Can Technology Defeat Ieds? Volume 45 Number 9 North American 09.08

THE MAGAZINE OF TECHNOLOGY INSIDERS 09.08

can technology defeat Ieds? volume 45 number 9 north american 09.08

UpDaTE 11 submersible robot gliders Defense contractors are snapping up the technology to build propellerless underwater robots. By Erico Guizzo

13 the world’s most powerful magnet

14 Virtual reality for injured athletes

15 quantum cryptography by satellite

16 a new search for e.t. begins

18 the big picture A solar-powered wonder wheel. 26 OpINION 9 spectral lines synthetic biology and new software- programming approaches take a turn at Fortune’s Brainstorm tech meeting.

10 forum More reader reactions to our special issue on the singularity.

20 reflections engineers, of all people, should be good at prediction. We’re not. 36 48 By Robert W. Lucky DEpaRTmENTs tread lightly cover story 4 back story a soldier watches his step in Iraq 6 contributors [top left]; Jon 26 COUNTERING IEDs careers Rubinstein starts The U. S. military has spent billions in search of technological a new life, post- 21 Grad school may cost you more countermeasures to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The fact ipod, as executive than you think. By Prachi Patel-Predd that successes have been few doesn’t mean it’s time to quit. chairman of the engineering life palm [right]; and By Glenn Zorpette 22 Why are so many jihadis spores evolve into engineers? two academics think they space invaders in know. By Susan Karlin the year’s hottest computer game 36 ENGINEERING spORE 23 books [bottom left]. A wild menagerie of beasts is put to the evolutionary test in this eagerly How the Internet makes unorganized awaited—and sophisticated—new game. By David Kushner organizations possible. By Bruce Schneier 24 Danica McKellar—actress, COVER: 42 bEyOND sIlICON’s ElEmENTal lOGIC mathematician, and author—strikes phOtOgRaphER unknOwn. thE split-sECOnd timing again with a new book. By Susan Karlin Of this imagE Of a hugE Key parts of microprocessors and other digital ICs may soon be made of iEd blast suggEsts that an insuRgEnt tOOk thE gallium arsenide or other III-V semiconductors. By Peide D. Ye 25 tools & toys phOtO. wE addEd thE sCan linEs fOR EffECt. A tale of two kids, a 27-inch monitor, this pagE, ClOCkwisE fROm and a mysterious electrical current. tOp lEft: miChaEl kambER/ By Sherry Sontag ThE NEw yORk TImEs/ 48 fROm pODfaThER TO palm’s pIlOT REdux; maRk RiChaRds; ElECtROniC aRts As Steve Jobs’s loyal hardware chief, Jon Rubinstein launched the iPod. 72 the data Now, as executive chairman of Palm, he’s working on a new handset, sure, most hacking is done by hackers, but the devils are in the and he’s got his sights set on Apple. By Tekla S. Perry details. By Prachi Patel-Predd www.spECTRUm.IEEE.ORG septeMBer 2008 • Ieee spectruM • NA volume 45 number 9 north american 09.08

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kam aND Ray havE ThEIR say Find out what Moshe Kam and pedro ray—the candidates for 2009 Ieee president-elect— have to say about the Ieee issues that matter to members.

lEft: EmiRatEs; Right: phOtO-illustRatiOn, anna dEmian; ORiginal WWW.spectruM.Ieee.orG phOtO, siEgfRiEd layda/ gEtty imagEs avaIlablE 1 sEpTEmbER ON spECTRUm ONlINE fIRsT-Class UpGRaDEs For you to re-create at home the same entertainment experience many airlines are starting to offer, your computer, personal electronic devices, cable or satellite system, cellphone, and TiVo would all have to be connected through a touch screen and remote that would be integrated bOOsTING IEEE’s into your fully reclining easy chair. Contributing Editor Robert N. vIsIbIlITy aND Charette flies the posh skies and talks with in-flight entertainment- pREsTIGE system experts about the latest approaches and plans for keeping Ieee has embarked on a five-year passengers happy. He also discusses some little-known facts about how communications program that seeks these systems are created, as well as how they are used to provide both to raise the organization’s global physiological and psychological comfort to stressed-out jet-setters. visibility and improve the image of the engineering profession. oNLINe FeAtures: ALso oNLINe: IEEE.Tv sERIEs can terahertz waVes be used to • Webcasts detect IeDs? executive editor Glenn • podcasts fOCUsEs ON ThE Zorpette investigates. • News ENvIRONmENT • Blogs register now for the 25 september A new Ieee.tv series focuses on the • Jobs webcast on how emerging display 73-nation Global earth observation • career Accelerator Forum technologies will affect consumer system of systems. the three videos • Ieee Xplore® digital library electronics and automobiles. give an overview of Geoss, explore • White papers its applications, and feature experts engineering jobs follow the • opinions weighing in on the latest earth- money, but can engineers follow the • More! observation technologies. jobs? professor Malcolm Getz explains.

ieee spectrum (IssN 008-9235) is published monthly by the Institute of electrical and electronics engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2008 by the Institute of electrical and electronics engineers, Inc., 3 park Avenue, New york, Ny 006-5997, u.s.A. the editorial content of Ieee spectrum magazine does not represent official positions of the Ieee or its organizational units. canadian post International publications Mail (canadian Distribution) sales Agreement No. 4003087. return undeliverable canadian addresses to: circulation Department, Ieee spectrum, Box 05, Fort erie, oN L2A 6c7. cable address: ItrIpLee. Fax: + 22 49 7570. INterNet: [email protected]. ANNuAL suBscrIptIoNs-Ieee Members: $2.40 included in dues. Libraries/institutions: $205. postMAster: please send address changes to Ieee spectrum, c/o coding Department, Ieee service center, 445 Hoes Lane, Box 33, piscataway, NJ 08855. periodicals postage paid at New york, Ny, and additional mailing offices. canadian Gst #2563488. printed at W224-N3322 Duplainville rd., pewaukee, WI 53072-495, u.s.A. Ieee spectrum circulation is audited by BpA Worldwide. Ieee spectrum is a member of American Business Media, the Magazine publishers of America, and the society of National Association publications. www.spECTRUm.IEEE.ORG septeMBer 2008 • Ieee spectruM • NA 3 back story

editorial

EdITor IN chIEF Susan hassler, [email protected]

ExEcUTIVE EdITor Glenn Zorpette, [email protected]

MANAGING EdITor Elizabeth A. Bretz, [email protected]

SENIor EdITorS harry Goldstein (online), [email protected]; Jean Kumagai, [email protected]; Samuel K. Moore (News), [email protected]; Tekla S. Perry, [email protected]; Philip E. ross, [email protected]; david Schneider, [email protected]; William Sweet, [email protected]

SENIor ASSocIATE EdITor Steven cherry (resources), [email protected]

ASSocIATE EdITorS Sally Adee, [email protected]; Erico Guizzo, [email protected]; Joshua J. romero (online), [email protected]; Sandra Upson, [email protected]

ASSISTANT EdITor Willie d. Jones, [email protected]

SENIor coPy EdITor Joseph N. Levine, [email protected]

coPy EdITor Michele Kogon, [email protected]

EdITorIAL rESEArchEr Alan Gardner, [email protected]

ExEcUTIVE ProdUcEr, SPEcTrUM rAdIo Sharon Basco

ASSISTANT ProdUcEr, SPEcTrUM rAdIo Francesco Ferorelli, [email protected]

AdMINISTrATIVE ASSISTANTS ramona Gordon, [email protected]; A Computer Game’s Nancy T. hantman, [email protected] INTErN Monica heger, [email protected]

coNTrIBUTING EdITorS John Blau, robert N. charette, Intelligent Design Peter Fairley, Alexander hellemans, david Kushner, robert W. Lucky, Paul McFedries, Kieron B. Murphy, carl Selinger, Seema Singh, John Voelcker t was one of those ‘Oh, wow’ we were building our relationship.” art & production

moments,” says IEEE Spectrum They battled bad plumbing and SENIor ArT dIrEcTor Mark Montgomery Contributing Editor David broken roads, which served as I ASSISTANT ArT dIrEcTor Brandon Palacio Kushner [right], recalling his good practice for life in Brooklyn, PhoTo EdITor randi Silberman first encounter with the new N.Y. Eventually, their virtual city’s dIrEcTor, PErIodIcALS ProdUcTIoN SErVIcES Peter Tuohy computer game Spore. Due to be inhabitants got to live in a big space EdITorIAL & WEB ProdUcTIoN MANAGEr roy carubia released this month and featured tower, so the two won’t complain if SENIor ELEcTroNIc LAyoUT SPEcIALIST Bonnie Nani in Kushner’s article in this issue, life continues to mimic art. WEB ProdUcTIoN coordINATor Jacqueline L. Parker Spore is the brainchild of legendary When Kushner visited Wright’s WEB ProdUcTIoN SPEcIALIST Michael Spector game designer Will Wright [left]. studio earlier this year, he got a editorial advisory board Kushner has been a devoted fan of sneak peek at Spore’s Creature Susan hassler, Chair; Marc T. Apter, Francine d. Berman, Jan Brown, raffaello d’Andrea, Stephen L. diamond, hiromichi Wright’s ever since 1993, when he Creator, the game’s built-in Fujisawa, Kenneth y. Goldberg, Susan hackwood, Erik heijne, began playing SimCity 2000. editing tool, which lets you sculpt charles h. house, david h. Jacobson, christopher J. James, ronald G. Jensen, Mary y. Lanzerotti, ruby B. Lee, Tak Ming What sets Wright’s work a fanciful new life-form out of a Mak, david A. Mindell, c. Mohan, Fritz Morgan, Andrew M. apart, Kushner says, is his ability featureless, bean-shaped blob. odlyzko, Leslie d. owens, Barry L. Shoop, Larry L. Smarr, to conjure up those “Oh, wow” Kushner was instantly hooked. harry L. “Nick” Tredennick III, William Weihl, Bas¸ak yüksel moments—lots of them. In SimCity, “Wright’s riffing on some basic editorial correspondence players explore the dynamics themes of play, going back to Silly IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New york, Ny 10016-5997 Attn: Editorial dept. Tel: +1 212 419 7555 Fax: +1 212 419 7570 of what makes a city thrive, Putty and Play-Doh and Mr. Potato Bureau: Palo Alto, calif.; Tekla S. Perry +1 650 328 7570 creating uncannily believable Head,” he says. “It’s at once new responsibility for the substance of articles rests upon the authors, not the IEEE or its members. Articles published do and compelling scenarios. and yet really familiar, with that not represent official positions of the IEEE. Letters to the “You wouldn’t think urban planning whimsical quality he’s known for.” editor may be excerpted for publication. and laying down pipe would make In the coming months Kushner advertising correspondence for a great computer game,” he says. fully expects to spend many happy IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th Floor, New york, Ny 10016-5997 But they did. The game even became hours creating creatures and playing Attn: Advertising dept. +1 212 419 7760 The publisher reserves the right to reject any advertising. part of Kushner’s courtship of his Spore. And that’s okay, because as a wife, Sue: “We spent months having veteran computer-game writer, he reprint permission LIBrArIES: Articles may be photocopied for private use fun building this city together as actually gets paid to play. o of patrons. A per-copy fee must be paid to the copyright clearance center, 29 congress St., Salem, MA 01970. For other copying or republication, contact Business Manager, citing articles in ieee spectrum IEEE Spectrum. IEEE Spectrum publishes two editions. In the international edition, the abbreviation INT appears at the coPyrIGhTS ANd TrAdEMArKS: IEEE Spectrum is a registered foot of each page. The North American edition is identified with the letters NA. Both have the same trademark owned by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics editorial content, but because of differences in advertising, page numbers may differ. In citations, you Engineers Inc. careers, EEs’ Tools & Toys, EV Watch, Progress, should include the issue designation. For example, the first Update page is in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 45, reflections, Spectral Lines, and Technically Speaking are no. 9 (INT), September 2008, p. 7, or in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 45, no. 9 (NA), September 2008, p. 11. trademarks of the IEEE. April Jones

