Rob
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Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:08:09 -0700
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To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead AT listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: Oh, hell, everyone has sleep apnea, time
for business success storytelling
again
China stories, and industry springing up
overnight from rice paddies and water buffalo paths.
I spent a lot of time with the Chinese
Nationalists, trained their pilots to fly P-51's
and B-25's, and of course had a pilot's
commission in both the U.S. and Chinese Air
Force. I didn't have a high opinion of Chiang Kai
Shek because of the endemic corruption---that
opinion has mellowed with the perspective of
time---basically he did what he had to do in an
economy collapsed by the Japanese occupation. At
least he would fight---Mao Tse Tung ran like a goddamned rabbit.
I was at the time, and for many years thereafter,
the youngest Group Engineering Officer and Group
Operations Officer in the U.S. Air Force at age
22, commanding 400 aircraft and 2800 men four
years off a dairy farm and with then only a high
school education, albeit a good one. A highly
strategic positiion and as much the result of
luck and the death of better-qualified contemporaries as any innate ability.
With a pretty foggy memory, I am trying to
reconstruct the military history and many
photographs for my kids who now see it as a world
they never knew existed. The foggy memory lifted
briefly---long ago past posts recounted that I
flew twenty three types of liaison, pursuit,
bomber, observation and transport aircraft for
the U.S. Air Force in WWII. It was actually
24---I had forgotten about the cursed UC-64, aka
Noorduyn Norseman in which I accumulated some 800
hours. It was designed as a Canadian bush
plane---ten passenger with a 600 hp radial
engine. The damned thing had zero visibility and
no dihedral so you had to fly it every minute you
sat in the pilot's seat. It would take off with
the cargo space filled with lead, but lead or
cotton it wouldn't climb over a fifty foot tree a
mile in front of you. My oldest boy is scanning
the photos onto a CD. I may post a few when I get a copy.
My friends occupied every position of power in
the Taiwan Government---most powerful post being
the head of National Reconstruction, and perhaps
the next being head of the Chinese Air Force, who
stayed at my home in Texas when visiting his children in the U.S.
The most spectacular and most rapid bootstrap
operation the world has ever seen took place in
Taiwan. By comparison, rebuilding Afghanistan or
Iraq is a piece of cake. The Japanese left a tiny
amount of industrial infrastructure, but
basically rice paddies had to be turned into
industrial power. Here's how it was done.
Chiang Kai Shek and the Office of National
Reconstruction seized title to most of the land,
and paid for it with I.O.U's that had to be
invested in infant industry to be worth anything
at all. Canny Taiwanese landowners immediately
scurried around to see what could be manufactured
and sold overseas for hard currency, primarily in
the U.S. market, for U.S. dollars.
A few tiny banks came into being---primarily to
handle letters of credit with American bank
affiliates. There was no stock market, no bank
loans to businessmen, all business investment
came from individuals---the aforesaid rice paddy
landowners and street capital from wage earners
who saved 25% or more of their meager earnings
and univesally wanted to become employers instead
of employees, illustrated by the Chinese proverb,
"better to be the head of a rooster than tail of an ox.".
Tiny shops posted in their front window that they
needed capital, and what they would pay for it in
common stock and interest. The wage earners
strolled in, looked around to assess the business
prospects, and dug in their loin cloths for
whatever they could afford to invest in return
for a piece of paper bearing the owner's
signature and National I.D. Number. Few of these
small shops failed, most thrived, and many quickly became industrial giants.
When I lived in Taichung I watched 14,000
manufacturers spring up there within five years
in an area where the total population was well
under a half a million. Completely unfettered
capitalism (which the U.S. does not have and
never has known), has enormous growth
potential---like watching bacteria in a Petrie
Dish with a 600 power microscope. There's no free
lunch---unfettered capitalism also contains
rapidly growing seeds of destruction, and in the
same five years the water became undrinkable and
air unbreathable---appalling to see almost 100%
of the population wearing breathing masks in a
vain effort to keep poisonous toxins out of their
lungs. Regulation of uncaring capitalists has
been imposed and the environment slowly
improving. Unlike the U.S., Chinese culture did
not permit the growth of corporate monopoly and
its attendant abuse of competition, wage earners
and the economy. In Taiwan general welfare means
general welfare, not welfare for a tiny top sliver of the population.
