind the times. How to make it rejoin the modern world? I became suddenly aware just how far in The Cloud I now live, because when I went into Windows Network Manager, though it could see my BT hub it wouldn’t connect. In Italy our remote valley lay beyond Telecom Italia’s ADSL network, so I used the Viao via a mobile phone connection from a newly built mast on the nearby mountain top. And of course their proprietary software wouldn’t work with a UK SIM even had I wanted it to. So how to get online?

A quick check in System Config showed there were indeed two network adapters in the Vaio, an Intel Wireless 3945ABG and a Marvell Yukon 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet, but I no longer have an Ethernet cable and the Intel clearly didn’t like my BT Hub 6. I suppose a grown-up would have started trying to diagnose the wi-fi problem, but I passionately loathe fiddling with networks or comms, and so I took the coward’s way out by fleeing to Amazon on the Chromebook. For an eye-watering £5.19 I ordered a TP-Link 150 Mbps Wireless Nano USB Wi-Fi Dongle, and when the thumbnail-sized widget arrived I popped it in a spare USB port. Like some parasitic insect it injected its drivers, flashed its little green light and connected immediately. Ookla showed a 30mps download speed, less than half what my Chromebook gets but twice what that costive Lenovo was getting 

Now for a browser. I’d been using Opera in Italy but even after updating it was deeply unhappy about certificates and stuff. Given that my life belongs to Google I had to get Chrome going. It took forever to download, let alone install, and it too was deeply unhappy, bitching about all kind of security problems and repeatedly making me identify myself. I got it sort of going but it was tragically slow and comically cranky, refusing to connect to The Guardian as a security risk (perhaps it’s joined the EDL?) So I did what you have to and reinstalled Firefox. 

After a couple of updates Firefox runs like the clappers, opens everything without demur and is not too proud to suck in all my Chrome settings and bookmarks: it works flawlessly with Gmail, Google calendar and contacts and so has effectively turned the Viao into a slower Chromebook utility-wise (though of course it can’t run Android apps). That’s all I need it to be, and for £5.19. And rather to my surprise, I understood that Windows 7 was the last version I actually liked: that Windows Button and left-side menu…

[Dick Pountain is rather enjoying retro computing]

    

 

IT NUMEROLOGY

Dick Pountain /Idealog 331/ 06 Feb 2022 03:44


It’s become a centrepiece of IT-biz wisdom that one should always, if possible, wait for version 2.0 of any new technology. Some of us who write about IT of course cannot wait and must suffer at the bleeding-edge, and once you get beyond version 2 though all bets are off (as an ex-Windows user I refuse to participate in 10 versus 11 chatter). However in recent weeks two other small integers have been brought to my attention, namely Web3 and 6G communications, and these seem to portend a forking of the IT evolutionary tree into two very different directions Web3 came properly to my attention thanks to three articles in the February issue of The Atlantic magazine, about the growing backlash against cryptocurrencies and the financialisation of digital content via NFTs. I’m slightly embarrassed that I haven’t covered crypto in this column before, but it’s no accident: ever since Bitcoin was first launched it has struck me as a dangerous, possibly fraudulent social experiment, based on ultimately unsupportable technology, but I’ve shied away from the torrent of abuse that this opinion is likely to provoke. I’m not an anarchist, but I do agree basically with the late economic anthropologist David Graeber about the origins and function of money. It’s fundamentally a way of fixing and storing the intangible emotion of trust, and the idea that blockchain technology somehow makes money ‘more democratic’ is nonsense. All it does is make it more unstable, the last thing we need in our post-viral anxiety state.

The ‘3’ in the name Web3 – coined by Gavin Wood, co-founder of the Bitcoin competitor Ethereum in 2014 – implies that Web2, dominated by Google, Facebook, Amazon will soon be over, replaced by people transacting directly with each other using blockchains. Let’s briefly recap the full genealogy. Web1, the original Berners-Lee/Andreessen invention, was a noncommercial, distributed publishing system that let scientists and nerdy hobbyists communicate with one another for free, and it spawned many services we now take for granted like webmail, blogs, memes and videos. By the mid-1990s businesses discovered its power and moved themselves online, while service providers like Google, Amazon and Facebook realised they could stay free to end-users by selling said users’ data to advertisers. That was Web2, which reaped fortunes the like of which the world never saw before.

Web3 and NFTs represent the next step, total financialisation of digital assets. Any old data, like monkeys-in-daft-hats, become speculative instruments. This potentially affects everything because nowadays computers are in everything so almost anything can become a digital asset, even your doorbell videos. Those Atlantic articles describe the furious backlash building in the USA, that calls Web3 and crypto scams, Ponzi schemes, parasitism and compares it to the 2007 sub-prime mortgage disaster.