www.spectrum.ieee.org na • ieee spectrum • september 2008 iEEE mEdia Staff Director; PubliSher, IEEE SpEctrum James a. Vick, [email protected] aSSociate PubliSher, SaleS & aDVertiSing Director Marion Delaney, [email protected] recruitMent SaleS DeVeloPMent Manager ROBERT W. expert on computer security, Michael buryk, [email protected] LUCKY wonders Schneier is chief security technical buSineSS Manager robert t. ross Marketing & ProMotion Manager blanche Mcgurr, why engineers are so officer of the BT Group’s Managed [email protected] bad at predicting the Security Services. His best seller interactiVe Marketing Manager ruchika anand, [email protected] liSt/recruitMent Marketing Manager ilia rodriguez, future, in this Applied Cryptography (1995) is [email protected] month’s Reflections column [p. 20]. considered the definitive book on rePrint SaleS +1 212 221 9595, ext. 319 Lucky, an IEEE Fellow, holds the subject. DePartMent aDMiniStrator faith h. Jeanty, [email protected] aDVertiSing SaleS +1 212 419 7760 11 patents and worked for many telePhone aDVertiSing/SaleS rePreSentatiVe years at Bell Labs. Before retiring BRIAN STAUFFER John restchack +1 212 419 7578 aDVertiSing ProDuction Manager felicia Spagnoli in 2002, he was vice president for created the incen- Senior aDVertiSing ProDuction coorDinator nicole evans applied research at Telcordia diary illustration for aDVertiSing ProDuction +1 732 562 6334 Technologies in Piscataway, N.J. our Careers story ieee Staff executiVe, PublicationS anthony Durniak “Extremist Engineers” iEEE board of dirEctorS PreSiDent & ceo lewis M. terman SEAN McCABE [p. 22]. His cover for the +1 732 562 3928 fax: +1 732 465 6444 [email protected] did the photo- 13 November 2000 issue of PreSiDent-elect John r. Vig illustration for the The Nation was honored by the treaSurer David g. green Secretary barry l. Shoop feature on the new American Society of Magazine PaSt PreSiDent leah h. Jamieson

video game Spore Editors as one of the top magazine VicE prESidEntS [p. 36]. The game, in which players covers of the past 40 years. evangelia Micheli-tzanakou, Educational Activities; John baillieul, Publication Services and Products; Joseph V. lillie, design their own creatures and Stauffer’s work has also appeared Member & Geographic Activities; george W. arnold, President, Standards Association; J. roberto b. de Marca, Technical environments, is the brainchild of in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Activities; russell J. lefevre, President, IEEE-USA Will Wright, the man behind the and Time. diViSion dirEctorS Sims franchise. McCabe says, giovanni De Micheli (i); thomas g. habetler (ii); curtis a. Siller Jr. (iii); edward Della torre (iV); “I wanted to create a fun sort of JEONg SUH & AARON Deborah M. cooper (V); irving engelson (Vi); anime alter reality with Wright WIESINgER, of Bryan Christie John D. McDonald (Vii); thomas W. Williams (Viii); frederick c. Mintzer (ix); William a. gruver (x) sitting in it, ultimately as its God.” Design, teamed up to create the rEgion dirEctorS opening illustration for “Beyond howard e. Michel (1); John c. Dentler (2); William b. ratcliff (3); robert J. Dawson (4); David J. Pierce (5); loretta J. arellano (6); MARK RICHARDS Silicon’s Elemental Logic” [p. 42]. ferial el-hawary (7); Jean g. remy (8); enrique e. alvarez (9); photographed Jon Suh is a recent graduate of Michigan Janina e. Mazierska (10) nnie Chiu

Rubinstein, who was State University’s digital media dirEctorS EmErituS a instrumental in the arts and technology program, eric herz, theodore W. hissey hards; C iEEE Staff i development of the and Wiesinger is finishing his r huMan reSourceS betsy Davis, SPhr iPod, for “From Podfather to master’s in the same program. ark +1 732 465 6434, [email protected] m Palm’s Pilot” [p. 48]. By means of a PublicationS anthony Durniak

+1 732 562 3998, [email protected] tone; technique called thin depth of field, PEIDE D. YE, s eDucational actiVitieS Douglas gorham Rubinstein appears in focus while author of “Beyond +1 732 562 5483, [email protected] StanDarDS actiVitieS Judith gorman everyone and everything else is Silicon’s Elemental +1 732 562 3820, [email protected] slightly out of focus. “It allows you Logic” [p. 42], is an MeMber & geograPhic actiVitieS cecelia Jankowski +1 732 562 5504, [email protected] niversity; Geoffrey

to see the people but not see the associate professor of corPorate Strategy & coMMunicationS Matthew loeb, cae u people,” Richards says. His work electrical engineering at Purdue +1 732 562 5320, [email protected]

buSineSS aDMiniStration richard D. Schwartz urdue p has appeared in Life, Wired, and University, where he’s known as +1 732 562 5311, [email protected] The New York Times Magazine. Peter. He adopted the nickname at technical actiVitieS Mary Ward-callan +1 732 562 3850, [email protected] Bell Labs, where he and his many Managing Director, ieee-uSa chris brantley BRUCE SCHNEIER co-workers in semiconductor +1 202 530 8349, [email protected] ko; brian stauffer; brianko; stauffer;

iEEE publication SErVicES & productS board C

reviewed Clay research were required to wear a John baillieul, Chair; tayfun akgul, Duncan c. baker, John t. barr l Shirky’s book about special blue suits and head iV, Mohamed e. el-hawary, gerald l. englel, gerard h. gaynor, roger a. grice, Marion o. hagler, Jens hannemann, Donald n. tephen

the organizational coverings in the clean rooms, which heirman, evelyn h. hirt, hirohisa kawamoto, Phillip a. laplante, s Mary y. lanzerotti, Michael r. lightner, george f. Mcclure, adrian power of the Internet, made it hard to identify who was eft: V. Pais, roger D. Pollard, Saifur rahman, Suzanne M. rivoire, Jon l which makes possible projects like who. In this “blue zoo,” as they g. rokne, W. ross Stone, James M. tien, robert J. trew, Stephen yurkovich, amir i. Zaghloul Wikipedia but also helps hate called it, having a name that iEEE opErationS cEntEr groups communicate [p. 23]. Westerners could easily recognize 445 hoes lane, box 1331, Piscataway, nJ 08854-1331 u.S.a. kwise from top An internationally recognized proved a definite plus. tel: +1 732 981 0060 fax: +1 732 981 1721 C Clo na • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org spectral lines

The Future Of Code, Digital And Genetic

he crowd at this summer’s Brainstorm Tech Conference, T organized by Fortune magazine, was atwitter with social networking and debating the future of software: From left, thoughtworks founder Neville “roy” mobile technologies and the myriad singham, David Heinemeier Hansson, charles simonyi, and grady Booch take center stage at other ways in which we continue to Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm tech. Photo: Steve JurvetSon tether ourselves to the Internet and one another. We were, of course, at Half applied to everything, particularly when the tools to generate a software solution. Moon Bay, Calif., near the U.S. epicenter software is being asked to solve large- It sounds like a software version of the of the metaverse, Silicon Valley. scale critical infrastructure “system of directed self-assembly techniques used Two of the meeting’s sessions, systems” problems. That’s why, if you in chemistry and nanotechnology. however, fell beyond the Internet’s get far enough into the little Everything Over on the in vivo side of the house, gravitational pull. Although these topics Mac user guide that comes with your Harvard’s George Church, biotech- attracted far less buzz than some of the new Macintosh computer, you’ll find: nologist and founder of the Personal rest, they could ultimately have more Genome Project; Drew Endy, of Stanford impact on tech industries than all the This computer system is not intended for use University and a founder of the BioBricks current Internet crazes combined. in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft Foundation; and Rodney Brooks, of navigation or communications systems, or An all-star programming panel— air traffic control machines, or for any other MIT and iRobot, discussed what’s being “The Future of Code”—featured David uses where the failure of your computer called synthetic biology or synthetic life Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby system could lead to death, personal injury, research. The goal of this work is to build on Rails (RoR), the highly regarded or severe environmental damage. biological systems from standard inter- open-source Web-applications develop- changeable genetic parts that can then ment platform; Charles Simonyi, space In other words, it’s tolerable if the be used to manufacture everything from tourist, renowned Microsoft developer, operating system running your Mac or biofuels to transistor parts, or as Brooks and now CEO of Intentional Software; the RoR software running your favorite put it, “to assemble the furniture without and object-oriented programming guru Web site seizes up or crashes from time to having to grow the tree first.” and IBM’s chief scientist for software time. It’s not okay if the software running Sound far-fetched? Undergraduate engineering, Grady Booch. JFK International Airport’s air-traffic- students participating in the annual The discussion poked at the elephant control system suddenly cuts out. And International Genetically Engineered in the server room: most software projects that was Booch’s point. There’s software, Machines competition have already pro- fail; most software is more complicated and then there’s software. grammed bacteria to make computational and enigmatic than the problem it’s trying Simonyi talked about his “intentional logic devices. In fact, synthetic biology is to solve; most software is just plain bad. So software” concept. If the human genome proceeding so fast that Endy and his col- how can it be done better—a lot better? can be encoded in a program that takes leagues are setting up forums to discuss Hansson, not surprisingly, champi- up less than 1 gigabyte, he asked, why its regulation by the research community. oned small-is-better open-source solu- does Windows require 15 or 16? So, So what happens if using synthetic tions. He pointed out that most problems instead of building software according genetic material in manufacturing solved by software today don’t require to elaborate blueprints that detail every becomes widespread, or if Simonyi fail-safe killer apps created by Microsoft- programming step, Simonyi is following is right and it becomes possible for size teams; they require robust but prop- what he called a recipe approach. His software programs to assemble them- erly sized small-team solutions. team at Intentional Software creates a selves? We’re guessing that these But Booch reminded the audience set of programming tools, writes a very technology upheavals will make the that software development is very diffi- specific description of the problem they Twitter/Facebook “revolution” seem oh cult and that RoR-type solutions can’t be are attempting to solve, and then uses so yesterday. —Susan Hassler www.spectrum.ieee.org September 2008 • Ieee Spectrum • NA forum

