About this corner
"Everything will be connected." "Chips that work like the brain." Some technologies have been promised for years and are still not part of daily life. Expectations never unfold the way we imagine. But that is rarely because the technology is dull; more often it is stuck at one particular layer. In this corner we walk out while it is still dark, to find where each technology has stalled, and where it gets interesting. And every walk ends the same way: at a doorway where you can try it with your own hands. These are articles meant not to be finished at the last line.
IoT Hasn't Tried Its Hardest Yet
Device counts and market size keep growing, yet the shop floor feels unchanged. How did the forecasts of ten years ago hold up? We walk through "pilot purgatory" in three layers and question the assumption of always-on connectivity. The walk ends at a sub-GHz radio module you can build yourself.
Read this articleThe Brain Runs on 20 Watts ― Where Neuromorphic Chips Stand
GPUs burn too much power. Brain-inspired chips have been researched for 35 years, so why aren't they the main act? The silicon works; we walk the layers above it to see what is happening there. The walk ends at a single neuron you can build on an FPGA and as an analog circuit.
Read this articleWhat we promise on every walk
We question the hype, but we stay on the technology's side. Missed forecasts are reported plainly. We never conclude "so it's hopeless". We keep looking for the part that is interesting.
We always say which layer is stuck. Is it the technology itself, the software and people who must use it, or a business design in which the money never comes back? We separate the layers before thinking about what comes next.
We always end at a doorway you can walk through. Some things cannot be understood by reading. Every walk closes by naming the course, the part, or the experiment where you can get your hands dirty. If the course does not exist yet, we say "under consideration" and mean it.
Where this sits on the shelf
The map is The Cambrian Explosion of Chips; the numbers under our feet are Chip Fabrication by the Numbers; this corner is the field report from the places on the map that have not arrived yet. New walks are added as we take them.