It seems unlikely the monster corporations will be replaced soon, especially Google which funds much deep, world-leading research. Which leads me neatly on to number ‘6’. The same week I received an email from the University of Oulu in Finland with links to seven videos that demonstrate their cutting-edge research in 6G communications. I clicked, I saw, I boggled (see for yourself at

https://www.oulu.fi/6gflagship/6g_demo_series).

These 6G innovations depend on very short wave, terahertz, radio signals, and on ways the Oulu teams have found to focus and steer them. The 6G radio demo shows how such signals can communicate and remote sense – detecting the shape and surface textures of nearby objects – simultaneously from the same device like a smartphone. The 6G optics demo shows communication via THz modulation of the lighting in a room, thwarting any radio-frequency snoopers outside the room. The 6G edge computing demo shows a scanner generating detailed 3D representations of objects, including you, almost instantly, using an array of Raspberry Pi’s as ‘edge processors’. Most fun of the videos is the 6G vertical demo about lighter-than-air drones that can patrol a building in sci-fi fashion to check for defects or take drinks orders. My conclusion after watching all of them was that Zuckberg backed the wrong horse with Meta: virtual reality is actually rather naff Web1.

The world’s politicians are as always several decades behind the implications of all these innovations, but very soon some crunch-time decisions will need to be made about the deployment and regulation of them. Most state banks are looking at introducing digital currencies (not blockchained crypto) which could offer huge simplifications of their tax, spend and welfare systems. But they could also be abused, as they already are being in India and China, to penalise and control political dissent. We badly need to start serious public debates about where all this stuff is taking us, whether the 6G/Web3 future will be a eu- or a dys- topia.

GRANDPA’S AXE

 

Dick Pountain /Idealog 330/ 07 Jan 2022 02:10

Grandpa’s Axe is a figment of American folk mythology: “had it nigh on 60 years, never give me no trouble exceptin’ fer two new heads and three new handles”. Well my hi-fi system is very much like that. I’m very far from being a hi-fi buff but I do listen to a lot of music and like reasonably good sound. I bought an ex-review Sansui system back in the days when Dennis published Hi-Fi Choice, but the only component remaining from that is a pair of wood-cased Castle speakers that I love. Nowadays all my audio feeds – Smart TV, Spotify and YouTube on Chromebook, Sony CD player and Dunlop vinyl turntable – play through them. However just before Christmas my latest amplifier, a Denon which also acted as the hub, expired with a horrid death rattle. Not being up to diagnosing and repairing it, I went online to look for a replacement.

It appears ‘separates’ hi-fi amps are a dying breed and accordingly are subject to ‘Veblen Pricing’ as rich folk’s toys, but I became intrigued by the new breed of tiny power amps meant for bookshelf systems, and found myself buying a Fosi bt20a. When I first unpacked it I thought it was a joke, not much bigger than a packet of cigarettes, but then I plugged it in and reeled in amazement as it drove my massive speakers just as loud, and with superior, more open sound quality than the Denon…

Now since this isn’t an audiophile magazine (we don’t even have audio devices in the A-List) how can I steer this miracle around toward my digital brief? Well, I assumed the Fosi must be digital inside, but I was wrong – it’s even more interesting than that. It turns out to be a ‘Class-D’ device, a technology which exists in a grey area between analog and digital which I’ve covered here before, for example in the silicon retina chips designed by Carver Mead or AI chips that use analog adders to perform convolutions. Hybrid analog-digital circuits can often be faster and less power-hungry as they don’t need to analog-to-digital convert their inputs and then digital-to-analog convert the outputs. The price is loss of the precision that digital brings, but for some non-numerical applications that may be worth paying.

Class-D amplifiers are a nice case in point. They work by chopping up an analog input signal into a very high-frequency stream of square-wave pulses whose spacing represents the analog values at each tiny interval. This stream then switches twin output transistors at a similarly high frequency, then filters out frequencies beyond the audible to directly produce an amplified analog output signal. This process can be 70-90% efficient: because the two output transistors are never both on at the same time little current flows and little power is lost as heat. The Fosi uses a phone-style 24-volt power supply and barely gets warm even when playing loud. It’s still a wholly analog technology as no bits are involved, but like a digital technology it works on a stream of discrete pulses, and can therefore be supported by cheap, miniature digital chips.