and, consequently, its Kurt Gödel proved cited, asserts that our input-output behavior. in 1930 in his famous minds require the Once we have achieved incompleteness theorem medium of “a social, this—assuming it will that mathematics is crafty, emotional, sex- ever happen—there incomplete; often you obsessed flesh-and-blood will be no economical must go outside of primate,” which almost reason to build exact mathematics to arrive at says it all. I would add replicas of human minds. truth. Gödel’s theorem that an essential part of Instead we would is the equivalent of our being is our mortality. build intelligent agents saying there are valid It provides a large part of for very specific tasks. computations that will our motivation for many These agents would at never be complete. The of our most defining least be alien to human only possible response of achievements, including minds, and there is no a robot to much of reality child rearing, teaching, reason to believe that is, “It does not compute.” writing, art, science, and their intelligence would To be human means to dreams of the singularity. not continue to grow. experience life. While Mortality also clears the simulating life and its Darwinian deck for the Philipp Wolfrum IEEE Student Member many processes can next generation to evolve. Frankfurt, Germany bring wonderful benefits If the lives of all our to mankind, confusing ancestors had been twice Letters do not More Notes oN greatly enjoyed simulations with reality as long, the sun would represent opinions the siNgularity reading about the is harmful and absurd. have gone into overheat of the Ieee. short, I hile Robin singularity but wonder mode long before concise letters are Zoltan Cendes preferred. they WHanson raises why its advocates IEEE Fellow something like us could may be edited for some thought-provoking ignore the fundamental Pittsburgh evolve and do something space and clarity. points in his article difference between about it. So let’s not be Additional letters “Economics of the computer models and he Consciousness too quick to frustrate the are available online in “And More Forum” Singularity” [June], reality. For example, TConundrum” [June] life-and-death process at http://www. there is one argument I Christof Koch and Giulio was a well-thought- that has been such an spectrum.ieee.org. strongly disagree with. Tononi [“Can Machines out, well-documented important part of us and Write to Forum, Hanson assumes that the Be Conscious?” June] article on the fantasy of our ancestors. IEEE Spectrum, first intelligent machines correctly observe that the singularity. British 3 Park Ave., 17th Michael Mallary Floor, New York, NY will be exact copies of consciousness is part neurobiologist Steven IEEE Fellow 10016-5997, U.s.A.; human brains. I think of the natural world, Rose, one of the experts Harmony, Pa. fax, +1 212 419 7570; that most researchers but their conclusion e-mail, n.hantman in neuroscience or that consciousness @ieee.org. intelligent systems functions only through would agree that this mathematics and logic is will not be the case. We false. While a computer are far from having model may simulate the the technology that hydraulic pressure in could scan and exactly a heart, this simulated reproduce the functional pressure can’t pump real structure of a system blood. In the same way, a as complex as the brain. computer may simulate But even if we could, a certain aspects of mere static copy of a consciousness, but this brain would not display artificial intelligence will humanlike behavior. never be conscious itself. CorreCtioN we would like to credit Henry For this we also would The human brain markram, of the Brain mind institute at ecole have to reproduce operates on reality, not polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, as the the self-adaptive numbers. Numbers original source of the images on the contents qualities of the brain, are only attributes of page and in “the consciousness conundrum” which continuously reality, not the whole of [above] in our June issue. markram’s work on the modify its structure it. Indeed, the logician Blue Brain project was the source of the images.

10 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org more online at www.spectrum.ieee.org

equipment, and monitoring THE LIFE Defense Contractors Snap Up systems. The order, valued at tens AQUATIC: of millions of dollars, sent defense A Spray robot glider gathered contractors racing to gobble up data for three Submersible Robot Gliders the leading glider technologies. months in the U.S. Navy contract stirs interest in propellerless AUVs In June, iRobot, in Bedford, Solomon Sea, Mass., best known for its east of Papua New Guinea, Roomba vacuum cleaner and where a French- chools of small fish follow and can remain at sea for several bomb-disposal PackBot, became U.S. research them for company or shade, months at a time, surfacing only the exclusive licensee of Seaglider, team is studying but sharks, less friendly, to get a GPS fix and beam data developed at the University of how regional S currents affect have on occasion chomped on to satellites. A mission using Washington, in Seattle. In July, El Niño cycles. their elongated bodies. These new a conventional autonomous defense industry giant Teledyne The Spray is one arrivals to the underwater world underwater vehicle (AUV) lasts Technologies acquired Webb of three designs are small submersible robots only hours. Research, in East Falmouth, competing for known as gliders because they Now it seems gliders have Mass., creator of the Slocum a U.S. Navy contract. thrust themselves through the caught the attention of some other glider. General Dynamics photo: Christophe MAes/ water not with propellers but by big fish. This month, the U.S. Navy had earlier subcontracted CeNtre irD simply changing their buoyancy. plans to announce the winner of Bluefin Robotics, in Cambridge, Thanks to this neat trick, gliders a contract for 154 gliders, plus Mass., a licensee of the Spray, consume just a trickle of power spare parts, launch-and-recovery a glider jointly developed www.SPEcTrUm.iEEE.orG September 2008 • Ieee Spectrum • NA 11 by the Scripps Institution of test kind of manufacturing to their center of mass by shift- Oceanography and the Woods commercial production mode,” ing the position of their bat- Hole Oceanographic Institution. says Tom Curtin, chief knowledge tery packs. “There are no The Navy solicitation, part of officer at the Association external moving parts—no pro- a larger program called Littoral for Unmanned Vehicle pellers or jets or moving fins— Battlespace Sensing, Fusion, Systems International, a trade to push this thing through the and Integration, involves organization in Arlington, Va. water,” says Tom Frost, iRobot’s using fleets of gliders to gather The Navy contract will pit the program manager for the data on ocean currents and on three main glider designs against Seaglider. “It’s really elegant.” And even though their original designs are alike, their makers boast of unique capabilities.

Pressurized iRobot claims the Seaglider has chamber the longest range and battery lifetime, being the first glider to complete a mission of more than Batteries 3750 kilometers and lasting six (roll control) months. Bluefin, which is also Pump supplying an offshore oil and gas contractor, says the Spray glider Flooded Batteries chamber (pitch control) can go about 50 percent deeper— 1500 meters—than its competitors Oil reservoir and has more durable sensors. And Teledyne says the Slocum’s

Bladder rudder gives it better shallow- water maneuverability and that a new system that harvests energy from temperature variations in the water could allow its gliders to stay at sea for years at a time. powEr, sAns acoustic properties that may one another. As it happens, they For researchers like Scott propELLErs: affect military sonar systems. all emerged from the same Office Glenn, a professor of physical A glider rises The Navy deal “got a lot of of Naval Research program in the oceanography at Rutgers by inflating a bladder with attention because right now mid-1990s. Similar in design, each University, in New Brunswick, oil and sinks by people are buying gliders in is a torpedo-shaped aluminum N.J., any extension of a glider’s deflating the ones and twos and threes, so hull about 1.5 to 2 meters long time at sea is welcome news. In bladder. The fixed it’s a big increment,” says Russ crammed with sensors, batteries, the past few years, Glenn and wings convert Davis, an oceanographer at and electronics. To move, the glider others have turned to gliders to vertical motion into horizontal, Scripps, which is part of the uses a pump to inject or remove study ocean circulation, climate and the glider University of California, San oil from a bladder located in a events, and marine life. One of displaces its Diego. Gliders are enticing, he flooded part of the hull. To ascend, his projects involves tracking batteries to says, because of their relatively a robot expands the bladder, the flow of sediments off New control roll and pitch. low cost: a fully equipped unit displacing water and increasing its Jersey’s coast during storms. He illustrAtioN: sells for about US $100 000 and buoyancy; to descend, it empties and his colleagues can’t go out on JohN MacNeill can go for six months; a data- the bladder out. A pair of fixed research boats in those conditions, gathering mission using a ship wings converts part of the vertical but with gliders they can be can cost over $30 000 a day. displacement into horizontal anywhere there’s an Internet Up to this point, however, motion, causing the glider to connection to monitor—or “fly”— AUVs have been a cottage travel in a sawtooth trajectory. the vehicles. “I do a lot of flying industry. “The challenge now To change pitch while from McDonald’s or Starbucks,” is making the transition from climbing or sinking or to turn Glenn says. “Anywhere, anytime, this very hands-on build-and- left or right, the gliders change you can go to sea.” —Erico Guizzo

12 NA • Ieee Spectrum • September 2008 www.SPEcTrUm.iEEE.orG the metric tonnage of greenhouse gas the united States would not emit if it used biogas from 99 mIllIoNlivestock manure to generate electricity, according to researchers at the university of texas at Austin

World’s Most Powerful Magnet Under Construction one hundred tesla without self-destructing

ultiply the magnetic at the hairy edge,” Boebinger field strength of a says, referring to the tradeoffs M refrigerator magnet he and his colleagues must by 2 million and you’ll be in make to get the most out of the the ballpark of the strength of magnet without destroying it the magnet that researchers in the process. Researchers at the National High Magnetic have been able to generate Field Laboratory, based near magnetic fields stronger than Florida State University in 100 T for years but knew that Tallahassee, are trying to any such experiment was create. When completed later a one-and-done situation, this year, the pulsed electro- because these magnets would magnet, located at the lab’s almost instantly be torn facility at the Los Alamos apart by their own forces. National Laboratory, in New Boebinger says the Magnet Mexico, will reach 100 tesla, Lab is close to reaching the mAgnETIC momEnT: Engineers are readying a supercooled, record- the holy grail of magnetic field material tensile strength setting 100-tesla magnet at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The magnet will have to withstand forces equivalent to 200 sticks of strength. And in another first, needed to repeatedly break dynamite. photo: leroy N. sANChez/los AlAMos NAtioNAl lAborAtory if all goes according to plan it the 100-T barrier. That is no will reach that level—about small feat, considering that to 60 T. The outsert is never as long as you can.” 67 times as high as a typical the US $10 million magnet powered up for more than Several ingredients in MRI—without blowing itself will have to resist enormous 2 seconds at a time, during the secret sauce will let this to smithereens. Lorentz forces—the electro- which the insert can deliver magnet snap back where Why would anyone need magnetic push on electrons multiple 20-millisecond others have simply snapped. a magnet that strong? Greg that attempts to force them bursts. Enough energy is The magnet is made up of Boebinger, director of the in a direction perpendicular transferred during those nine nested coils of wire. At Magnet Lab, says that this to the flow of current. In a 2 seconds to raise the the heart of the two innermost magnetic field strength is the magnet that strong, says magnet’s temperature coils, where Lorentz forces only way to test the properties Boebinger, these forces are from the cryogenic cold of create pressures 30 times as of newly discovered high- “equivalent to the explosive liquid nitrogen to nearly great as those at the bottom temperature superconductors force of 200 sticks of dynamite 200 °C. It takes an hour to of the ocean, researchers like iron oxyarsenide, which packed into a volume of cool the magnet enough have placed state-of-the-art may improve the performance space the size of a marble.” to start another round of nanoparticle wire composed of MRI machines and high- The electromagnet will be pulses. Boebinger says the of 82 percent copper and voltage power lines while made of two pieces—a thick, design and composition threaded through with silver lowering their cost. A 100-T hollow cylinder, called an will allow researchers to strands no more than a few magnet would also let outsert, that’s 1.5 meters in get roughly 10 000 pulses hundred atoms across. The you conduct certain zero- diameter by 1.5 meters tall, out of the $8 million outsert copper-silver combination gravity experiments without and an insert just big enough magnet and about 100 pulses is stronger than either metal traveling into space and to fit inside the outsert’s before a $20 000 insert alone by a factor of 100. let you develop magnetic 225-millimeter bore. The magnet is destroyed. From there, things get GK GK propulsion systems that outsert will be powered by “Simply put, pulse magnets a little easier, if only on the AND

