Tools Tools Tools - EDA Tools everywhere!

Whether you are a IC logic design engineer or an IC packaging and Signal Integrity engineer you most certainly have faced the number one issue haunting the industry..."what God dam tool shall I use?" For there are so many tools vendors with tools each one of them claims to be "the tool of choice". Whether you work for Cisco, Juniper, Intel, AMD, TI, IBM you most certainly have had extensive interactions with Mentor Graphics, Candence, Synopsys, SiSoft, Dolphin, Sigrity, etc.

All these vendors offer an excellent lineup of tools - each tool tend to compliment each other. So long as they are compliant with Industry standards as outlined by GEIA, IBIS, NIST, or IEEE. However, this is not always the case. Some EDA vendors are pretty good with interoperability between tools from different vendors - but others well lets say they are like thorns in the IC and PCB design industry.



Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita and TheBuzz are trademarks of Rabita Technologies,Inc

Return of the Techies-i ...A Satirical i-Moment

Here is an i-moment, an i-pause in the busy Techie life. The i or , as I in an earlier blitz coined it as the Techies-i is much abused by both individual Techies and corporate entities. Mysterious indeed it is, even though it has been used to death, it continues to be an attention grabber. Have you noticed, recently Google has re-branded its search as iGoogle - you don't believe me, just go to http://www.google.com and check out the icon.

The techies-i isn't limited to the world of Tech, it has infact ventured into a whole new space and being used to brand Political Satire, or PoliTech Satire - only a Techie would think of using the i in such a manner...be it iPhone, iGoogle, iMap, iFaqeer, or why not iRack or how about iRan !

Copyright C. 2007

Sand Hill Road Golfers...

A San Francisco-based World Golf Tour™ (WGT) offers the world’s most photo-realistic online golf experience. WGT seeks to democratize the game of golf via the Web, making golf accessible and affordable for all, and to build an online community based on its engaging, interactive golf experience. WGT enables multiple players to explore famous courses simultaneously and sparks competition with tournament play and real-life prizes

According to Rich, who is the Director of Product Management for the World Golf Tour "We are building the most realistic golf game on the internet. Look for us to be live soon!"

We believe that this represents a quantum shift in consumer internet as the first internet sports league for golfers. Battery Ventures, a notable Technology Venture Capital firm is backing them and we have good reason to believe strongly in Battery and their excellent track record.

Copyright C. 2007

Women 2.0

What is Women 2.0?

Women 2.0 connects like-minded, motivated young women in the Silicon Valley to swap energy, ideas, and experiences with each other.

We promote the collaboration and growth of women in entrepreneurship, technology, and business and provide opportunities for young women to interact with successful women from a broad spectrum of industries.

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita and TheBuzz are trademarks of Rabita Technologies,Inc

Homeland Security wants master Key for the Internet

The US Department of Homeland Security is insisting that Verisign hand over the master keys of the Internet. If it succeeds, the US will be able to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system's root zone on the Internet. Effectively it would mean that US spooks could snoop on anyone.



read more | digg story

RSS Feeder...feeding the Genie...SYNDICATING your FEEDS!

FeedGenie , operated by Arwanah LLC a Silicon Valley startup is a real RSS Feed Processor. It contains functions to find, subscribe, and upload RSS feeds. Feeds are stored in a hierarchical folder structure with the ability to create local feeds. Users can set feed sample rate can can assign search key words and extract feeds in user defined folders. It is capable of extracting podcasts, mp3, video, pictures etc. from RSS feeds and move them to folders unattended. A download manager which is integrated within FeedGenie does this. A monitor gives the status of multiple reads, space, searches and genie icons change color to show the progress. This tool is targeted to as an individual business intelligence tool, not just a feed reader.

You can download the professional FeedGenie feed processor and try one month of extended functions and features. If a license in not purchased it will turn into standard FeedGenie which has more functionality than most free readers.

Cpyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita and TheBuzz are trademarks of Rabita Technologies,Inc

Silicon Valley silhouette...BOOMing or BUSTing

Silicon Valley, the High-Tech hub of the world. Technology is what drive the Valley from the individual contributors to the multi national corporations, all reap the harvests of a BOOMing economy. The Valley's back engine is kept running by a select group of smart engineers and entrepreneurs. Things seem to be abuzz again here with Web2.0 startup's popping up in every nook and cranny of the Valley, with backing of the whose who in the Valleys' private equity circle.

