[HN Gopher] A 60 GHz phased array for $10
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A 60 GHz phased array for $10
Author : blueintegral
Score : 136 points
Date : 2020-01-21 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hscott.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hscott.net)
| Traster wrote:
| >Now the bad news: SiBeam was bought by Lattice Semiconductor,
| and right before I gave this talk, Lattice shut down the entire
| SiBeam organization and ended support and production of this
| part. I didn't find out about this until months later, when I
| contacted the sales engineers I had been talking to about this
| part and they told me what happened.
|
| This is one thing that really pisses me off. Time and time again
| you've got small(ish) companies doing interesting stuff,
| succeeding and then they step on a landline. They do something
| that gets them in the cross hairs of a big company and suddenly
| BOOM big company buys small company for ridiculous money and then
| inexplicably shuts down 90% of what the small company was doing.
| The sale happens for a nice premium and yet the second the sale
| is closed 90% of the things that the company did that made it
| valuable are jettisoned. How can it be that these companies can
| afford to buy companies at a premium, throw away massive parts of
| the value of the company and yet: this obvious value destruction
| seems to be standard operating procedure for large companies.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| >yet the second the sale is closed 90% of the things that the
| company did that made it valuable are jettisoned
|
| If it were valuable they wouldn't be jettisoned
| AaronFriel wrote:
| This is taken as axiomatic by people who believe in the
| efficient market hypothesis, but I don't think there's much
| reason to believe it's true.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| The efficient market hypothesis implies that P==NP. There's
| a LOT of reason to believe it's false.
| vba wrote:
| How so? Can you elaborate? Genuinely interested
| bordercases wrote:
| Rather than using the metaphors from one field in another
| field whose day-to-day has little to do with those
| concepts, try reading a book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Efficiently-Inefficient-Invests-
| Marke...
| aesthesia wrote:
| Well, a naive, overly strong formulation of the efficient
| markets hypothesis may imply that P=NP. Something like
| "an optimal trading strategy is a function depending on
| the entire market history, and in order to find an
| optimal trading strategy, one must check an exponentially
| large space of such functions."
|
| The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf.
| They do a sketchy reduction to an extremely stylized
| model of the market from the knapsack problem and 3-SAT.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Here is a paper on it :
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf
| novok wrote:
| Google 'likelihood of P = NP' or 'efficient market
| hypothesis P = NP'
| ethbro wrote:
| > _How can it be that these companies can afford to buy
| companies at a premium, throw away massive parts of the value
| of the company_
|
| It's almost like the lack of robust anti-trust prosecution by
| world governments have so enriched large, rent-seeking
| companies that they can literally afford to burn money and
| still come out ahead...
| TomMarius wrote:
| The founders obviously wanted to exit
| paulmd wrote:
| everyone wants to exit, the only question is how many
| zeroes it'll take for you to admit it. If I offered you a
| billion dollars for 100% of your startup today, would you
| really actually not exit?
|
| what's the old saw? "now we're just haggling over the
| price"...
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| I don't see Musk exiting for whatever amount of zeroes.
| bordercases wrote:
| Then how do we realign capital to stop keeping large
| loss-running companies or now slow-growing companies on
| life support so that basic innovations can still
| penetrate the market?
|
| IIRC Zuckerberg had the option to relinquish control of
| his company but other than taking that sweet sweet In-Q-
| Tel dollar still did his best to stay at the helm.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Agressively tax large organisations. There'd be a cost to
| that, but as this comment chain is discussing, there's
| also a cost to leaving them with the money and allowing
| them to use it to stifle innovation.
| big_chungus wrote:
| On the other hand, preventing acquisitions reduces available
| exits and might discourage future innovation (which in turn
| might promote more trusts).
| bordercases wrote:
| There needs to be a larger gradient of funding options than
| "Waste cash until unicorn" or "rent-seek until next
| bailout", and "dominate small-to-medium market niche" or
| "sponsor and penetrate next manufacturing commodity".
|
| We've seen so much wastage from the prevailing financial
| model in SV tech.
| detaro wrote:
| Lattice didn't exactly buy SiBeam. They bought the company
| owning SiBeam.
| ngvrnd wrote:
| This linked article says this chip was produced to support a
| standard that didn't catch on. It's not surprising that it's no
| longer in production if this is true.
| [deleted]
| colechristensen wrote:
| Some companies are purchased only so they won't become major
| competitors.
| TomMarius wrote:
| Companies are not primarily purchased, but sold. The previous
| owner could've continued, but they've chosen not to. We can't
| dictate them what to do, right?