Vi could eventually replace a 1.4-gigawatt generator and are applied metal fatigue,” wallet. “The further out you KK i i

hA those that burn rocket fuel. produce fields between 40 T says Boebinger. “The trick go, the lesser the forces are,” rt/Getty So far, researchers have and 44 T, while the insert is to hold off the breakdown says Boebinger, “so you can reached 90 T, proving that will draw enough current of the bonds between the afford to use material that is iMAG the Magnet Lab is on the right from a 2-megajoule capacitor molecules due to mechanical not as strong and not nearly as es track. “We’ve been running it bank to generate fields up and thermal stresses for expensive.” —Willie D. Jones

www.SPEcTrUm.iEEE.orG September 2008 • Ieee Spectrum • NA 13 Virtual-Reality Test Reveals Hidden Concussion Damage A technology that can tell when athletes are ready to get back in the game

utumn is upon us, Each subject was connected and in the United to an electroencephalograph A States, so is football via 19 electrodes attached to season. The players, who his or her scalp and earlobes deliver jarring hits to one and was asked to stand on another that often equal a platform studded with the force of car wrecks, sensors that recorded shifts are lionized for the ability in pressure distribution at VIrTUAL ExAmInATIon: To assess athletes’ injuries, scientists to, in the words of an old the bottom of the feet. The measure motion and brain waves in response to virtual situations. photo: eleNA slobouNoV watch commercial, “take a platform was surrounded licking and keep on ticking.” on three sides by video reaction times and abnormal (HIT), applauds the Penn But concussions are not screens that created a visually physical reactions like using State researchers’ efforts. uncommon, and new research immersive environment. too little or too much force. The HIT system, developed shows that even when players A computer running Nearly 97 percent of the time, by researchers at Simbex, are symptom-free and have a proprietary algorithm these abnormalities in motor of Lebanon, N.H., and at passed a battery of cognitive- recorded and synchronized coordination corresponded Virginia Tech and Brown function tests, their brains the subjects’ physical and to detectable differences in universities, uses helmet- may not have completely neurological responses to the athletes’ brain waves mounted sensors to measure recovered and may still be virtual-reality graphics. The compared with baseline the force of collisions. It then vulnerable to further injury. graphics were designed to readings taken before the start alerts coaches and trainers An ongoing study at give participants the sense of their competitive seasons. to those collisions likely to Pennsylvania State Univer- that they were involved in According to research have resulted in concussions, sity aims to create a reliable some situation that provokes a associate Richard L. based on data from more electroencephalography physical response—say, riding Tutwiler, the Penn State than 30 000 impacts. [See system for judging whether a roller coaster or participating researchers are refining the “Helmets Sense the Hard an athlete should get back in a snowball fight. technique and gathering a Knocks,” IEEE Spectrum, in the game, stay on the The control group, made pool of data they think will October 2007.] sidelines, or call it quits. up of players who had not be large enough to yield a Jeffrey Chu, Simbex’s In an early round of the suffered concussions, mostly reliable brain assessment director of engineering, says study, to be published in did what was expected tool within two years. “The that Penn State’s test and HIT IEEE Transactions on Neural when presented with virtual hope is that we can then would be complementary Systems and Rehabilitation situations that called for make a portable unit that technologies. “HIT gives Engineering, 61 football, rugby, complicated, coordinated can begin taking readings sideline staff a powerful and soccer players at Penn responses using multiple right after a player gets off tool by putting the focus State (male and female) were body parts, and their brain- the field,” he says. on players likely to have examined; 30 of them were wave patterns were ordinary. Stefan Duma, director suffered a brain injury,” says chosen because they had Using the control data, the of Virginia Polytechnic Chu. “A device based on EEG suffered concussions 30 days system became increasingly University’s Center for or other assessment tools prior to participating in the adept at identifying Injury Biomechanics and the would pick up from there, study but had been cleared previously concussed athletes, lead researcher on the Head determining the extent of the for a full return to their sports. who exhibited delayed Impact Telemetry program damage.” —Willie D. Jones

14 NA • Ieee Spectrum • September 2008 www.SPEcTrUm.iEEE.orG up. What returned to the observa- in an easily detectable way. Breaking tory were single photons. The difficulty lies in preserving Single-photon exchange is the entanglement over long important because it provides part distances. The success of the Ajisai Quantum of the security of quantum cryp- experiment demonstrates that PaPer tography. In a common scheme, a source of single photons on a TransisTor Cryptography’s single photons are converted into satellite can indeed be detected at a Researchers from “entangled pairs”—pairs of photons ground station many hundreds of Universidade that are mutually dependent, kilometers away, against very high Nova de Lisboa in 150-Kilometer even when they travel far apart. background noise. Portugal say they’ve Quantum theory says that if you The success with Ajisai “is an made a transistor measure one of the photons in an important step, as many of the using paper as both Limit the substrate and entangled pair, the properties of the potential problems, such as timing the dielectric layer. Scientists want to other are also instantly revealed. and tracking, have been proven to Elvira Fortunato, put an unbreakable- For the purposes of quantum cryp- be in a manageable regime,” says lead author of the code generator on the tography, the pairs are split up Norbert Lütkenhaus, professor study in this month’s IEEE Electron Device international Space and sent to the parties wishing to at the Institute for Quantum Letters, says that Station communicate secretly. Through a Computing at the University of oxide semiconduc- series of steps involving polariza- Waterloo, in Canada, who was not tors are compatible esearchers in Europe in tion filters and other measures, the involved in the research. with paper because the field of quantum cryp- photons produce the same random For the proposed ISS experi- they can be built at room temperature. R tography have demonstrated series of bits, or quantum key, ment, the entangled photons The paper transistor for the first time that it should for each party. In theory, no one would be beamed from orbit to two performed similarly be possible—with the help of can intercept individual photons distant ground stations, allowing to a transistor on satellites—to communicate across and steal the key, because any them to communicate using the a glass substrate, she says. Fortunato —Saswato R. Das thousands of kilometers using attempt to do so would alter the key quantum key. wants to use the unbreakable codes whose security transistors for low- is guaranteed by the laws of quan- cost disposable tum physics. For many business or microelectronics government uses, the codes must like biosensors and smart packaging. be usable between cities and con- photo: soNiA pereirA & tinents, but quantum cryptogra- NuNo CorreiA phy machines today are limited to about 150 kilometers by the length of individual optical fibers and the loss of photons within them. The team that performed the experiment, made up of researchers from Italy and Austria, did not actually encrypt a message, but they demonstrated a key principle: the detection of single photons sent from a satellite. This month they will present a plan to the European Space Agency to install a quantum cryptography system on the Inter- national Space Station (ISS) and use it to perform the first satellite- based quantum communication. The researchers, led by Paolo Villoresi at the University of Padua, used the Matera Laser Ranging

Observatory, in Italy, to bounce sECrETs by sATELLITE: Scientists propose installing a quantum cryptography weak laser pulses off the Ajisai system on the international Space Station that would generate an unbreakable code satellite, a mirrored orbiter 1485 km from entangled pairs of photons. illustrAtioN: europeAN spACe AGeNCy, GeNerAl stuDies proGrAMMe www.SPEcTrUm.iEEE.orG September 2008 • Ieee Spectrum • NA 15 wE’rE LIsTEnIng: Forty-two radio dishes in Hat creek, calif., will start listening for signs of extraterrestrials this month.

photo: seth shostAK

but if many smaller, cheaper ones are electronically linked, they will have the same resolution as a single large dish. This works because a system called a correlator tracks the differences between the phases of radio waves as they reach the various dishes. This phase information can then be used to construct the same kind of radio image that a single, larger radio dish would provide. From each of the antennas, a broadband feed collects signals over the range of 0.5 to 11.2 gigahertz. The signal from the sky is then amplified over the entire frequency band, encoded onto a laser, and sent over an optical fiber to the control room, where it is digitized and processed. Corp. cofounder Paul Allen, the “The unique aspect is that ATA will Allen Telescope SETI Institute (for Search for be able to conduct radio astronomy Extraterrestrial Intelligence) will and SETI at the same time,” says have its own powerful observatory to Blitz. The array’s amplification system Array Starts search the skies, rather than having allows the signals to be split into four to comb through data gathered from independent frequencies, and all four Search for E.T. other telescopes’ observations. The can be analyzed at once—usually two ATA, nestled in a remote volcanic for astronomy and two for SETI. radio telescope array will valley about 460 kilometers northeast Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at seek out new life and new of San Francisco, will be the first the SETI Institute, says the first signals civilizations privately funded major radio telescope they will look for are “in a large area in observatory. However, the original array the general direction of the center of the t’s smaller than originally hoped for, plan called for 350 dishes. “The technical Milky Way, to see if there are any ‘super- but with 42 radio antennas the Allen challenges wound up significantly transmitters’ sending out signals from I Telescope Array, or ATA, is the most adding to costs and producing delays. advanced civilizations.” Shostak predicts advanced structure ever built to look Building up to a 350-element array that with the ATA, the first signals for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. depends on getting enough financing to from an advanced civilization could Following technical delays and cost finish it,” says Blitz. “We need another be detected within the next 25 years. overruns that left it well short of its $45 million, so checks are welcome.” “I think that most astronomers planned size, the array is expected to The original plan called for the believe that there must be intelligent begin its mission full-time this month. It purchase of inexpensive 6-meter radio life somewhere out there,” says Arpad began performing radio astronomy last dishes from a commercial product line, Szomoru, head of technical operations year but wasn’t ready to look for artificial but these picked up too much back- and R&D for the Joint Institute for radio signals until now. ground interference. So the ATA had to Very Long Baseline Interferometry in “We are doing final calibration, go with a more expensive, custom-built Europe, which recently electronically testing, and repairs and expect to design. In addition, the array requires a linked radio telescopes around the world begin with the first SETI program by pointing and tracking system with much [see “Earth-Size Radio Telescope Opens about September 1,” Leo Blitz, director greater accuracy than what commercial Its Eye,” IEEE Spectrum, August 2008]. of ATA and the Radio Astronomy systems are capable of. So the designers “Whether SETI has a chance of detecting Laboratory at the University of had to invent a new system from this is unclear, but as technology California, Berkeley, told IEEE Spectrum. scratch, adding to the delays and costs. advances and instrumentation becomes Thanks in part to a gift of The resolution of a radio telescope more sensitive, who knows?” US $25 million from Microsoft is proportional to the size of the dish, —Barry E. DiGregorio

16 NA • Ieee Spectrum • September 2008 www.SPEcTrUm.iEEE.orG 18 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org the big picture