On the surface of things it would appear like that the Valley is coming back to life after its long slumber which began 4 years ago with the dot-com bust. But is the latest round of prosperity reaching the vast majority? As we don't only have entrepreneurs and top ranking CxO's residing here. How are the middle income workers and families fairing? Are they also enjoying BOOM time in the Valley?

According Channel5 CBS EyeWitness news the middle class in the Silicon Valley is worse of now than in the year 2000. According a new labor report prepared by Working Partnership U.S.A. shows that the vast majority of low and medium income are struggling to make ends meet.

This squeeze is not only experienced by the low and middle income Valleiites, but is also effecting life for your techies with an average take-home pay in the ball park of six-fugures. As the cost of living in this Valley has been on an exponential rise. Take the recent gasoline price hike to more than $4 per gallon at many Bay Area gas stations, which is above the National norm.

Copyright C. 2007

SoundTagr...The YouTube for user generated Audio files...

soundtagr was first conceptualized back in December of 2006 by a well known serial entrepreneur of Pakistani-Canadian decent. His first startup is the successful web2.0 venture, YouSendIt.com based in the Silicon Valley and backed by Alloy Ventures and Sevin Rosen Fund, two of the Valley's well known and reputed Venture Capital firms.

The original concept that the founder, Khalid Shaikh shared with me over a delectable lunch at Shalimar-Sunnyvale in the early part of December 2006 centered around creating a site for user generated Audio files, and so the reason for the domain http://www.soundtagr.com, registered at GoDaddy.com. However, if you visit the site now you will find that the scope has been extended to include all sorts of files and thus we get filetagr.



The underlying idea behind filetagr is: web sites are generating millions in company revenue from user generated content, but the person creating that content never gets a share of that revenue. So filetagr intends to give the revenue back to the user.

So how does it work? After a user subscribes to filetagr they have an option to upload a file to share. Whether it be audio files, video or event documents the type of file is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is once you upload your file, you are given a unique URL to share with your social network of friends and co-workers. For each click from a unique IP address you will earn around $0.01.

To learn more about filetagr visit the filetagr blog.


Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita and TheBuzz are trademarks of Rabita Technologies,Inc

TellAPal: A Real World Referal System....

While LinkedIn gets all the glory for professional social networking, there is another fairly new professional social networking site, Tell-A-Pal is based on a simple premise: If you are a service oriented business or professional, your greatest source of new customers are your existing customers. So why not reward your existing customers for referring new customers? It makes sense. Tell-A-Pal is a service that helps other businesses setup a referral reward program.

Tell-A-Pal is a privately held company in the Silicon Valley, it is in the online referral business of facilitating businesses and professionals to reward existing customers for referring new customers. There site is currently down, though a few months back at a social gathering I was introduced by a common friend to the founder Faisal Qureshi, formerly from Sun Microsystem's, Faisal hinted at some exciting new developments along the lines of a social commerce site being developed.

Tell-A-Pal will be launched from one of the following domains which are currently parked and hosted by Yahoo-Inc.

http://www.tellapal.com
http://www.tellapal.org
http://www.tellapal.net

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita and TheBuzz are trademarks of Rabita Technologies,Inc

Social Networking...transforming communities...

AtifsList logo developed courtesy Rabita Technologies, Inc

AtifsList is an ethnic centric mailing list that emerged out of a need similar to how CraigsList was started by Craig Newmark. The difference between the two is that AtifsList is specifically focused on providing information about events and the latest going ons in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in the small, yet vibrant Muslim and South Asian communities of the region.

The list founder Atif M Qureshi, a Pakistani-American fire protection engineer in the Bay Area founded the list out of a need of the hour where he being an extremely active social bee was dissatisfied with the Ad-Hoc scheduling of events in his community. He found it quite frustrating many a times where you had scheduling conflicts between multiple events in the region. Not to mention little background information to go by, thus in of March of 2006 we saw the emergence of AtifsList.