The efficiency and power saving such hybrid processing confers is becoming ever more desirable to designers of the neural networks on which Deep Learning AI depends. Implementing a simulated neural network in digital technology is enormously power hungry. Training a network involves storing billions or trillions of weights in memory cells, and then performing multiply-accumulate operations on them and new inputs when the network is eventually deployed to analyse new data. Back in issue 301 I described how the US firm Mythic’s IPU chip contains an analog computing array of memory cells that are actually tunable resistors: computation happens in-place as each input voltage gets turned into an output current according to Ohm’s Law, with resistance representing the stored weight value. With data and computation stored in the same place less energy is wasted and less silicon real-estate is needed for A-to-D conversion. 

Carver Mead’s silicon retina chip similarly employed an array of photosensitive cells connected by a network of resistors, with Kirchoff’s Laws achieving the necessary ‘computation’ as currents flow between them to achieve behaviour similar to that of the human eye.

Fitted with its second new head and third new handle, my audio environment is now immensely satisfying, even if it is so hybrid that it would cause a real audiophile to grind their teeth. The little black box omnivorously devours analog feeds from TV, CD player and turntable (through an equally tiny analog mixer) just as effectively as Bluetooth from my Chromebook. And it passes my own very analog test regime: Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints Live’ album makes my remaining hair stand on end via either route.

[Dick Pountain thought DAC was a brand of trousers until he discovered Smirnoff]

MORE MEMORABLES

Dick Pountain /Idealog 329/ 04 Dec 2021 02:59

Last year I wrote here about three technical breakthroughs that were announced during November 2020 – an mRNA vaccine against Covid-19, Alphafold 2 solving the ‘protein folding problem’, and Apple’s M1 CPU. I’d like to repeat this exercise for November 2021, and though my picks for this year’s breakthroughs are equally profound – one in neuroscience, one in space exploration and one in quantum computing – they’re perhaps a little more difficult to explain.

The neuroscience discovery is simple enough to state: the human neuron appears to be several orders of magnitude more computationally-complex than silicon ones used to emulate it. Given each neuron’s number of axon connections this means the whole brain is almost infinitely more complex than any current AI. A team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron, and the result suggests that the AI net requires between five and eight ‘hidden layers’ to represent the complexity of a single biological neuron. 

Deep-learning networks have created the current explosion in AI abilities like driverless cars, Alexa, Google Translate, Deepfold and so on. They all employ several layers – each containing a large number of silicon ‘neurons’ – between their input and output layers, which when trained on millions of examples configure themselves into a ‘black-box’ that classifies input into outputs. How many hidden layers are appropriate remains a keen matter of research: more isn’t always better, and the right number tends to be in single figures. Now it turns out that the classificatory power of a single human neuron is equivalent to a many-layered AI net. Our brain runs these mostly on coffee and chocolate digestives, while training a large deep-learning AI net consumes so much electrical power it’s becoming  a threat to the climate.   

At the other end of the distance scale, we’ve all thrilled to those colour photos of galaxies and nebulae captured by the Hubble Telescope. It’s so sensitive it can collect light from far-off objects which left not far after the Big Bang and has been travelling for billions of years since. Not close enough to the Big Bang however to answer some of the most important questions in cosmology. Thanks to an expanding universe the very oldest objects get red-shifted into the infrared, while the Hubble works with visible light. As I write we’re just two weeks away from the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope which works in the IR and if successful will push that vision back far enough to perhaps rewrite our story about the origins of the universe.  

I say ‘if’ because the Webb incorporates the most ambitious space engineering ever. A house-sized mirror, made from hexagonal tiles of toxic beryllium was polished to the greatest smoothness ever achieved, then folded up to fit into the rocket. In space it has to unfold correctly and each tile be constantly realigned by computers. And it needs to work at close to 0°K so it must travel to the Lagrange Point where earth, sun and a moon’s gravity cancel out, then unfurl a vast, flimsy sunshade made of five layers of metallised film. Superb engineering, but the best of luck is still required... 

Richard Feynman once prophesied that a use for quantum computers would be simulating reality at quantum level, and in this year’s breakthrough a quantum simulator has solved a real physics problem. A ‘quantum spin liquid’ is a novel state of matter in which a  magnetisable substance can’t take on a fixed polarity because its unusually threefold crystal symmetry makes domain pairing impossible. There’s a mineral, marvellously named Herbertsmithite, which may exhibit this state, giving it interesting and perhaps useful optical and magnetic properties, but directly studying quantum entanglement inside a sample is impossible. 