ENERGY LOOP It’s after dusk, but this brilliantly illuminated Ferris wheel, perched atop the Santa Monica Pier in California, is being powered by the sun. Well, sort of. During the day, its 650 solar panels generate up to 71 000 kilowatt- hours of energy— enough to spin the 27-meter-high wheel and shunt current to the power grid. After dark, it draws back the power it put in. This past summer, the park replaced an older solar Ferris wheel, which burned 5400 incandescent bulbs, with this US $1.5 million model and its 160 000 LEDs. The new wheel’s lights use only one-quarter of the energy consumed by the bulbs. What became of the older model? Sold on eBay for $130 000. Photo: Andrew Gombert/Corbis www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 19 reflections By roBert w. lucky the elusive Future

hy are we engi‑ hold, while overlooked inno‑ The millimeter wave‑ responsible for many of neers so bad at vations proliferate, and still guide never happened either. the innovations that upset W making predictions? others are used in unpre‑ Out of the blue, optical the very future they and In countless panel discus‑ dicted ways. fiber came along, and that their associates had been sions on the future of tech‑ When I joined Bell Labs, was that. Oh, and analog working on. This is the way nology, I’m not sure I ever so many years ago, there didn’t last. Gordon Moore the future often evolves: got anything right. As I look were two great development made his observation about looking back, you say, “We back on technological prog‑ projects under way that integrated‑circuit progress should have known” or ress, I experience first “We knew, but we didn’t retrospective surprise, believe.” And at the same then surprise that I’m time we were ignoring the surprised, because exponential trends that were it all crept up on me all around us, we hyped when I wasn’t looking. glamorous technologies like How can something artificial intelligence and like Google feel so neural networks. inevitable and yet be Yogi Berra, who should impossible to predict? probably be in the National I’m filled with Academy of Sciences as well wonder at all that as the National Baseball we engineers have Hall of Fame, once said, “It’s accomplished, and I tough making predictions, take great communal especially about the future.” pride in how we’ve We aren’t even good at changed the world in making predictions about the so many ways. Decades present, let alone the future. ago I never dreamed Journalists are sometimes we would have satellite The PicTurePhone, shown here in 1965, flickered and died in the marketplace. better than engineers about navigation, computers Photo: Bettmann/CorBis seeing the latent future in our pockets, the embedded in the present. Internet, cellphones, or together were to shape the in the midst of this period, I often read articles telling me robots that would explore future—the picturephone but of course we had a hard that there is a trend where Mars. How did all this and the millimeter wave‑ time believing it. a lot of people are doing this happen, and what are we guide. The waveguide Analog switching over‑ or that. I raise my eyebrows doing for our next trick? was an empty pipe, about stayed its tenure because in mild surprise. I didn’t The software pioneer 5 centimeters in diameter, engineers didn’t quite believe realize a lot of people were Alan Kay has said that the that would carry across the the irresistible economics of doing this or that. Perhaps best way to predict the future country the 6‑megahertz Moore’s Law. Most engineers something is afoot, and an is to invent it, and that’s analog signals from those used the Internet in the amorphous social network what we’ve been busy doing. ubiquitous picturephones. early years and knew it was is unconsciously shaping the The public understands Needless to say, this growing at an exponential future of technology. that we’re creating the was an alternative future rate. But, no, it would never Well, we’ve made a lot of future, but they think that that never happened. Our grow up to be a big, reliable, misguided predictions in the we know what we’re doing technological landscape commercial network. past. But we’ve learned from and that there’s a master is littered with such failed The irony at Bell Labs those mistakes. Now we know. plan in there somewhere. bets. For decades engineers is that we had some of the The future lies in quantum However, the world evolves would say that the future of finest engineers in the world computers. And electronics haphazardly, bumbling along communications was video then, working on things will be a thing of the past, in unforeseen directions. telephony. Now that we can like the integrated circuit since we’ll be using optical Some seemingly great have it for free, not many and the Internet—in other processing. All this is just inventions just don’t take people even want it. words, engineers who were right around the corner. o

20 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org careers

resources statistics. When you look back at four or five years in grad school, you might assess the final cost at $1 million. Mercifully, engineering graduate students do well when it comes to financial support in the form of research assistantships, teaching assistantships, and fellowships. All in all, engineering and computer science doctorate recipients were the least likely to report both debt and high levels of debt, according to the NSF report. Some benefits are harder to translate into dollars and cents. The biggest return is career flexibility, says Regets. “You have more choices as to what you do, you have more choices over your conditions of employment, you’re less likely to end up on the lower end of the earnings distribution,” he says. The Biggest Career Choice Higher degrees can bring job security in a shaky economy. In the shadow of the 2001 dot-com bust, the Of All Is When to Start job market was toughest for electrical grad school may cost you more than you think engineers and computer scientists. Unemployment for bachelor’s degree holders hovered around 5 percent, ou’re a college senior, a few time, because salaries for those almost twice the rate as for Ph.D.s. exams away from that engineering with grad degrees rise more and Grad school specialization also Y diploma, and you have to decide for a longer period. That might gives you an edge. Fast-paced changes whether to take a job or go to graduate make you believe that getting an in technology push companies to school. To choose wisely you must advanced degree is a no-brainer. look for skills that cannot be acquired estimate the likely economic return on Not so. Even the most bare-bones in a bachelor’s program. Texas your investment. calculation needs to include three Instruments now hires six times as It’s not an easy calculation. The additional factors—the cost of tuition, many engineers with master’s degrees details will differ from place to the cost of not working, and the value or higher as it did a decade ago. place, school to school, and person of money. Tuition for graduate studies Whether or not to go to graduate to person. To simplify things, we’ll averages $24 000 a year at a public school is, in the end, a personal choice. use average U.S. costs and benefits. university, according to the National Megan McGinty, who graduated this Let’s look first at the benefits of a Science Foundation’s latest report, summer from Valparaiso University graduate degree. In 2007, a new master “Science and Engineering Indicators with a bachelor’s in EE, says she had of science in electrical engineering 2008.” Not working for a year costs you planned to get a master’s degree but graduate earned more than US $66 000, on average $55 000 (before taxes). And decided to start working full-time. “Of compared with about $55 000 for a dollar you spend today is worth a lot course, earning a salary is going to be bachelor’s degree recipients, according more than one you will earn decades nice, but I don’t think this would have to the National Association of Colleges from now, given both inflation and the stopped me from attending grad school,” jan mammey/getty images mammey/getty jan and Employers in Bethlehem, Pa. The real rate of return on investments. she says. She chose work in order to extra bump from a doctorate was “A doctorate is very expensive for gain time to think about which area of about the same: in 2007 new Ph.D. someone in electrical engineering specialization she wants to pursue. As salaries averaged almost $76 000. because of the earnings they would have an added bonus, her current employer For those with graduate degrees, to forgo while in grad school,” says Mark will pay for her master’s degree. the good news only gets better over Regets, at the NSF’s division of science —Prachi Patel-Predd

www.spectrum.ieee.org september 2008 • Ieee spectrum • NA 21 larger groups, and no fewer than a dozen smaller groups— to allow us to establish whether the puzzle holds true.” The findings garnered worldwide attention when they were published online last fall in a 90-page working paper. A catchy title didn’t hurt: “Engineers of Jihad.” Hertog, now a lecturer in political economy at the University of Durham, in England, says that though he and Gambetta expected the paper to get noticed, they were surprised by accusations of “ethnic profiling.” “After all, the anecdote that engineers were overrepresented Extremist Engineers in radical Islamic movements in the Middle East has been why are so many jihadis engineers? around for decades,” Hertog says. “But there was never a hich academic [see table, “Fields of Study”]. systematic study about how pursuit has been the The authors acknowledge many were involved in political W most prevalent among that the data underrepresent violence or radical Islam.” Islamic jihadis? groups in South Asia, Southeast Curiously, the two have not It’s not the oddest question Asia, North Africa, and Iraq. heard from Islamists themselves. to come up at a dinner party, They claim, though, that the “Frankly, we hope we don’t, after especially at the University of sample population is “disparate what the engineers said,” Hertog Oxford. But when it comes up enough—there are individuals adds. “Some of them were between a Middle East expert from 30 nationalities, nine generally curious. But most had and a sociologist, idle talk knee-jerk reactions. Look, we yields to a quest for data. That’s Fields oF study did not say engineers have a how political scientist Steffen terrorist mind-set—please write engineering 78 Hertog and sociology professor that. We said that engineers tend Diego Gambetta soon found Islamic studies 34 to be politically to the right and themselves poring through more conservative than other records of 404 people from medicine 14 graduates. You can therefore infer 30 countries engaged in political that their radical fringe is closer business/economics 12 violence between 2005 and 2007. to those of religious groups.” Their answer? Engineering. sciences 7 Hertog and Gambetta believe Of the 178 whose academic that a combination of social focus could be ascertained, education 5 conditions and an engineering 44 percent of those were Other 28 mind-set make engineers engineers—most of them in susceptible to radicalization. electrical engineering, civil subject unknown 18 The paper cites evidence engineering, and computer that engineering graduates studies. The next-largest group, Total 196 are much more religious and Islamic studies, had fewer than Source: “Engineers of Jihad,” by Diego Gambetta politically conservative than and Steffen Hertog,Sociology Working Papers,

half as many, at 19 percent paper number 2007-10, University of Oxford. those pursuing other courses brian stauffer

22 NA • Ieee spectrum • september 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org books

of study. “People gravitating toward engineering already Here Comes Here have those views,” says Hertog. “Engineering seems to attract a larger share of Comes Everybody people drawn to rule-bound systems, compared with other clay shirky’s new book explains scientists who primarily work how the internet makes silly on open-ended questions and organizations possible might be more skeptical.” The paper suggests that the trend is also driven by pro- n 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of fessional disenfranchisement. the most perplexing questions in eco- “The effect of the lack of I nomics: if markets are so great, why do opportunities was intensified organizations exist? Why don’t people by the corrupt, state-driven just buy and sell their own services in a job allocation,” the researchers market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Clay Shirky wrote. In other words, Hertog Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the says, after having earned an question by noting a market’s transaction elite degree you’re frustrated costs: buyers and sellers need to find one Sounds a lot like the Internet, having to drive a taxi or sell another, then reach agreement, and so on. doesn’t it? And that’s precisely Shirky’s vegetables, just because you The Coase theorem implies that if these point. His new book, Here Comes lack powerful friends. transaction costs are low enough, direct Everybody: The Power of Organizing Hertog and Gambetta are markets of individuals make a whole lot Without Organizations, explores a planning to expand their of sense. But if they are too high, it makes world where organizational costs are findings into a book covering more sense to get the job done by an close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely the topic in far more detail, with organization that hires people. connected groups of unpaid amateurs more anecdotes, background Economists have long understood can create an encyclopedia larger than information, and data from the corollary concept of Coase’s ceiling, the Britannica and a computer operating 600 case files recently found by a point above which organizations system to challenge Microsoft’s. American forces in a jihadist collapse under their own weight—where Shirky teaches at New hideout in Iraq. It will include hiring someone, however competent, York University’s Interactive additional survey data on means more work for everyone Telecommunications Program, but political and religious attitudes else than the new hire contributes. this is no academic book. Sacrificing of engineers in developing Software projects often bump their rigor for readability, Here Comes countries and the Muslim world heads against Coase’s ceiling: recall Everybody is an entertaining as well and locate their findings more Frederick P. Brooks Jr.’s seminal study, as informative romp through some broadly in theories of political The Mythical Man-Month (Addison- of the Internet’s signal moments— violence, radical behavior, and Wesley, 1975), which showed how the Howard Dean phenomenon, cognitive psychology studies adding another person onto a project Belarusian protests organized on on how personality traits relate can slow progress and increase errors. LiveJournal, the lost cellphone of a to political attitudes. It will What’s new is something consul- woman named Ivanna, Meetup.com, then link those findings to tant and social technologist Clay Shirky flash mobs, Twitter, and more—which studies of how small radical calls “Coase’s Floor,” below which we Shirky uses to illustrate his points. groups form and consider find projects and activities that aren’t The book is filled with bits of insight why certain individuals are worth their organizational costs—things and common sense, explaining why more likely to be involved. so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, young people take better advantage of “Looking back, we never or just so thoroughly unimportant that social tools, how the Internet affects should have put the paper on the no organization, large or small, would social change, and how most Internet Lia Lia Web,” says Hertog. “It put us on ever bother with them. Things that discourse falls somewhere between b u L aong the map, but not in the way we you shake your head at when you see dinnertime conversation and publishing. wanted to be.” —Susan Karlin them and think, “That’s ridiculous.” Shirky notes that “most user-

