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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (30692)	9/26/1999 9:03:00 AM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, That was probably the most insightful and well written post I've seen on SI. After reading it I can only conclude that the future of Rambus is now out of the realm of the marketeers.

To: Bilow who wrote (30692)	9/26/1999 3:10:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

RE: <The worst defects are ones that are rare, as they are the hardest to test for, and once found, they are the hardest to fix. Defects which happen every microsecond are duck soup to fix, its the ones that happen once per week that leave engineers and technicians grasping at straws. These kinds of errors are so rare, that you just can't tell management whether you have fixed it or not until a couple weeks have gone by.> Carl, I can't remember who but someone named these bugs "Heisenbugs" after Heisenburg's Uncertain Principle which says you can't observe something without changing it. Just putting a scope probe on these lines will change operation so you can't troubleshoot it.

To: Bilow who wrote (30692)	9/26/1999 4:37:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, if we designed everything to allow a lot of margin for error, we'd be getting nowhere fast. In my opinion, a lot of technologies introduced today leave little room for error in a fundamental sense. We're manufacturing silicon in ever smaller and smaller feature sizes, from 0.25 micron to 0.18 micron to 0.13 micron in the future. At that scale, you can practically count the number of atoms going across a trace. We've got microprocessors that are becoming so complicated, validation is quickly turning into a gargantuan beast. And no doubt the new I/O interfaces like PCI-X, the merged NGIO and FIO specs, and AGP-4x are going to give the analog signal experts some real headaches. Combine all this added complexity with a market that demands shorter development cycles, and you'll be lucky to leave any margin for error. As for your pet peeve over the "know-it-alls" who supposedly tried to drown out the Rambus skeptics, just remember that there are "know-it-alls" on both sides of any argument. And I've certainly seen quite a few trying to drown out the Rambus advocates. Tenchusatsu