I lived in Taiwan during long periods in the
1980's, and went back and forth like a badminton
shuttlecock on the always dangerous Northwest
Airlines aircraft, until safer ones such as Singapore Airlines emerged.
Here's where the generalities end, let us turn to
specifics---David Lee and Maggie Chen, and
Hershey Valve Company (which I chose for them as
having good vibes in the U.S. market, and which
you will find in every Home Depot and Lowes, most
U.S. industrial supply distributors today.
At the time I had designed a long line of
thermoplastic valves, the tooling and testing
equipment to produce them. I had already
encountered a highly dishonest supplier against
whom my partner and I obtained a judgment which,
with interest is now perhaps $45,000,000. In the
search for an honest supplier I ran across
Hwatzee plastic injection molding company (see
where the Hershey came from?) They had only four
or five injection molding machines, in as many
small villages where they could find enough electricity to operate them.
David's parents operated a small number of
coastal freight vessels---enough to make a
living, but not to provide any financial help to
David---their most important contribution was to
educate him in the essentials of running a small
business. David had little formal education
however, and could not speak a word of
English---essential to doing business in the U.S.
Maggie had no money, but could speak English as
well as I can, and both were dead honest, could be trusted with your life.
Like all plastic fabricators in Taiwan at the
time, they had not the foggiest idea of material
specification---as far as they knew, PVC was PVC,
so they bought raw material I described to them
as "pau pau tah! (Mandarin for bubble gum), which
distorted beyond belief at operating temperatures as low as 140 degrees F.
Maggie set up a meeting with twenty engineers at
the Formosa Plastics Company (now in Texas), and
we spent a full day going over the specifications
of what we then called Type I, Grade I PVC---it
now has a specification number which I have
forgotten. They were technically proficient and
understood immediately what they were
told---within a week were producing Type I, Grade
I PVC, and the Taiwan export valve industry was
born. Well, a little more was required---the
Fisher Valve Company in the U.S. owned the only
patent on unimolded ball valve seals, so I
patented an easier-operating variant and licensed
it to Hershey Valve until the Fisher patent
expired a few years later. Got a few thousand
dollars which they gladly paid to avoid a patent
lawsuit, and we were both happy. They relocated
their crossroad injection machines to the
industrial park in Taichung, where electricity is
plentiful and cheap---are still there operating a
multimillion dollar business..
And now let us shift the spotlight to Chenbro in
Taiwan. After Hwatzee aka Hershey was well
established in the international thermoplastic
valve market, Maggie left Hershey, except as in
an advisory position and minor stockholder.
Maggie's husband was an electronics engineer---a
hell of a good one, and with modest initial
capital they started making computer components
such as cases, circuit boards etc.---withing
three years Maggie had a factory employing almost
a thousand people and in five years had a net worth of around $50,000,000.
I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1985,
given thirty days to live, and divested myself of
all assets in 1985 and left the fascinating
business of starting new businesses. Two
operations and two series of chemotherapy
fortuitously got rid of the cancer, but I am now
paying the price of the chemotherapy in the form
of myelodysplasia. Don't like the price, but what
the hell, no one lives forever. This is one of my
feel-good days---the reason for assuming the role
of story teller, since no one else is posting much.
Now Maggie's operation could go broke within a
year or two. Could, I say, she's an enormously
gifted individual who is fast enough on her feet
to convert her operation to other processes,
other products, other markets almost overnight.
She sure as hell won't go broke, been there, done
that and won't let it ever happen to her again.
The suddenly resurgent U.S. Sun Microsystems is
the threat (watch Sun as an investment
opportunity if they succeed in making circuit
boards completely obsolete, a bypassed relic of the computer age.)