Mr. Qureshi decided to take it upon himself to try and bring order to a chaotic system in his community. In his listing he includes future events in the bay Area with details addressing the what, where, why and how, and reviews and ratings of past events. His ratings are based on a sampling of a segment of his reader base who normally attend the events he has listed.

One may see this as a repeat of the CraigsList story, however CraigsList is a universal list which fills the void in multiple areas, where as AtifsList is focused solely on a certain segment of the San Francisco Bay Area community. With a particular mission to transform the bay Area Muslim community into a progressive forward looking one, and bridging the gap between his community and mainstream America. This is the power of the web, enabling ordinary citizens like Mr Atif Qureshi with the tools to bring his community, which has been under scrutiny since the horrific attack of September 11, 2001 into the mainstream American limelight and portraying a positive truthful image.

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita is a trademark of Rabita Technologies, Inc
making pristine connections...

Light Computing - the web4.0 future is near...

What are these? Look like pens...



Pen's with hidden cameras? Interesting....




Now what is this...pens with hidden cameras on a stand...



Now see - a holographic computer or as recently coined web4.0 technology.

No words can adequately describe quite how breathtakingly cool this i.Tech Virtual Keyboard is. Bluetooth enabled, it uses infrared to project a clear and crisp keyboard onto your desktop, and then transfers your keystrokes via wireless networking to your PDA, Pocket PC or smart phone - it sounds far too futuristic to be true. But it's very much for real, and it's awesome.

This 22nd Century gadget is about half the size of your average deck of cards, sits wirelessly on any flat surface, and projects a red standard QWERTY-layout keyboard on any flat opaque surface. Using detection technology it "watches" your fingers hit the key locations it has projected, and then sends the keystrokes through to your PDA, smart phone or pocket PC via Bluetooth.

The projected keyboard is highly visible even in strong light (though it does of course look spectacularly cool in the dark). It's highly portable as well, though it will make you look a bit of a lunatic at the local, as you will look like you're typing on nothing more than the pub table (which also raises some serious health and safety concerns), and you will of course be interrupted every fourteen seconds with someone coming over and wanting to know where they can get one.

There is no cooler keyboard in the known universe.

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc

A New Computing Paradigm....

On February 13th, 2007 D-Wave Systems, Inc a Canadian based Quantum Computing technology startup will be launching the worlds first commercially produced end-to-end Quantum Computing system powered by a 16-bit processor.

The live launch will take place at 8am at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Following is a brief description about Quantum Computing.

[Note to view TechRabita from India, Pakistan, China or Iran please visit us through
our alternate site at http://www.pkblogs.com/techrabita. This is due to the fact that the blogspot.com domain has been blocked by the respective Telecommunication authority.]

What is Quantum Computing?

Quantum Computing is a form of computing that operates in the realm of Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is a mathematical framework or set of rules for the construction of physical theories. For example, there is a physical theory known as quantum electrodynamics, which describes with fantastic accuracy the interaction of atoms and light. Quantum Electrodynamics is built up upon the framework of quantum mechanics. The relationship of quantum mechanics to specific physical theories like quantum electrodynamics is like a relationship of a computer’s operating system to specific applications software—the operating systems sets certain basic parameters and modes of operation, but leaves open how specific tasks are accomplished by the applications.

In a quantum computer, the fundamental unit of information (called a quantum bit or qubit), is not binary but rather more quaternary in nature. This qubit property arises as a direct consequence of its adherence to the laws of quantum mechanics which differ radically from the laws of classical physics. A qubit can exist not only in a state corresponding to the logical state 0 or 1 as in a classical bit, but also in states corresponding to a blend or superposition of these classical states. In other words, a qubit can exist as a zero, a one, or simultaneously as both 0 and 1, with a numerical coefficient representing the probability for each state. This may seem counterintuitive because everyday phenomenon is governed by classical physics, not quantum mechanics -- which takes over at the atomic level. [Click for an explanation on Classical bit Vs. Qubit]

Fig. 1: Mathematical depiction of Quantum states - above shown are two |0> and |1> states, which are vector quantities - below is a superposition or summation of the two states. The reciprocal of the square root of two are amplitudes defining part of the superposition is in the |0> state and
the rest is in the |1> state.

