I was asked to come up
with an interesting topic for my blog entries to do with my area or at least
the area that I want to get into. This was a difficult question to answer.
Engineering is a vastly covered topic and electronic engineering is a huge area
of it. The reason this area is so vast is because the technology that is
available today is constantly changing.
In a paper written in
1965 called “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” by Gordon E. Moore
[1], a trend in electronics was described where the amount of
components on an integrated circuit would double roughly every year. In a further
revision of this statement it was determined that the number of components on
an integrated circuit would double
roughly every two years, which as we all know is the famous “Moore’s Law”. How
is this relevant though? Moore had essentially predicted the growth of the
integrated circuit. This was a key point to find as it had also predicted the
growth of electronics. The vastness of my area is directly affected by this discovery.
So what to choose? What stands out of the crowed and is interesting enough to
write a blog entry or two?
The main answer I
could come up with was Research and Development. Every component that has to
date been created be it the phone in your pocket, your MP3 player, laptops or
your P.C all started in a research and development centre. One such centre is
Bell Labs [2]. Bell Labs was
a technological hub with innovations in electronics that could not be matched for
its time. From its R&D department such discoveries as the telephone, radar,
semiconductor devices, computers and many more inventions had been created. However
Bell Labs is old and outdated, so still my research into what to write about
continued.
Enter Google[x]. What
is it? Where did it come from? Who runs it? Not much is known about it to be
quite honest. If you look on “About” section on Google there is nothing said about
it at all. Secretive I know. So how do we find out about it?
In looking
for ideas I came across a slight mention of the name and was intrigued from the
start. According to an article in the New York Times [3]the lab is
a super secretive one that is located in Mountain View California which is
close to the Googleplex, the main Headquarters of Google located near Silicon Valley.
The place is rarely talked about and not a lot of people in the employ of
Google knew about it. What is known however is that Google[x] is essentially the
next Bell Labs. It has been described as a dream house for innovation, with Google
looking to create the top 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas,
and has succeeded in creating quite a few of them. Most notable is the quite
recent driverless car created by the wonderful scientist and engineers of
Google[x]. The pure idea of a new innovation centre for researching the wildest
technology imaginable is quite appealing but the designs that have been put on
the book? Well that’s for another entry.
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/at-google-x-a-top-secret-lab-dreaming-up-the-future.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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