Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2000
Last month DDJ reported on a new gate design from the University of California at Berkeley and a molecular transistor being developed at Yale and Rice universities, both projects striving to further miniaturize transistors. Outside of academia, commercial research laboratories are also doing their part.
Motorola has announced a breakthrough in semiconductor materials enabling future transistors to be three to four times thinner than those built with conventional materials, while consuming less power. The new materials are part of a class of semiconductor materials called "perovskites," derived from strontium, titanium, and oxygen. Researchers expect to have working transistors made out of perovskites by 2004. For more information, see http://www .mot-sps.com/news_center/.
Meanwhile, Lucent's Bell Labs has announced a new vertical transistor design based on a polysilicon deposition technique instead of photolithography, which is used to produce conventional horizontally oriented CMOS transistors. In this new vertical gate structure, the gate length and its variability are controlled by the thickness of the deposited film. The new vertical design is expected to allow gate lengths of less than 30 nanometers using currently available manufacturing equipment. For more information, see http:// www.bell-labs.com/ and the International Electron Devices Meeting web site at http://www.ieee.org/conference/iedm/.
VA Linux has opened SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/), a web repository and resource center for open-source projects. According to a prepared statement "SourceForge now hosts a wide range of tools and applications, including several components of the Linux kernel; major Internet client and server applications for chat, e-commerce, FTP, IRC, mail, news and the Web; and several business, scientific and educational applications." VA Linux claims that more than 3000 developers have already registered at the site.
At SourceForge, you can download open source projects, such as Topaz, a project to create the next generation Perl, and The Berlin Project, a next-generation graphical system for Linux and UNIX. In addition, open-source 3D graphics development projects such as the 3dfx Glide drivers for Linux, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) Project, and the Crystal Space 3D engine are hosted on SourceForge. You can also find other programmers to collaborate on projects via SourceForge.
The Software Carpentry Project, sponsored by the Advanced Computing Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, is providing $860,000 over the next two years to fund the design and development of new versions of several basic software development tools. The project is being administered by Code Sourcery (http://www .codesourcery.com/), and everything it produces will be open source.
The first step in the project is a design competition offering a total of $100,000 in prizes. Contestants can submit entries in four separate categories:
Once designs have been selected, another $200,000 will be provided this year to seed initial development and documentation.
The project coordinator is Greg Wilson, an independent software developer and frequent DDJ contributor. According to Wilson, the project's primary goal is to improve the working practices and standards of software engineering to put them more on par with the standards expected in other disciplines of science and engineering.
The deadline for first-round submissions to the design competition is March 31, 2000. For more details, see the Software Carpentry Project web site at http://www .software-carpentry.com/.
Dale Thorn, the developer of the C language encryptor (CCRP ) and also a DDJ contributor, is offering a prize of $1000 to the first person who can decrypt a sample text file that has been encrypted using CCRP. CCRP was developed initially as a simple password encryptor for PC game programs, but it has evolved into a general-purpose encryption program. For more information on the contest, contact Dale Thorn via e-mail at dthorn@batchmaster.com.
The 1999 winner of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award is Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina.
Brooks managed the System/360 development team at IBM in the early 1960s and was instrumental in the design and development of the Operating System/360 software, which introduced innovations in I/O handling and operating mode transition still in use today. Brooks and Dura Sweeney collaborated to invent the Stretch interrupt system, which is the basis of today's interrupt systems.
Brooks was also involved in early wordprocessing design, which led to the decision to make the 8-bit byte the addressable unit, and to the inclusion of a full character set in the operating system.
Brooks left IBM in 1965 to become the founding professor of the computer-science department at the University of North Carolina, where he concentrated on research in real-time 3D graphics. Brooks and his students built the first molecular graphics system for solving protein structures.
Brooks is author of the 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0201835959) now in its second edition, which has sold more than 300,000 copies. With G.A. Blaauw, he is also coauthor of Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution (Addison-Wesley, 1997; ISBN 0201105578). For more information on the Turing Award, see http://www.acm.org/.