Just an FYI, I went to download the webinar and it didn't like my email address - I got this message:
Please input a valid email address from a non-free provider.
My provider is "non-free" in that I do pay for it - it's not a yahoo or hotmail account, so I am puzzled as to why it doesn't like it or even why it makes a distinction...so unfortunately I can't access the webinar.
That said - fascinating topic! I remember in my product engineering days at Dallas Semiconductor - back in 1990 I got to participate in some failure analysis at the chip level. If I recall correctly, we used an electron microscope and we isolated some transistors on a chip by zapping lines with lasers - very fun stuff! There is something fascinating about working at that level - I usually worked with discretes but once in a while we would work with a wafer or chip. I remember picking up a wafer with the suction tool. I was fine until my boss commented that I was holding about ten thousand dollars in my hand!
In the old days failure analysis procedures were less formal. i remember an old FA guy showing me how to get to the chip on a ram I needed to open up and look at. It looked like a mad scientist laboratory with a beaker of acid smoking under the vent-a-hood. He had a fixture to use with the acid and the idea was to hold it to the top of the part until it ate away enough to expose the chip. I asked him how he knew it was time to remove the fixture and his reply was - until its too hot for you to hold any more!
I have a paid gmail account. They use this as an excuse to prevent false registrants.
How silly this makes them look!!
Anyone can go to go-daddy, pay $10 for a .com domain with 5 free email accounts and fool the system. Any serious industrial spy would easily penetrate your security.
What it does do is block the large number of people who have various free or low cost accounts for no good reason. It also reveals they seem to spy on you.
What are they afraid of, indeed. There is plenty to be cautious of, and screening email domains is only about as effective as skeleton key lock.
More specifically, I am surprised that the detailed process of reverse engineering is being openly shared at all.
Initially, engineering details and processes ought to be closely guarded. Industrial intelligence is a big issue, and as the article states, its familiar territory to patent attorneys regarding infringement and detection.
Contrary and oppositional to that is the reverse engineering process. In this article, examples of very sophisticated methods and procedures used to discover that which often remains undetected, unless very advanced methods are used to determine such specific design intents.
Those very methods of determination ought to circle back 180° to the initial point; these are engineering secrets in and of themselves that ought to remain closely guarded.
UBM's decision to openly share their discoveries is a step towards a very open-source society of design engineers, but I can only imagine the angst it brings to those companies whose secrets are being publicized.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
Now that solar and wind harvesting technologies are a thriving market, researchers are seeking other environmentally related energy sources for which they can create harvesting devices.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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