Following my retirement, we have closed our company for new business.

Please do not hesitate to contact me directly, our email portal remains open and I would be delighted to hear from you and provide ongoing support or advice.

Richard Thomson

support@rta-instruments.com

Companies represented up to the end of December 2023. Please now contact them directly.

k-Space Associates, Inc.
Phone: +1 (734) 426-7977
requestinfo@k-space.com
https://www.k-space.com

STAIB INSTRUMENTS GmbH
Phone: +49 8761 76 24 0
sales@staibinstruments.com
https://www.staibinstruments.com/

Monday 27 June 2016

Something to think about

The impossible barber and other bizarre thought experiments. How inventing riddles has revealed the flaws in our grasp of reality

Thursday 23 June 2016

Wednesday 22 June 2016

ITRS reborn as ITRDS

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, first published in 1965, will start a new life as the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems. The new effort will address road map issues that include computer systems, architectures and software as well as the chips and the components used in them.

Monday 20 June 2016

Smartphone market shrinkage

According to Strategy Analytics global smartphone shipments fell 3 percent annually to reach 335 million units in Q1 2016. This is the first time that the smartphone market has shrunk on an annualised basis.

Friday 17 June 2016

TFS to buy FEI

Thermo Fisher Scientific to buy FEI for $4.2 Billion - electron-microscope maker FEI to become part of Thermo Fisher’s analytical instruments segment.

Thursday 16 June 2016

Wednesday 15 June 2016

IBM - now more than a 2 bit organisation

Scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated reliably storing 3 bits of data per cell using phase-change memory technology.

Monday 13 June 2016

Patent trolls

Patents are one method that organisations use to protect their intellectual property, generate income and safeguard competitive advantage. An increase in patent litigation could be seen as a good thing as organisations appreciate this and act to enforce the protection of what is rightfully theirs. Unfortunately a recent US study has highlighted that some firms solely exist to amass patent portfolios with the aim of suing cash rich organisations seemingly irrespective of the actual patent infringement. Worryingly, the target organisations seem to react by reducing R&D spending following settling these wrangles.

Friday 10 June 2016

Pop goes the weasel

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN recently had some performance issues that were categorised as severe electrical perturbation. Fortunately the technical fault was soon identified as a short circuit within a 66kV transformer. It was caused by a weasel. Sadly the animal did not survive the encounter, lost for the advancement of science. Not quite the same as leaves on the line or the wrong type of snow but perhaps mort de la fouine could be added to Network Rail’s lexicon of excuses.

Thursday 9 June 2016

Wednesday 8 June 2016

Cause and effect

As Sigmund Freud and others have noted, there many influences that shape us as individuals. Pavlov and his dogs taught us about conditioning and showed how we can be trained to respond in a certain way to a particular stimulus. A modern technological variant in the press recently being an app linked wrist band that can give you an electric shock should you indulge in some bad habit such as smoking or perhaps even spending too much money. No doubt the hackers are looking forward to having some fun with this.

I personally like (and hope that it is true) the story that the creator of the shock giving device once hired someone to sit next to him and slap him on the face every time he was seen using (wasting time on) Facebook. Not Kierkegaard but probably more effective.