www.spectrum.ieee.org september 2008 • Ieee spectrum • NA 23 books

generated content isn’t ‘content’ at here CoMes do. And while there has been some all, in the sense of being created for everybody: success in closing down individual The Power of general consumption, any more than organizing Web pages, discussion groups, and a phone call between you and a sibling wiThouT blogs, these are just stopgap measures. is ‘family-generated content.’ Most of organizaTions In the end, a virtual community is what gets created on any given day is By Clay Shirky; Penguin still a community, and it needs to be Press, 2008; 336 pp.; just the ordinary stuff of life—gossip, US $25.95; ISBN: treated as such. And just as the best little updates, thinking out loud—but 978-159420153-0 way to keep a neighborhood safe is for now it’s done in the same medium a policeman to walk around it, the best as professionally produced material. way to keep a virtual community safe Unlike professionally produced one photo to contribute, Linux can is to have a virtual police presence. material, however, Internet content harness the work of a programmer Crime isn’t the only danger; there is can be organized after the fact.” with little time, and Wikipedia also isolation. If people can segregate No one coordinates Flickr’s benefits if someone corrects just themselves in ever-increasingly 6 million to 8 million users. Yet a single typo. These aggregations specialized groups, then they’re less Flickr had the first photos from the of millions of actions that were likely to be exposed to alternative 2005 London Transport bombings, previously below the Coasean ideas. We see a mild form of this in beating the traditional news media. floor have enormous potential. the current political trend of rival Why? People with cellphone cameras But a flash mob is still a mob. political parties having their own uploaded their photos to Flickr. They In a world where the Coasean news sources, their own narratives, coordinated themselves using tools floor is at ground level, all sorts of and their own facts. Increased that Flickr provides. This is the organizations appear, including ones radicalization is another danger sort of impromptu organization the you might not like: violent political lurking below the Coasean floor. Internet is ideally suited for. Shirky organizations, hate groups, Holocaust There’s no going back, though. explains how these moments are deniers, and so on. (Shirky’s discus- We’ve all figured out that the harbingers of a future that can self- sion of teen anorexia support groups Internet makes freedom of speech a organize without formal hierarchies. makes for very disturbing read- much harder right to take away. As These nonorganizations allow for ing.) This has considerable implica- Shirky demonstrates, Web 2.0 is contributions from a wider group tions for security, both online and off. having the same effect on freedom of people. A newspaper has to pay We never realized how much our of assembly. The consequences of someone to take photos; it can’t be security could be attributed to distance this won’t be fully seen for years. bothered to hire someone to stand and inconvenience—how difficult it is Here Comes Everybody covers some around London underground to recruit, organize, coordinate, and of the same ground as Yochai Benkler’s stations waiting for a major event. communicate without formal organi- Wealth of Networks. But when I had Similarly, Microsoft has to pay zations. That inadvertent measure of to explain to one of my corporate a programmer full time, and security is now gone. Bad guys, from attorneys how the Internet has changed Encyclopedia Britannica has to pay hacker groups to terrorist groups, the nature of public discourse, Shirky’s someone to write articles. But Flickr will use the same ad hoc organiza- book is the one I recommended. can make use of a person with just tional technologies that the rest of us —Bruce Schneier

a theorem on magnetism, and For more information, visit Math Kisser speak before the u.s. congress, http://www.kissmymath.com. while guest-starring on “the west And read more about mcKellar Actress-mathematician-author wing,” “NYpD Blue,” and “How i this December in the upcom- Danica mcKellar has a new met Your mother.” the new book, ing issue of ieee Women in book out called Kiss my math: a continuation of her preteen engineering magazine. showing Pre-algebra Who’s boss, best seller math Doesn’t suck, —susan Karlin encouraging math interest in focuses on pre-algebra and jobs middle school girls. Best known as that use math. “i’m making girls Kiss My MaTh: showing winnie cooper in the 1988–1993 feel less intimidated by math,” Pre-algebra who’s boss tV series “the wonder Years,” says mcKellar. “i want them By Danica McKellar; Hudson Street mcKellar went on to major in thinking about it as more than just Press, 2008; 352 pp.; US $24.95; math at ucLA, collaborate on something you do in school.” ISBN: 978-159463049-1

24 NA • Ieee spectrum • september 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org tools&toys The Voltage in the Dell A mysterious current led me to the perfect multipurpose monitor

just can’t squeeze two through a printed circuit screens into my living-room board within the monitor, I home office, sharing it as I showing as slow-moving do with two small boys, their bands called hum bars, train sets and games, and which are sometimes pink. a tank full of aquatic frogs. With my diagnosis, I also So last year I sought out found Jensen Transformers, one display that would do in Chatsworth, Calif., known everything. My seemingly throughout the Internet simple search turned into as the king of ground-loop device that would vastly Pink hum bars, visible in the an engineering detective fixers. Jensen sold me a improve their designs. white lettering above, proved story that would ultimately $60 ground-loop isolator that I called Dell once again. a nearly intractable problem in one Dell monitor model. involve three companies, attached to my television The company generously Photo-iLLustration: hum bars: biLL WhitLocK; four monitors, a helpful cable. It worked, but it also responded with an upgrade monitor: DeLL executive, and a tutorial on blocked the kids’ cable to a far better monitor— the nature of electric current. cartoon channels. Jensen the 3008WFP, a 30-inch connector). The picture is so It wasn’t much of a quest sent another model of isolator model that had come out just crisp, and the colors so vivid, at first: I quickly settled that had the same problem. two weeks earlier and costs that the 3008 has become on a US $999 27-inch Dell Not giving up, the company twice as much as my original. the kids’ favorite set. In fact, 2707WFP with decent sent—at its own expense— Its resolution is so good I they complain bitterly when resolution, which I could a $500 “humbucker.” When can keep five or six windows Mom takes it back for her plug my digital cable box that didn’t work, Jensen’s open at once. It also doubles obsessive multitasking. directly into. Then I noticed president, Bill Whitlock, as a true HD 1080 television. All this technology horizontal pink bands that called to take me on a step- Last year, the only doesn’t come cheap. The moved slowly through the by-step test to find the exact monitors with 4-megapixel monitor itself costs television picture. The point in my system where (2560-by-1600) resolution about $1964, and for peak problem stumped customer the pink gremlins were were designed strictly for resolution you need a high- service at both Dell and Time invading. He also told me doctors and graphics artists. end graphics card. And Warner Cable. Still, Dell that a properly designed They were expensive, yet this is, of course, television swapped the monitor three monitor would have routed didn’t easily replace a TV, without a tuner and without times. Time Warner changed the ground hum away having only a single digital built-in sound. Add a my set-top box and then from the video circuitry. visual interface (DVI) cable or satellite box and my cables. Nothing worked. Visible bars were evidence input. This year, however, external speakers, though, It was time for Google. of what he called a “head- Dell realized that a simple and it’s good to go. I searched on “slow pink slapping design flaw.” modification would make its Would I buy one next bars” and found my problem: Whitlock wondered highest-end monitor ideal for time around? For me the a ground loop—the same aloud whether anyone video gaming and plain old 3008 is absolutely worth the condition that causes a teaches ground loops in television watching as well full freight. If a television is loud hum in some stereo engineering schools these as computing. Dell gave it all you’re looking for, you equipment. When there are days. Designers, he says, seven inputs in all, including can get a 42-inch high-end small voltage differences apparently come out of high-definition multimedia set for the same money. But in the wiring that connects places like MIT thinking interface, display port, DVI, if you want one screen that different pieces of electrical that ground wire equals component video (the familiar does it all and does it very equipment, an unintended zero current, end of story. triad of red, green, and blue well, it’s worth going into the current will flow through Most designers don’t know plugs), and composite video red. Just stay out of the pink. the system. In my case it ran that they can build a $15 test (using a single yellow RCA —Sherry Sontag www.spectrum.ieee.org september 2008 • Ieee spectrum • NA 25 26 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org Part one of a two-Part rePort Billions of dollars spent on defeating improvised explosive devices are beginning to show what technology can and cannot do for the evolving struggle By Glenn Zorpette Countering IEDS

wo platoons of U.S. Army scouts are in a field deep in the notorious “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad, a region of countless clashes between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. The platoons are guided by a local man who’s warned them of pressure-plate improvised explosive devices, designed to explode when stepped on. He has assured them that he knows where the IEDs are, which T means he’s almost certainly a former Sunni insurgent. The platoons come under harassing fire. It stops, but later the tension mounts again as they maneuver near an abandoned house known to shelter al-Qaeda fighters. A shot rings out; the scouts take cover. They don’t realize it’s just their local guide, with an itchy trigger finger, taking a potshot at the house. The lieutenant leading the patrol summons three riflemen to cover the abandoned house. Then all hell breaks loose. One of the riflemen, a sergeant, steps on a pressure-plate IED. The blast badly injures him, the two other riflemen, and the lieutenant. A Navy explosives specialist along on the mission immediately springs into action, using classified gear to comb the area for more bombs. Until he gives the all clear, no one can move, not even to tend the bleeding men. Meanwhile, one of the frozen-in-place scouts notices another IED right next to him and gives a shout, provoking more combing in his area. Then a big area has to be cleared so that the medevac helicopter already on the way can land. The sergeant dies several hours later in a field hospital.

www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 27 EDITOR’S NOTE: To minimize the possibility that information in this article could endanger coalition personnel in Iraq or Afghanistan, a draft of this article was reviewed by current and former officials of the Joint IED Defeat Organization, a U.S. Department of Defense agency. In response to those reviews, IEEE Spectrum voluntarily removed three passages and the names of two active-duty U.S. military personnel.

That incident, which took place on three years on counter-IED equipment, behind more armor and praying that 7 November 2007, exhibits many of the technology R&D, training, and other there’s a technical solution to all this.” hallmarks of the missions in Iraq and measures through the Joint Improvised Three U.S. military officers offered Afghanistan—a small patrol; a local man Explosive Device Defeat Organization more specific criticisms in a recent of dubious background; Navy specialists and its predecessors. paper for the Joint Forces Staff College, working with soldiers on dry land; and JIEDDO says that its mission is to sup- in Norfolk, Va. JIEDDO, they wrote, “is costly technologies pressed into service port efforts to defeat IEDs as “weapons still built around a technical-solution against cheap and crude weapons. of strategic influence.” This wording approach focused on research and devel- And, most of all, death by IED. acknowledges that insurgent fighters use opment, testing, and fielding the elusive “Sergeant T” became one of the 24 coali- IEDs with no hope of defeating a military ‘silver bullet’ to defeat IEDs.” tion soldiers killed by IEDs that month force in the traditional sense. The point There are lots more published in Iraq. As of the end of June, IEDs is to cause death and destruction result- criticisms in that vein. Nevertheless, have killed untold thousands of Iraqis ing in news imagery that affects the politi- it’s basically impossible to find any- and Afghanis, as well as 1795 coalition cal will of the country that dispatched one inside or outside of JIEDDO who military people in Iraq and another 231 the force. This distinction is significant believes in a “silver bullet” technology in Afghanistan, according to the Web because it implicitly suggests that IEDs that will solve the IED problem. On site iCasualties.org. Those figures are and the casualties they cause cannot be the other hand, it’s not too hard to find nearly half of all combat fatalities in eliminated. It points to a response based people who think that technologies— Iraq and roughly 30 percent of those in on minimizing their effectiveness, for including ones that predict or detect Afghanistan, according to the site. example with armor and by other means, IEDs as well as others that neutralize IED fatalities in Iraq were down to marginalize their strategic impact. them or at least lessen their effects—will sharply in May and June, to 14 and 11, JIEDDO emphasizes a holistic be part of a complicated and variable set according to iCasualties. But they were approach, incorporating such nontechni- of responses that reduce the lethality of up in Afghanistan, to 12 in May and 22 cal aspects as training troops in counter- IEDs and also increase their costs to the in June. Overall, in the first half of this IED tactics and technology and using extent that they become ineffective. year, IEDs, including suicide bombs, law enforcement techniques, forensics, The challenge is more complex than killed 115 coalition people in Iraq and and intelligence to smash the networks most people realize. “There have been no 72 in Afghanistan. Those figures mean that build and deploy IEDs. But this year, easy problems when it comes to measure- that in the first half of 2008, IEDs $2.57 billion of JIEDDO’s $4.38 billion countermeasure, whether you’re talking caused 54 percent of all coalition deaths budget is devoted to developing counter- about submarine warfare–antisubmarine (including nonhostile ones) in Iraq and IED technologies, feeding a perception warfare, tank-antitank, or antiaircraft- 59 percent in Afghanistan. that the agency is chasing a cure-all. counterantiaircraft,” says Daniel Gouré, The U.S. military has responded with In an interview, a civilian at a mili- vice president of the Lexington Institute, read: Zoriah

the most intensive program of technol- tary academic institution who studies an Arlington, Va., think tank. “They’re sP ogy development in at least a decade. It counter-IED tactics characterized the always immensely complicated challenges

has spent US $12.4 billion over the past U.S. approach as “hide and pray: hiding in which technology just plays a piece. Previous

28 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org rIGHt of BooM: Jose Callazo’s Husky mine-detecting vehicle hit a buried IED south of Baghdad on 4 August 2007. Callazo was treated by medics [far left] and recovered from his injuries. A vehicle-borne IED outside a newspaper office in Baghdad’s Waziriya district [center] killed two people, injured 30, and destroyed more than 20 cars. A soldier paid tribute [above] in 2006 to a comrade killed by an IED.