September 22, 2003
New Sun Microsystems Chip May Unseat the Circuit Board
By JOHN MARKOFF
OUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 19 Written off
lately by the computer industry as a has-been,
Sun Microsystems may still have a few tricks up its engineers' shirt sleeves.
On Tuesday, Sun researchers plan to report that
they have discovered a way to transmit data
inside a computer much more quickly than current
techniques allow. By placing the edge of one chip
directly in contact with its neighbor, it may be
possible to move data 60 to 100 times as fast as the present top speeds.
For the computer industry, the advance if it
can be repeated on the assembly line would be
truly revolutionary. It would make obsolete the
traditional circuit board constructed of tiny
bits of soldered wires between chips, familiar to
hobbyists who hand-soldered connections when
assembling Heathkit electronic projects.
"It could represent the end of the printed
circuit board," said Jim Mitchell, director of
Sun Laboratories here. "It makes things way, way faster."
Sun, an icon of Silicon Valley, has been losing
market share and laying off thousands of workers
as corporate computing customers turn
increasingly to Microsoft and Intel for their
software and hardware. Sun is in desperate need
of a technical advance that can differentiate it from the others.
The new technology is being developed as part of
a military-financed supercomputer effort. But Sun
executives said they were seeking ways to find
commercial uses quickly for a future generation of computer systems.
Sun has not decided whether to license the
technology to other manufacturers or reserve it
exclusively for Sun's own systems, Dr. Mitchell
said. Analysts, though, say they believe that the
company is moving toward a more liberal technology licensing policy.
"This is a big thought project," said Vernon
Turner, vice president for global enterprise
servers at the International Data Corporation, a
market research firm. "It will give them some
leadership if they can pull it off."
The recent resignation of Sun's co-founder,
William Joy, a leading software designer and
developer of the Java programming language, has
been seen as evidence that the company is
struggling to remain innovative. Still, Sun has
maintained its research spending despite corporate cutbacks.
The new breakthrough is based on an insight by
Ivan E. Sutherland, a Sun vice president and
research fellow who is a pioneer of modern
computing. Dr. Sutherland, 65, was a co-founder
of Evans & Sutherland, an early maker of
high-performance computers. He is also the
inventor of interactive computer graphics.
In a paper to be presented at the Custom
Integrated Circuits Conference on Tuesday in San
Jose, Calif., Dr. Sutherland, Robert J. Drost and
Robert D. Hopkins plan to report that they were
able to send data at a speed of 21.6 billion bits
a second between chips in a scaled-down version
of the new technology. By comparison, an Intel
Pentium 4 processor, the fastest desktop chip,
can transmit about 50 billion bits a second. But
when the technology is used in complete products,
the researchers say, they expect to reach speeds
in excess of a trillion bits a second, which
would be about 100 times the limits of today's technology.
Currently, computer data is moved in and out of
an integrated circuit through tiny wires soldered
to the surface at special pads that ring the edge
of each chip. While the pads are small, they are
vastly larger than the transistors and wires that make up the chip's circuitry.
A typical gold or aluminum wire might be 25
microns in width and soldered to a pad that is
100 microns wide, about the width of a human
hair. Compared with the internal circuitry, this
passageway requires relatively large amounts of
power. Also, the size of the pads and wires
necessarily limits the number there are to ferry
information in and out of the circuit.
The new Sun chip has tiny transmitters that are
only a few microns in width. In addition to
having many more connecting points, the chip
should consume far less power. The chip's
additional channels increase the processing
speed, like adding lanes to a highway; being able
to eliminate the pads is another benefit of the
chip's design, like getting rid of a series of tollbooths.
Chip-to-chip bottlenecks have long been a vexing
challenge for computer designers, who have
explored many ways of increasing the overall
speed of systems that are composed of hundreds of chips.
