Perspective: Behind the scientific gobbledygook method

The annual International Solid State Circuits Conference is one of the more interesting get-togethers I attend.

Why? Because I have absolutely no idea what's going on.

On Wednesday at 11:15 a.m., for instance, ISSCC attendees could choose among:

• A lecture on a one-cycle lock time slew-rate-controlled output driver presented by Hynix;

• The IBM blockbuster: "A 16Gb/s Source-Series Terminated Transmitter in 65nm CMOS SOI;" or

• UCLA's "11b 800MS/s Time-Interleaved ADC with Digital Background Calibration."

In the end, I opted for the speech on the "2D Microfluxgate Earth Magnetic Field Sensor" because it was sandwiched between a presentation on a microgyroscope with automatic mode matching from Georgia Tech and another on a gravimetric FBAR circuit operating in liquids with flip-chip packaging from Infineon. I figured it would be easier to stay put than lose my seat.

The average person can barely fake any sort of comprehension in the proceedings for very long. The person next to you--usually a chip designer or a professor at a university--will invariably try to strike up a conversation.

What do you say? "Er...gravimetric FBAR. Are those the boots Richard Gere wore in American Gigolo? Do you know where the Loss Compensated Distributed Amplifier Smackdown is? Is it in Cypress II?"

A universe ruled by the whims of the customer is one rife with chaos.

It just doesn't work to just blurt out, "So where's the value add?" and then go back to your nap.

The really enthralling part of all this, of course, is getting (once again) tangible and overwhelming proof that there remains a fairly large population of people in the world far smarter and more dedicated than I will ever be--or you, for that matter. No offense--don't you think your time would be better used devising a wide locking range regenerative frequency divider like J.C. Chien from National Taiwan University?

If you listened to a lot of the chatter from bloggers or analysts in recent years, tasks such as improving computer performance and ramping up processor speeds were supposed to become irrelevant. Instead, leading companies in the future would be set apart from competitors by improving industrial design, introducing products rapidly, or coming up with ways to create a tighter emotional bond with consumers.

A symbolic death knell for specs came when Intel and Advanced Micro Devices submarined clock speed on their chips.

A universe ruled by the whims of the customer, though, is one rife with chaos. One day they want SUVs; a few months later they are clamoring for hybrids. Lost: yes, but who knew?

Ponder this for a moment: Why did YouTube win the online video war? It emerged around the same time as similar companies such as Veoh Networks, and the sites function in a similar manner. Yet YouTube has become a worldwide titan while Veoh is best known as a place to download skateboard videos or kung fu movies that fell out of copyright. The same applies for MetaCafe.

I asked a venture capitalist once how he picked winning consumer start-ups. He shook his hand in a pantomime of shooting craps and threw the imaginary dice. "Whoosh," he said.

Admittedly, customers need to be kept happy. But if forced to choose between devising fine-grain redundant logic using defect prediction flip flops (thank you, T. Nakura of NEC) and trying to figure out why Tony Danza does better in the 3:30 to 4:30 time slot than in prime time, I'd choose the first. It just seems so much less nebulous.

Besides, research is simply fundamental. Although accountants might view it as an expensive task that can be outsourced, none of the easy-to-use technological marvels that everyone takes for granted today would be possible. Those cell phone videos of celebrities having sex couldn't be captured without digital signal processors, a type of chip first unfurled in a 1980 paper presented at ISSCC by Bell Labs.

In a decade, personal in-car radar systems may be common. And the two papers presented by University of Southern California professors on the subject at the conference this year (one is titled "A monolithic 4-Channel Beam-Former in 0.13 CMOS Using a Path-Sharing True-Time-Delay Architecture") could well be the foundation for that.

Gotta run. I have to see a man with DLL jitter reduction techniques.

Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.

More Perspectives

[ghostofitpast]

Be that as it may ...

There is still something to be said for expressing yourself in a language that approaches the comprehension of the man in the street. Even Einstein saw the value in writing a book about relativity for the general public. There is a danger of getting so wrapped up in a highly specialized jargon and the narrow community that speaks only that jargon. The danger is of becoming a "techno-moron," thoroughly informed about one small corner of the world and oblivious to all else.

[billmosby]

We can do both!

If you're presenting technical work to an audience in which you
expect to find members who understand the jargon, jargon saves
time. That's how it arises in the first place. In other venues,
converting to English or whatever makes sense. I remember talking
to a couple of people about plasma physics one time. They had
nursing backgrounds and were quite confused at first! Once I
explained that I didn't mean blood plasma, things cleared up a tiny
bit.

[dmm]

fallacy

It is a common idea that scientists and engineers often become "techno-morons." I hate to break it to you, but this is a delusion. Super-brainiacs often spend most of their time hanging out with others of their kind for the same reason that most adults prefer to hang out with other adults rather than with children: it is exhausting to continually reach down to someone so far beneath you intellectually. You have to keep explaining stuff, and not use big words, and gloss over the complications that make life interesting. In the end you wind up playing dollies.

Some people have a wonderful talent at connecting with (and raising up) people at a lower intellectual level. Whether they are "ordinary" intellects working with children, or geniuses working with "ordinary" adults, we call them teachers. They change society and make our knowledge-based economy possible. We reward their special gift by paying them crappy salaries and quoting encouraging sayings such as "those who can't, teach."

[rapier1]

Language

I agree but its very important to remember that this is
conference by physicists for physicists. The specialized language
is important because its a concise and precise way of exchange
information. When I talk to fellow researchers I'll say "SACK
behaviour indicates OOPs possibly caused by queue issues at the
Juniper M160 rather than a fish route" because they know what
that means. If I'm talking to my mom I'd jut say 'Oh there is a
machine between here and yahoo mucking things up'.

[Soliton]

Well said

While the write-up was funny and experience excruciating indeed from the "layman's" point of you, thats how things are. As a researcher in solid-state electronics, I sometimes get to review papers (peer-review) that has quite a bit of technical jargon alien to me even (the same thing can be referred with different jargon sometimes) -- so then I have to educate myself before passing judgement on the quality of the paper. The truth is, use of jargon can be extremely concise and coherent means of passing on information to your peers, however, that same can also be incomprehensible to the man on the street, an erudite tech reporter, or even someone in a different area of research. What saves the day, however, is the fact that if the end result of the work is general enough for the "wider audience" it will inevitably be disseminated by the researchers themselves for the "wider audience". Unless, of course, its Quantum Mechanics ;)

[gal1264]

Oops

I think you mixed up that programming article's DLL with the low Jitter PLL you saw at the conference. That and you missed the presentation of silicon photonics. Otherwise spot on :) We're entering the era where everything will be made of silicon!

[SmpCtryPhys]

Scientific?

The author would be better served if he would learn the difference between scientific and technical. All of the gobbledygook he quotes is technical rather than scientific. A good starting place to learn this is James Burke's books which also explain how natural this confusion is. Nonetheless, if one is reporting on matters technical and/or scientific, one must uphold a higher standard than sports or celebrity gushing.

[nextcube]

The other thing is...

In the end, it's research at the silicon physics level that makes all of the higher-level stuff possible. Moore's Law is powered not by magazine ads portraying twenty-armed tennis players, but by incremental improvements, day in and day out, by researchers like these. Give them a break if they speak a language unfamiliar to you!

[NoVista]

the real fallacy is:

reach down to someone so far beneath you intellectually

Nothing wrong with jargon -- as we say in the land of oz, horses for courses.

Don't fool yourself that being a super-brainiac in one field makes you master of the universe. If the shoe's on the other foot and you're listening to a specialist on Austrian economic theory, you might have second thoughts about intellect ...