Simulating its lattice on a conventional computer takes months, but teams at Harvard and MIT recently simulated it in reasonable time using an unfashionable kind of quantum computer that employs neutral atoms rather than the superconductors used by Google and IBM. This isn’t a general-purpose computer: it builds a lattice of neutral atoms with the right symmetry using laser beams both to place the atoms and to switch their so-called Rydberg states to make them act as qubits. Neutral atom qubits are longer-lived and more robust against environmental decoherence than superconductors, and this success may refocus attention on the technology.

This last breakthrough tickles me for a different, less exalted reason though: “Herbertsmithite, named after the mineralogist Herbert Smith (1872–1953) is generally found in and around Anarak, Iran, hence its other name, anarakite”. We all know that kryptonite can counteract the powers of Superman, so perhaps anarakite might have a similar protective property against online computer super-nerds.

[Dick Pountain would like an anarakite amulet for Christmas]

MOLTEN METAPHOR

Dick Pountain /Idealog 328/ 05 Nov 2021 09:03

The little-known corollary to Moore’s Law is that computer columnists have to mention it in a column at least once a decade, and I am no exception. The miracle of digital search tells me that I’ve covered it here in 1996, 2004, 2005, 2009 and 2019 (the numerate among you will deduce that it’s a pretty rough sort of law). That first date is significant because it was in PC Pro issue 18, two years before the most popular piece I ever wrote for Byte, ‘The Limits Of Computing’ in 1998, about how and when Moore’s Law would end. In that piece I talked about the difficulty of getting down to 0.1 micron feature sizes in silicon CPUs: it would require short wavelength UV light from exotic krypton/fluorine lasers to illuminate the masks whose reduced images create the circuit patterns via the lithographic fabrication process. Getting much smaller would require X-rays which are intractable for many reasons.

Skip forward one quarter of a century, Moore’s Law is still at work and Intel and Apple’s latest chip families are pushing feature sizes down toward 10 nanometres (0.01 microns in old money). They do that by using EUV (Extreme UV) illumination, the last stop before those dreaded X-rays, and these are very, very difficult indeed to generate. I found myself getting interested in fab tech again, and decided to read up on EUV. 

There’s only one firm in the world that makes the EUV machines for this chip generation. It’s a Dutch firm called ASML (nothing at all to do with ASMR) and you can have one of their machines for somewhere around $180,000,000 depending on what bell and whistles you need. You’ll need to rent a new garage, around the size of a football field, and a couple of cranes to house it, and your electricity bill may rise. The reason for this price and size is that 13.5nm EUV radiation is totally absorbed by both glass and air, so everything has to be performed in the highest possible vacuum and with mirrors rather than lenses. The mirrors, by Zeiss, are the flattest ever made, flatter even than the ones in space telescopes. A whole array of vacuum pumps employ little rotors spinning at 30,000rpm that bat air molecules away one at a time like ping-pong balls. Oh, and you can’t use any old incandescent lamp to generate these rays. In fact the only way they found to generate 13.5nm EUV is by blasting a tiny drop of molten tin with two hits from a powerful laser microseconds apart, which explodes it into a tiny ball of glowing plasma. Over and over again, like a sort of hot, tinny ink-jet printer. Phew.

I’ve always been fascinated by molten metal. I love the stuff, perhaps because my father worked in the steel industry. As a small boy I watched Bessemer Converters blowing, the best firework display in the world, from just far enough so I didn’t catch fire (health-and-safety was loose back then). At home I melted down all my lead soldiers in a pan on the gas stove, poured them into two small alloy jelly moulds in the shape of tortoises which became our doorstops for years (I did spill at bit on the kitchen floor, which remained a burned-in silver splatter for years too). 

My favourite movie was ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ in which Charles Laughton as Quasimodo, stands on the roof of a Gothic cathedral chanting “Molten Metal! Molten Metal” while he pours boiling lead onto the soldiers below. Studying chemistry in London I was often faced with molten metal, often sodium, not always on purpose. When later I became a magazine publisher I used to visit marvellous old printing plants in the East End that still employed Linotype machines, in which a small vat of molten lead gets poured into the lines of lead type. 

You get the picture. I just find the image of some sort of expensive ink-jet printer that fires drops of molten tin that get blasted into plasma very, very powerful indeed. It’s a bit of a cliché to compare the silicon chip industry to the building of Gothic cathedrals, in both effort and ambition, but ASML’s EUV machine makes it a very tempting metaphor. It’s certainly as costly, and getting on for a similar sized floor-plan. Instead I’ll deflate the rhetorical atmosphere slightly with a more humble metaphor. Predicting the end of Moore’s Law is very like making a long car journey with a small child, who keeps asking “Are We There Yet!, Are We There Yet!”. And I can now tell you that the answer is a resounding “Not Yet!...Soon!”.