Other potential technologies have included
optical lasers and even the idea of quantum
entanglement of electrons, which holds out the
possibility of moving huge amounts of data instantaneously.
Transmitting data between chips by placing a
transmitter next to a receiver, along the lines
of the Sun design, employs an effect known as
"capacitive coupling" to send electrical pulses
at high speed. The idea came to Dr. Sutherland
when he was visiting Steve Jacobsen, a robotics
expert based in Utah, who has developed a
technique for ultraprecise mechanical alignment.
This technique might be applied to connect large
arrays of ultrasmall transmitters and receivers, Dr. Sutherland decided.
While the concept has yet to be validated fully,
Sun researchers have already received an
important vote of confidence from the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon.
In July, Sun was a surprise winner of a $49.7
million award from the agency to work on
supercomputer designs. Cray and I.B.M. also won
contracts, but Sun was chosen over two
competitors, Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard.
The choice of Sun surprised many supercomputing
researchers because both Silicon Graphics and
Hewlett-Packard have larger supercomputer businesses.
"This is one of those things that could have
great potential if they can work out the
details," said William J. Dally, a professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at
Stanford University and a consultant for Cray on
its supercomputer project financed by the Pentagon agency.
The Sun technique could pack hundreds of chips in
face-to-face checkerboard fashion far more
densely than is possible today. The technique
holds out the hope of attaining what had been one
of Silicon Valley's far-off dreams: a computer
packaging technique known as wafer-scale integration.
Today, chips are manufactured in wafers that
contain hundreds of identical circuits. The
individual chips are cut apart and each chip is
wired into a separate package. The chips are then
laid out on printed circuit boards and connected
to other packages by wires that are thousands of
times thicker than the chip circuits.
For decades, computer designers have tried to
figure out how to make computer systems out of
single large wafers. But designers have stumbled
over the fact that it is virtually impossible to
create large wafers that are free of defects.
Now the Sun researchers may have surmounted the
hurdle with a simple mechanical solution having
a bunch of small chips work together with the
computing properties of a single wafer.
"This is a very novel idea that could give you a
way to make a very compact computer," said David
Patterson, a computer scientist at the University
of California at Berkeley who is a Sun
consultant. "From the very beginning people have
been making circuits on wafers and then chopping
them up and then wiring them back together again."
As a graduate student in the 1970's, Dr.
Patterson worked on a Pentagon-financed
wafer-scale integration research project at
Hughes Aircraft. Even though it was not
cost-effective, he said, it was one of the few
successful efforts to build such a computer.
Since then, the industry has tried unsuccessfully
to commercialize wafer-scale circuits aimed at
avoiding chip-to-chip communication bottlenecks.
All of them have failed and several have
collapsed in spectacular fashion. Gene M. Amdahl,
the designer of I.B.M.'s 360 mainframe computer,
founded Trilogy Systems in 1980 to build an
advanced mainframe computer based on wafer-scale
technology. He was able to raise $279 million
from computer partners, venture capitalists and a
public offering, before going under.
Dr. Sutherland acknowledged that Sun has more to
do before it could determine if its proximity
communication technology was viable. One issue is
potential interference between the tiny
transmitters and receivers. A second issue is
cooling. As chips are moved closer together the
challenges in removing heat increase sharply.
At the same time, Sun's computer designers said
they were optimistic about the technology and
were eager to consider ways of using it in future Sun computers.
"It's pretty exciting in what it has enabled,"
said Marc Tremblay, a Sun microprocessor
designer. "As you cross boundaries between chips,
that's where the pipe has been narrow."
He said that faster chip-to-chip speeds might
also lead to a rethinking of the internal layout
of computers in ways that would enhance performance even more.
Dr. Sutherland said that he was uncertain where
the new technology might be applied first
commercially, but that there was already great
interest from the company's computer division.
"The news we hear from product-land is, `We want this yesterday,' " he said.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home
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[Homestead] Oh, hell, everyone has sleep apnea, time for business success storytelling again,
Rob, 06/16/2012