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| Probably because the technology didn't make it as a standard
| but they wanted the expertise.
| inetknght wrote:
| I wonder what sort of API could be used to control that kind of
| phased array. I guess that's the point of the blog post though:
| asking for help with reverse engineering its interface.
| droithomme wrote:
| I wonder what sorts of things the chips were used for inside
| laptops and smart TVs. He mentions it being used for streaming,
| but it's a directional radar chip, seems it would be used for
| doing a 3d scan of an area?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's a directional transceiver. Directional transceivers happen
| to be usable as radar, but these were not intended for that
| usecase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WirelessHD
| lachlan-sneff wrote:
| Phased arrays are very cool tech. Personally, I can't wait for
| visible-wavelength optical phased arrays to hit the mainstream
| (they're just now being implemented), since they'd enable tech
| like legitimately holographic displays and video cameras with
| digitally programmable optical zoom.
| jobseeker990 wrote:
| Have any further reading I can do on this?
| hwillis wrote:
| https://www.spar3d.com/news/lidar/mits-10-lidar-chip-will-
| ch...
|
| holographic displays would use eye trackers to show each eye
| a different image. Solid state zoom is maybe a bit of a
| stretch, but it would involve pixels becoming sensitive to
| angles more inward or outward from the sensor's center.
| lachlan-sneff wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I believe that's not how holographic
| displays would work with optical phased arrays. I believe a
| phased array can make it seem that light is being emitted
| from any point above the display (within the display angle
| of the opposite side of the display). There's no need to
| track observers, because it would be an honest
| reconstruction of the light emitted from a real 3d
| dimensional object.
| hinkley wrote:
| Does anyone recall in the Long Dark Ago when there was a startup
| that was planning to embed a phased antenna array into a cubicle
| wall?
|
| It still gets me the level of miniaturization that happens when
| you come back to an idea 20 years later, instead of watching the
| incremental changes along the way.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I love how industry came up with ever crazier schemes to stream
| content from phones and laptops to TVs. There must have been
| three different attempts involving WiFi alone, but this phased
| array mmWave 60 GHz million bucks basic research abomination
| surely takes the cake.
|
| Meanwhile, some Google engineer realized you could solve 90% of
| phone-to-TV streaming applications and 100% of the hard technical
| problems by just telling the TV to download and display the
| YouTube video itself. Genius!
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Yes, genius if the content is asynchronous.
|
| Any real-time or interactive display will need to be able to
| stream at sub-frame latencies. At 60fps that means less than
| 16ms, at VR friendly refresh rates ~90fps that means 11ms.
|
| While their approach works beautifully for their core
| competencies, static and non-interactive streaming content, it
| doesn't really work for any other application.
| LASR wrote:
| Turns out the dumbest solutions to effectively solve a
| particular problem are the best.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Is this appropriate for creating a wireless HDMI interface for VR
| headsets?
| danbr wrote:
| Yep. It's already being done by oculus or one of those VR
| startups.
|
| https://www.displaylink.com/vr
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| I am pretty sure HTC's Vive Wireless adapter uses a 60GHz link
| made by Intel ("WiGig").
| thinkmassive wrote:
| "That chip was the SB9210 from SiBeam. This part was originally
| intended to be used for WirelessHD, a protocol for wireless
| video streaming that never took off. ...at one time they were
| included in some smart TVs and in some high end laptops."
|
| It sounds like it would be very suitable for a VR headset.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Datasheet says it add 5ms latency, latency in VR causes nausea.
| csours wrote:
| I'm not up to date on VR tech - is the video memory on board
| the VR headset? If the memory is onboard, you could do some
| simple rotations and translations on the current frame while
| the render pipeline caught up.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| There's an overview of some of the various techniques that
| Oculus uses here: https://uploadvr.com/reprojection-
| explained/
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| 5ms isn't yet at nausea levels though...
| sp332 wrote:
| In 2014, Michael Abrash gave a talk summarizing what's
| needed for a feeling of presence in VR. He said 20 ms
| motion-to-photon latency is required for the virtual world
| to feel like it's "nailed in place". So 5 ms is 25% of the
| latency budget.
| nathancahill wrote:
| The number I've heard, don't ask me from where, is 16 ms.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| 60FPS ~= 16.67ms/frame. So if you don't want to drop
| frames on a 60Hz monitor, your frame time budget is 16ms.
| If you want input to appear on the next frame, you've got
| _at most_ 16ms. If you 're targeting a 120Hz monitor then
| you've got 8ms. Etc.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| I haven't used it but the reports I have seen say the vive
| wireless seems to work fine without noticeable latency.
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