Note on the Notation:

In quantum mechanics a commonly used notation is referred to as the Bra-ket notation which describes quantum states. It was invented by Paul Dirac to intuitively describe quantum stats. It is also used to describe abstract vectors and linear functions in mathematics. It is called Bra-ket because the inner product of two states, say for example a x and y are denoted by a bracket . This can also be described with the integral symbol as

= Integral(x*y) dxdy

Where x* is a complex conjugate of x.

Most of quantum mechanics uses this intuitive notation which hides the underlying complexities of the mathematical description.

Why Quantum Computing?

You might be asking why we need to worry about quantum computing. Well I could state several reasons why quantum computing is important, but for the purposes of this report it would suffice to state three of most fundamental reasons:

1. Semiconductor Fabrication Costs:

With the increasing complexity of Integrated Circuits (IC’s) the over head costs of fabrication has been on a steady rise. The plot in Figure 1 depicts the cost of fabricating Semiconductors verse time.

Fig.1: Semiconductor Fabrication Cost increases with Time (Courtesy Scientific America, 2000)

2. Declining Number of Electrons per chip:

With the increasing density and reduction in physical size of the semiconductor chips die, the number of electrons per chip are on a steady decline and their quantum mechanical interaction is becoming more and more significant. The plot in Figure 2 depicts a decreasing of the number of electrons per chip with increasing time.

Fig.2: Declining Number of Electrons per chip (courtesy Scientific America, 2000)

3. Classical computers, which are based on binary 0 and 1, are not able to generate a true random set of numbers.

4. Quantum Computers are able to perform certain types of calculations that could be too lengthy for classical computers to perform.

To further learn about the theory behind quantum computing, I would strongly recommend the following text by Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang titled "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information".

In the meantime standby for news about D-Wave Systems, Inc's groundbreaking historical launch of the first Commercially produced Quantum Computing System.

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies, Inc

Blogger Philhantropy....a new paradigm to charitable giving...

Dave McMurty is a Silicon Valley professional working in corporate development and mergers and acquisitions has harnessed the power of viral marketing and social networking to raise more than $175,000 in 5 months to build 38 homes in Columbia. Listen to Bloggers Give Back on Voices of the Human Network, by Cisco Systems.

Through the power of the internet, Dave has succeeded in providing his reader base with an intimate and personal connection to the housing project in Columbia sanctioned by Habitat for Humanity.

This is indeed a paradigm shift to the traditional method of raising funds which is a thing of the past. This revolutionary model is easy and cost effective to implement - it would surely cut overhead costs of raising funds at excruciatingly expensive fundraiser dinners, allowing more fund to be channeled to needy families around the world.

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita is a trademark of Rabita Technologies,Inc

Wikiasari - A new way of searching the web!

Recently the Wiki Foundation founder Jimmy Wales announced a new search engine that will be based on user inputs.

What does this mean for Google, which is by far the most extensively used search engine around the world? The search world is extremely fragmented, every few months we have new search engines popping up - from Yahoo! to Google to Chacha, Webcrawler and now Wikiasari. How much longer will this trend continue - is the search space headed for a new "dot.com bubble"? Who will be the victor over this newest battle being played out in the search world?

Whatever the outcome in the search space, it is surely going to be one that is most agile in performing user searches. User's are searching for engines that will provide them with the exact information in the shortest amount of time. No one wants to sift through a million search results only to find one or two useful ones.

Sooner or later we will be witnessing a new Internet revolution, one that is based on user inputs and provides the human element to the online world. This may very well come in the form of web4.0 or holographic technology, where users interaction will go beyond the mouse and keyboard. In fact will be based on web based interactions in virtual online venues. Very much along the lines of the concept of the HoloDeck as depicted in Gene Roddenburry's novel Star Trek.

Already companies like Cisco and HP have embarked in such a direction with there Video Conferencing technologies called Cisco TelePresence and HP Halo respectively. The key in these two Video Collaboration tools is in the experience. The Cisco TelePresence indeed give one the impression of being in the same room as other participants - this is definitely the next best thing to the HoloDeck.

Copyright C. 2007 Rabita Technologies Inc
TechRabita is a trademark of Rabita Technologies,Inc