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All good things come to an end eventually and today marks the day that my fine record of 4 consecutive acceptances into VLSI/IEDM ends… I wasn’t particularly upset or depress as the acceptance rates for these conferences are low itself. However, the rejection pill is still hard to swallow especially after such a spectacular run ...
The problem with cycling to work is that you have to wake up real early and leave real late to avoid the heavy traffic in Hsinchu. And boy do I mean traffic!! With the super garang drivers and crazy scooters zzzooomming here and there with no respect for the traffic lights…Typically the bus is the ...
As typhoon Fung Wong made landfall today, all businesses and schools are closed for the day in Taiwan. This is the second typhoon in a month but it didn’t hit as hard as expected in the Hsinchu area. However, the typhoon seems to have unleash its power onto Taipei and Hualien with torrential rainfall and ...
I am working in the capital of IT in Taiwan. Hence a visit to the Sim Lim square equivalent in Hsinchu is a must! But first to the ubiquitous bubble tea store before heading to geekdom…There were tons of IT products which you don’t need but you will want buy at the stores ...
That’s what I am hoping the weekend going to turn out to be. The past three weeks have been GOOD but tough. But it’s things like these, which keeps the passion alive. Today, I got to know that one of my ideas is being actively pursued by leading semiconductor companies. What is even more exciting ...
Been here for about three weeks. So far it has been work and more work. In the day there’s work for TSMC, in the evening its paper writing for my advisor. I am beginning to envy my lab mates back in Singapore. I have to slow down a little or else I will be tripping ...
The weather forecast has typhoon Kalmaegi making land fall in Taiwan in the next three hours. It is definitely a new experience for me after living in one of the safest region in the world where natural disasters are unheard of. A typhoon “holiday” might be issued, if Kalmaegi continues to gain strength and speed ...
I wonder why did I ever take an additional module. Yes, I am all for learning but I seem to be always “abusing” myself with all these additional workload and stress. It is 3.30pm in the afternoon on a public holiday but I am spending my time mugging for tomorrow’s paper. The module is pretty ...
This marks my second trip to Hsinchu, Taiwan, courtesy of Jason Liow for VLSI-TSA 2008. Hsinchu is essentially the “silicon valley” of Taiwan with most of the significant technology firms anchored in the nearby science park. This trip was off to a good start when the flight that I was scheduled for was delayed ...
As Miss Kan Cheong has termed it so appropriately that April is more than deadly. There are tons of deadlines for us these poor graduate students. So to cheer everyone up. Enjoy the duet of Kylie and Kermit. It might be foreign to some of you but I am sure Mr YaYaBar knows this… And ...
Alright I got lazy with the blogging. I am known as Mr Lazy for a reason right… I have decided to lump the events of two days into a single entry for convenience and laziness. The last day of the conference saw Mr JohorNot presenting his work at the symposium, which was pretty well delivered. ...
“Oops I did it again” ought to be the theme song for this phase of Miss Kan Cheong’s journey in life. In her “religious” attempt to minimize the number of charge cycles on her laptop battery so to extend its life. She went to the extreme of removing it during her presentation yesterday because the ...
The second day of the MRS meeting had Paul Packan from Intel giving an excellent overview of device scaling from the perspective of historical trends and future directions. In short, power and leakages are issues that are currently keeping Intel engineers up at night. One major concern is the source-to-drain leakage arising from band-to-band ...
We are having a break before the start of the afternoon sessions and from the photos you can tell SNDL is hard @ work @ MRS 2008. First time attendees Pu Jing and Miss Kan Cheong will be delivering their excellent talks later this afternoon in the non volatile, and phase change memory sessions, respectively. ...
The first day of the meeting was devoted entirely to tutorials (short course) for the various symposiums. I attended the tutorial “Trends, Challenges in Doping, and Characterization of Bulk and Thin-Body Semiconductor Devices” given by Ray Duffy from NXP and Wilfried Vandervost from IMEC. The talks were rather informative especially the part on doping …
San Francisco is an awesome holiday destination with fabulous weather and iconic attractions. But first you have to suffer an arduous ~17 -19 hours of flight, if you are coming in from Singapore. However, it does seems that I am getting a hang of these transpacific flights as they aren’t as torturous as before. ...
It’s about 2 hours before I depart for the airport to catch NW6 to Narita on route to SFO. It’s the annual MRS Spring Meeting that I will be attending and this will be my fifth MRS meeting since 2003. It is always a joy to be back in San Francisco. For this trip, I ...
I was fast running out of “real estate” on my puny 80GB hard drive. I have not even loaded my music collection into the MB So PIMPING the MB was a no brainer Future MB owners take note that 80GB is pathetic. I added 4GB RAM memory modules in the process of ...
It has been a busy day completing assignments, it’s not something, which I particularly enjoy but it’s just one of those things that has to be done. Amid all the chaos during the random sampling of answers for the assignment, I have much to thank for the valuable “assistance” of Mr Lab Rat, Miss Kan ...
Yes the long arduous journey of mine in the completing this QE report is over. As of 4.10am on a Monday morning the report is completed. All that is left is the printing and binding of the report. It is 41 pages long encompassing 4 chapters. I have to admit my initial goal of a ...
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