🎚 Raspberry PI Zero 2W: What does the silicon contain?

Author of the article used special tools and chemicals for having a closer look at how new Raspberry board is built.

It's not just a single integrated circuit, but rather 3 pieces of silicon and a bunch of gold wires which tied everything together. Looks like developers have moved away from Package-on-package and have gone for the even more sophisticated multi-chip packaging.

In this technique they take the substrate (basically a circuit board with super fine traces), then they put down the DRAM, a spacer... which is simply a bit of un-etched silicon, and then the SOC. It's all connected together with gold bond wires and encapsulated in epxoy.

Advantages of this is cost, the package is often as expensive as the silicon it contains. They have gone down from two packages used on the "Pi zero" where they stacked the DRAM on top of the SOC to one.

#articles #boards

📊 Engineering is Still a Great Job

As revealed in ElectronicDesign's 2021 Salary Survey, science and engineering jobs continue to be fun and profitable.

The most engineers and programmers want to stay in their jobs and would recommend them to others based on the results of our recent salary survey. The majority of engineers and programmers were satisfied with their current position, which is a good indication they chose the right profession. Likewise, the survey results show that more than 90% recommend engineering as a career choice to others.

Job satisfaction seems to match well with retention or it may be the sign of the times. Not a lot of engineers or developers are actively searching for a new position. Still, a substantial portion are keeping their eyes open for opportunities that may arise.

The outlook for engineers who want to stay put or move into new positions looks good, with most companies maintaining or increasing the number of engineers or developers on their staff.

#articles #work

📃 Save the planet! Program in C, avoid Python, Perl

A team of Portuguese university researchers attempted to quantify the energy efficiency of different programming languages in a paper entitled Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages, where they looked at the runtime, memory usage, and energy consumption of twenty-seven well-known programming languages.

To the surprise of no one, the study concludes that “compiled languages tend to be, as expected, the fastest and most energy-efficient ones”. C and C++ languages are the most efficient and fastest languages. Go is the worst language from the compiled languages category, and it’s even worse than languages relying on a VM like Java or Erlang, at least with the binary-trees sample used.

#articles #programming

📟 Open-source plastic scanner

Towards a simple device that can identify the five most common plastics

Plastic pollution is a well-known problem worldwide, and is still growing. It negatively affects humans and wildlife through animal death, groundwater pollution and incorporation of micro plastics in our digestive system.

Discrete near-infrared spectroscopy makes it possible to identify over 75% of all plastic used in everyday life.

This ecosystem consists of:
▫️ A breakout board that combines all components to emit and sense infrared light on a small printed circuit board with standard communication protocols.
▫️ A handheld scanner that integrates the breakout board into real-world applications. It enables local machine-learning processing of the sample, all in a compact form factor.
▫️ Software that communicates with the hardware and implements machine learning for optimal and quick prediction of plastic types.

More information...

#projects #machine_learning