{"id":180,"date":"2007-03-02T13:16:32","date_gmt":"2007-03-02T19:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/archives\/180"},"modified":"2007-03-02T13:16:32","modified_gmt":"2007-03-02T19:16:32","slug":"the-switch-flips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/archives\/180","title":{"rendered":"The switch flips"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems like the direction of technological progress has been to reduce the number of moving parts in use, but now we may be starting a trend in the other direction. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MEMS\">MEMS<\/a> are getting hot, for example: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eetimes.com\/rss\/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197700751&#038;cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS\">MEMS switch tops 26 GHz<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eetimes.com\/news\/semi\/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196902930\">DLP Pioneer&#8230;<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>[Ha, I accidentally made a funny when I said they&#8217;re &#8216;getting hot&#8217;. See, cuz the thing about MEMS systems is that they don&#8217;t get hot, like larger-scale mechanical systems. Ha.]<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s pretty amazing that we&#8217;re seeing switches that thunk back and forth 26 billion times in a second, or projectors where every single pixel has its own little mirror wiggling independently hundreds of times per frame. What would Archimedes think of these?<\/p>\n<p>And (of course) I see interesting roles for software coming up in concert with such systems. Whenever you can affect something in the real world at a rate of MHz or GHz, you can drive it with software and do some things you wouldn&#8217;t have believed&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems like the direction of technological progress has been to reduce the number of moving parts in use, but now we may be starting a trend in the other direction. MEMS are getting hot, for example: MEMS switch tops 26 GHz, or DLP Pioneer&#8230;. [Ha, I accidentally made a funny when I said they&#8217;re [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[39,51,56],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-ponderings","tag-software","tag-technology","author-admin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourada.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}