Photos, From LeFt: BeNJamiN LoWY/vii NetWork; eLi J. medeLLiN/u.s. NavY; Peter vaN agtmaeL/magNum Photos

“Overall,” Gouré adds, “the effort to cal approaches such as intelligence exploi- Police. They were planted by “criminals, counter the IED has been a real lesson tation, suffice to marginalize the strategic animal rights activists, disturbed indi- in humility to a military that has always influence of IEDs? viduals, and terrorists,” Trotter says. prided itself on being able to find a tech- The alternative scenario is not pretty. IEDs aren’t new. In World War II, nical solution to a problem.” In it, the IED continues for the foresee- Belorussian guerillas used them against The U.S. experiences in Iraq and able future to be the weapon of choice the German army. The Vietcong made Afghanistan have pretty much con- for the world’s terrorists, insurgents, them out of unexploded U.S. ordnance firmed that technology alone can’t solve militias, guerillas, revolutionaries, and during the Vietnam War. The mujahi- an IED problem. U.S. forces did not see marginal or failed states. deen used IEDs in Afghanistan in the steep declines in IED incidents in parts 1980s against the Soviets. of Iraq until they gained the coopera- he stakes are high. The But it was the Irish Republican Army tion of local people in those areas and scale and urgency of the that first demonstrated the level of havoc secured their help in aggressive efforts struggle to devise an effective that homemade bombs could create in a to attack the terrorist networks that put response reflects not just the sustained campaign. Over 37 years, from IEDs on the roads. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan the early 1970s until the late 1990s, the The problem is that in war or its after- T but also an almost universal consensus IRA targeted infrastructure and British math, the active support of local people among military analysts and government soldiers and achieved “a complete spec- can seldom be counted on. And IEDs are officials that the IED problem will long trum of development of the IED from sim- already a problem in places where there outlive those conflicts. Lots of facts support ple, crude devices to quite sophisticated is no occupation, where no war is being that view, but start with this one: outside of devices,” says Lt. Col. Jim Storr, a British fought, and where there is no antagonis- Iraq and Afghanistan, there are 200 to 350 Army veteran. In the early 1970s, the tic local population to be won over. IED attacks every month around the world, British Army was dealing with as many as It’s not easy to assess counter-IED tech- according to the Triton report, which is 1400 IED detonations a year, Storr says. nology’s capabilities and limits, because published periodically by the British That’s how many occur in Iraq and researchers are pursuing hundreds of counter-IED consulting firm Hazard Afghanistan in three or four months. projects, many of them are classified, and Management Solutions. IED attacks are The prevailing theory on the future of some have yet to prove themselves out- particularly common in Colombia, India, warfare contends that recent and ongoing side of a laboratory. Nevertheless, with Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, conflicts—in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, the United States and other countries Russia (Chechnya), and Sri Lanka. Israel, Lebanon, Sudan—are just the pouring billions of dollars into counter- In Pakistan alone, IEDs, including sui- opening phases of what will be a decades- IED activities, a couple of questions cide bombs, killed 865 security people and long era of scattered, low-intensity come to mind: how much can technology officials last year, according to testimony engagements that will pit advanced do, in the absence of local cooperation, to in the U.S. Senate in February. In 2006, countries against a constantly changing reduce casualties from IEDs? Can some British officials dealt with 250 IEDs in the assortment of nonstate militias and mar- combination of the technologies now UK, according to Andy Trotter, deputy ginal or failed states. The conflicts will be being pursued, together with nontechni- chief constable of the British Transport “asymmetric,” meaning that the fight- www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 29 ing won’t involve vast arrays of tanks, he difficulty of the counter- struggling economy has a large agricul- fighter planes, and bombers, radar and IED challenge arises from tural component. And even with hun- countermeasures, and troops firing ord- many factors. The physical, dreds of IED incidents a month in Iraq, nance at each other in accordance with electromagnetic, and chem- the relative amount of fertilizers diverted military doctrine as it has evolved over ical environments in which to making IEDs is small. the past 2500 years. Given their goals TIEDs are deployed are chaotic and clut- Five-gallon cans or barrels are com- and the means available to them, and tered. The social networks that let insur- mon containers for the main explosive. their need to counteract their opponents’ gents fund, build, and emplace IEDs are For a barrel, the detonator might be a bag overwhelming advantages in technology incredibly complex. And IEDs themselves filled with TNT and a blasting cap (ironi- and resources, insurgents and militia- are hugely diverse, their makers having cally, the bag has often been the thick plas- men will keep on using IEDs, including proved themselves tireless in adapting tic bag that a military “meal, ready to eat” car and suicide bombs. and altering their creations. comes in). To complete the IED, a trigger To be specific: “The IED threat will All IEDs have a power source, a trig- of some sort is connected to the detona- be long-term, because nobody will ger, a detonator, and a main charge. The tor. Such a bomb could easily destroy a want to fight the United States force-on- power source is usually a battery. Its light vehicle like a Humvee or could seri- force,” predicts Col. Dick A. Larry, head function is to supply enough energy to ously damage a heavier, more extensively of the IED division of the U.S. Army the detonator, usually a blasting cap, armored vehicle, such as an MRAP (mine- Asymmetric Warfare Office. to enable it to set off the main charge. resistant, ambush-protected) truck. “IEDs have the capability to inflict dam- In 2004, as IEDs began proliferating The two most lethal forms of IEDs are age, political and psychological, out of all wildly in Iraq, the main charge was typ- deep-buried IEDs and explosively formed proportion to their size and cost,” noted ically artillery rounds lashed together penetrators (EFPs). They account for Maj. Gen. Anthony Stone, the former to explode simultaneously, the casings only 5 to 15 percent of all IEDs in Iraq but director of special projects for the UK’s shattering to provide shrapnel. Bomb roughly 40 percent of the IED casualties, Ministry of Defense, at a recent conference makers also frequently pack ball bear- according to the latest figures from the on counter-IED technology. ings around the main charge to maxi- U.S. Defense Department. Deep-buried Some analysts warn that rogue fight- mize casualties. IEDs often contain hundreds of kilo- ers will inevitably use weapons of mass Over the past couple of years, Sunni grams of explosive and have flung heav- destruction, probably in an improvised insurgents have favored homemade explo- ily armored vehicles like MRAPs tens of way. And though the United States and sives for the main charge. They’re more meters, in one case killing all on board. some European and Asian countries easily used in the huge quantities needed have seen few IED attacks so far, not to fling through the air the 25-ton vehi- e went into an many analysts think that state of affairs cles now commonly used by U.S. forces. intersection, and will go on indefinitely. The typical homemade explosives in Iraq, the EFP went off “If we do not find solutions now in urea nitrate and ammonium nitrate, are and went right Afghanistan and Iraq, we will continue produced using nitrogen-based fertilizers. through our vehicle,” looking for solutions when this prob- To make urea nitrate, bomb makers sepa- W says the deputy commander of the Gulf lem comes to the United States,” says rate the urea from the fertilizer and then Region Central District of the U.S. Army Colonel Barry L. Shoop, who is director use nitric acid to attach a nitrate group Corps of Engineers in Iraq. At the time of

of the electrical engineering program (NO3) to the urea molecule. the attack, he was south of Baghdad, in a at the U.S. Military Academy and was The fertilizers and other materials heavily armored vehicle called a Wolf. “The JIEDDO’s first chief scientist. are not easily controlled, because Iraq’s molten metal came up underneath us, and

30 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org BoMB-MaKInG MaterIaLS: A tip in March 2007 led Iraqi police to a cache of IED-making parts in Anbar province. U.S. soldiers inspected the haul [far left], which included bags of blasting caps. An Iraqi Army raid turned up other IED items [center], including wires for triggering bombs at a distance. In February 2007 [right], U.S. soldiers found copper liners and enough other components to make 150 explosively formed penetrators, a particularly deadly form of IED. The materials were found in a Shia village north of Baghdad.

