[P&N] Chapter 4: Hardware Is Ephemeral

Citation: Edward A. Lee, 2017: Plato and the Nerd - the creative partnership of humans and technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Hardware is both hard and soft. I will argue that for an engineer who works with digital technology, hardware is merely an ephemeral expression of an idea, lasting longer than a spoken word, which vanishes from the room in a few milliseconds, but still ephemeral, in the grand schema. The ideas articulated by the hardware, in contrast, although undoubtably mutating and evolving, can last a long time indeed.

Lee’s arguments totally make sense to me. In fact, I completely agree with almost every single word he said in this chapter, because many of them even seems so obvious. This reminds me of Barbara Liskov, Professor Fox once said in lecture that when Liskov received Turing Award, someone behind him said, “why does she receive this, everyone knows that(Liskov substitution principle)!” Sometimes it is very hard to translate something obvious to us to some formal expression, and people haven’t realize this point. As a student majoring in CS, I can’t even tell you clearly how does Wikipedia work, can I?

Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM, in March 2009, for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.
- Wikipedia

In this post, I will try to summarize how Wikipedia works in terms of hardware according to Lee in several pictures. And I hope one day I can give a presentation to my younger alumnus regarding this topic. As for the software part, I will introduce it in the post of Chapter-5.

As you can see later, the way Wikipedia actually work is really through models of models of … models and layers under layers … under layers. There are tons of abstraction and simplification used in this process. Otherwise, we will not be able to design a single chip.

People used to design a circuit in a way the picture above shows, but now it’s impossible for us to design every chip in that way.

Mead-Conway approach: defines standard layout patterns according to a variable parameter called \( \lambda \), which is the minimum distance between features in a layout.