Photos, From LeFt: eros hoagLaNd/redux; Zoriah; roBert NickeLsBerg/gettY images there were a few shrapnel pieces that were the system when he sees a vehicle coming The jammer program became known as inside the compartment. But, for the most that he wants to attack. The infrared sen- CREW, for “counter radio-controlled IED part, it missed us.” Even so, he was bleeding sor then detects the heat of the passing electronic warfare.” The latest jammers internally so badly that he had to be flown vehicle and detonates the device. The U.S. designed for U.S. vehicles are code-named to Germany, where his life was saved by an military has contended that the radio- Jukebox and CVRJ and are manufactured 8-hour operation that put in 600 internal control systems also come from Iran. by EDO Corp. and other companies. They stitches. It was the fifth IED attack he’d The EFP is a textbook case of measure- cost upwards of $80 000 apiece. All told, survived, and by far the worst. countermeasure–counter-countermea- the U.S. military spent about $2 billion on It was a classic explosively formed sure. For a time, coalition vehicles sought jammers in 2007. penetrator attack: the target was an to throw off the EFP’s infrared trigger The insurgents’ response to the first armored vehicle, and the projectiles with a simple countermeasure called a jammers, in late 2003, was swift. It estab- were fired at close range, in this case rhino, basically a hot glow plug in a metal lished a Spy vs. Spy–like competition from below the vehicle. can affixed to the front of the vehicle by between counter-IED specialists and EFPs are associated particularly with a rod of variable length. It reduced the the bomb makers, in which sometimes Shia militia groups. The U.S. military has effectiveness of EFPs but not decisively a measure was followed by a counter- long contended that Iran is a supplier of so, because the attackers varied the tim- measure within days. the EFP’s key component—a concave coping of the detonation to try to counteract As jammers proliferated, insurgent per disk, called a liner, that must be prop- the rhino. groups quickly went back to using com- erly machined to work well. This disk is The triggering system, generally the mand wires—buried pairs of long enam- fitted to one end of a metal tube that’s only complicated part of an IED, remains eled copper wires attached to a simple slightly longer than the diameter of the the focus of strenuous countermeasures switch—and also to “victim-operated” disk. The tube is packed with a plasticized because it is pretty much the only com- triggers. These triggers, also usually military explosive, typically one contain- ponent you can attack with technology. buried for concealment, include pres- ing cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, also Early on, in 2003 and 2004, most IEDs sure plates and crush wire—flexible tub- known as RDX. Its detonation releases in Iraq and Afghanistan were triggered ing with two conductors inside that touch an extremely fast-moving shock wave, wirelessly, often with cellphones, long- and make an electrical connection when which turns the liner into hot, explosively range cordless phones, key fobs, walkie- the tubing is squashed by a tire or a foot. formed fragments moving at one to two talkies, and wireless doorbells. kilometers per second—faster than a high- Relying on modified existing hard- efeating the device” is velocity rifle round. The kinetic energy of ware and Navy expertise, JIEDDO’s pre- how JIEDDO refers to the the fragments is so high that it penetrates decessor quickly fielded jamming systems. many things it does to deal most kinds of armor. Installed in vehicles, the jammers pro- with an IED already in place: EFPs are usually triggered by a vide a bubble of safety around the vehi- searching for it, disposing of passive infrared sensor. The triggering cle, within which radio-frequency power D it, and if all else fails, surviving its blast. system also often has a radio-control overwhelms any signal being transmitted These tasks get a lot of attention because override that lets the triggerman enable to an IED’s wireless trigger. the score is easily tallied. Column A: lives www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 31 Monthly Global Terrorist Events unmanned aerial vehicles, and from local people suspicious of activity in their neigh- (minus Iraq and Afghanistan) borhoods. “It’s a challenging new frontier,” 1000 IED events (explosions or rendered safe) says Shoop. “Combining an understanding Other terrorist acts of the psychology and sociology of terror- 800 ist networks with probabilistic modeling, complexity theory, forensic science, pat- tern recognition, and data mining to pre- 600 dict human behavior is new.” JIEDDO has already acknowledged 400 that it is using sophisticated database software in Iraq to help its analysts get a handle 200 on that multifarious assortment of images, data, intelligence, and anecdote that bears 0 on whether an IED has been emplaced. Y Y Y V V G G R R C C L L N N N N JU JU JA JA FEB FEB JU JU SEP SEP DE DE OCT OCT AU AU NO NO MA MA MA AP APR AP MAR MAR In his final press conference this past 2006 2007 2008 November as director of JIEDDO, retired U.S. Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs Source: Triton Report identified for the first time an organiza- Iraq IED Incident Trends tion called the Counter IED Operations Integration Center. Calling it a “very pow- IEDs found and cleared erful intelligence fusion operation,” he Ineffective IED attacks (IED incidents that fail to added that “it makes a difference in that produce coalition casualities) line of operations we call ‘attack the net- IED attacks with coalition force casualties work.’ Beyond that, I can’t say anything.” Meigs’s successor at JIEDDO, Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, said in an interview this past May: “Say you know a particular part of your district gets a larger proportion of IEDs. You want to study it, layer in all the data: signals intelligence, significant events over a couple years, moving target indicators from JSTARS [an advanced G G G G G C C C C C R R R R N N N N N FEB FEB FEB FEB FEB JU JU JU JU JU DE DE DE DE DE OCT OCT OCT OCT OCT AP AP AP AP AU AU AU AU AU MAR military reconnaissance aircraft], humint 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 [human intelligence] reports. You have to take it on faith from me that actionable patterns begin to form.” IeD attaCKS are already common in some places outside of Afghanistan and Iraq [top]. The rate of attacks in Iraq [bottom] declined in the first half of 2008, thanks to aggressive efforts to dismantle ife and death on the roads the networks that build and deploy IEDs. (The number of incidents is not included in this chart of Iraq and Afghanistan often because the Joint IED Defeat Organization declined to release them.) depend on the eyes and intuition of soldiers just a few saved; column B: lives lost, damaged, irre- ing the desired effect, the rallying cry years out of high school. Most vocably changed. But defeating the device became “attack the network”—in other LIEDs are found today by a soldier peering is actually a small piece of a much larger words, destroy the infrastructures that through a thick Lexan window of a mas- and evolving counter-IED strategy. build and deploy IEDs. Attacking the sively armored truck and noticing some- JIEDDO originally divided its projects network, it turns out, spans prediction, thing amiss. among five functions: prediction, detec- prevention, and part of detection. “You won’t find the IED itself,” explains tion, prevention, neutralization (which JIEDDO has been criticized for spend- a U.S. Army counter-IED trainer, in an includes defeating the device), and mitiga- ing too little on attacking the network. interview at Camp Speicher in Tikrit, tion. Some of those technologies and most But as a former JIEDDO official wrote Iraq. “You look for other indicators. Trash of the techniques, as deployed today in Iraq in an e-mail, “a significant portion of the right after a route clearance. Disturbed and Afghanistan, are classified. Still, what activities in Attack the Network are clas- soil. An area strangely devoid of activity, is known about those categories offers at sified,” making it difficult for outsiders to or a heavily laden vehicle with no occu- least a partial view of evolving counter- know how big the effort actually is. pants. A donkey cart by itself—it’s some- IED strategies, as well as insights into the Attacking the network boils down in body’s livelihood, so why is it abandoned? main issue: whether the strategic influence part to analyzing social networks, collect- Why is no one there?” of IEDs can be subverted. ing and analyzing intelligence, and per- Over the past year in Iraq, military In this world, simply categorizing sistently surveilling places. It has been patrols guided by local people, often for- activities can be complicated. A few a difficult challenge, depending as it has mer insurgents, have uncovered count- years ago, when it became clear that on wildly incongruous data, tips, and less thousands of IEDs. The locals are going after IEDs on the road wasn’t hav- reports from surveillance systems, such as paid to reveal where the bombs are.

32 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org Soldiers travel the roads in RG-31s, For the record, most of the armored tified two such projects, code-named MRAPs, convoy trucks, and Buffaloes, vehicles listed above, as well as the Desert Owl and Copperhead, but has not which have a big robotic arm that can Gyrocam and ODIN, were all at least released any details. be operated from inside to paw through partially funded initially by JIEDDO. There is also a lot of work on systems roadside junk. Many of the vehicles are that can detect IEDs at what are called also outfitted with a Gyrocam, a gyro- t’s really hard to find tiny wires standoff distances: tens of meters, or far stabilized telescopic camera system that in the dirt,” said General Meigs enough to survive if the IED blows up. A lets them scrutinize, on a monitor in the in his final JIEDDO press con- couple of years ago troops in Iraq were truck, suspicious roadside objects from ference last November. “And it’s reportedly using a system called PING, hundreds of meters away. The system hard to find an IED that’s buried. which emitted microwave signals that can be switched to one of three different IThose are tough challenges from a laws- penetrated building walls. If the signals bands: visible light, infrared, and ther- of-physics perspective.” encountered an IED with large amounts mal (the thermal mode is useful for turn- Tough, but maybe not impossible. of metal, the IED altered those signals in ing up people hiding at night), and it costs Dozens of advanced-tech projects are a way that could be detected, presumably more than $500 000. It is used on drone aimed at detecting buried IEDs. Some with reasonable consistency. aircraft such as Predators as well. systems are intended to fly aboard drone Some of these standoff systems Other technologies also help with aircraft, others to be carried on vehicles; depend, or will depend, on radically detection. A vehicle called a Husky has still others are to be carried by a soldier. new technologies, such as terahertz- a powerful magnetometer that detects In the airborne category are advanced frequency and millimeter-wave radia- buried metal-containing objects, such imaging systems that would find buried tion [see Web-only sidebar “Terahertz as pressure plates, crush wire, and artil- IEDs, pressure switches, and even com- Waves: No Silver Bullet” at http://www. lery rounds. At the moment of detection, mand wires by detecting disturbed earth. spectrum.ieee.org//sep08/ciedextra], though, the driver is directly above the These systems, being developed by sev- or on radical applications of existing object. To protect the driver as much as eral defense contractors, would sense technology. Several have already been possible in a blast, the Husky has a cast- radiation in dozens of narrow spectral deployed, with limited success, but metal suspension and a harness restraint bands in the visible and infrared parts most are more than a few years away. system designed for a helicopter. Those of the spectrum. The existing technologies include vis- features have let drivers walk away after The principle is that disturbed earth ible light lasers, ground-penetrating being blown 20 meters in the air. scatters radiation differently from undis- radar, synthetic-aperture radar, ther- Drone aircraft also sometimes spot turbed earth. The system, called a hyper- mal imaging, magnetic resonance, and evidence of IEDs or even catch insur- spectral imager, would run algorithms electronic “sniffers” that can detect in gents in the act of installing them. In to calculate the signal strength in those the air infinitesimal concentrations of tactical operations centers all over Iraq spectral bands. That data would be molecules from explosives. you can see video from Warrior, Shadow, used to map, for a grid of points on the A sniffer called Fido is being used in Predator, or Hunter aircraft playing ground, the reflectance as a function of Iraq and Afghanistan; there’s a hand- out on flat-panel monitors in real time. wavelength. Limited processing power held version and also one attached to Mostly, the feeds show empty or clut- forces a tradeoff between the spatial a small robot. Fido exploits a kind of tered roads and suggest the immensity resolution on the ground (you want to material called an amplifying fluores- of the detection challenge. be able to see command wires) and the cent polymer. A polymer is a long chain Nevertheless, a special C-IED spectral resolution (you need a certain of identical molecular links called mono- U.S. Army task force called ODIN (for minimum number of spectral bands to mers. When a photon hits a fluorescent observe, detect, identify, neutralize) reliably detect disturbed earth). The sys- polymer, it releases an excited electron has for more than two years been using tems being tested now use bright, con- that travels along the chain, causing the a small fleet of piloted and drone air- trasting colors to show subtle differences monomers to fluoresce. The monomers craft to monitor the main supply routes in reflectance. are designed, however, so that if any in Iraq. A New York Times report in June Another project, now being tested, one of them encounters and binds with said the task force had about 300 peo- detects command wires using a radio a certain molecule—let’s say one from ple and 25 aircraft assigned to it. When transmitter, carried by a soldier, that a nitroaromatic explosive—the fluores- they spot people placing IEDs, ground sweeps through a wide band of frequen- cence is quenched. controllers feed the information to quick- cies. The waves are polarized, and when Because the chain has so many poten- response combat teams, with often fatal the polarization is properly aligned tial receptor sites, the system based on results for the bombers. with a length of buried wire, the radio- it can detect concentrations down in the In an interview with the newsletter frequency energy couples into the wire. parts-per-quadrillion range, accord- Defence Systems Daily last November, Maj. That coupling causes a resonance at a ing to the original paper on the inven- Gen. James E. Simmons said that as of specific frequency. The system detects tion, which was published in the June August 2007 the program had resulted in that resonance, which can indicate not 2001 IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and the deaths of 233 IED emplacers, the injury only the presence of the wire but also its Remote Sensing. But although the Fido of 48 others, and the detainment of 260. To approximate length. system works well, it does so only for a put those numbers in perspective, in a typ- Troops are also testing detection sys- limited number of explosives, according ical month a single turbulent province like tems that use ground-penetrating radar to an official familiar with it. And the Salah Ad Din could, until recently anyway, or other technologies to detect com- only standoff capability you get is from record more than 800 IED incidents. mand wires. JIEDDO has publicly iden- the robot. www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 33 eutralizing an IED When the right code comes up, the IED than 3200 of them in combat roles. There means either disabling it or detonates. The technique doesn’t work, have been more than 150 IED attacks on destroying it. Both jobs are however, if the code is long—say, 18 bits MRAPs, the U.S. Defense Department performed by military spe- or more. There are simply too many pos- says, which resulted in a total of eight cialists trained in the rapidly sible combinations, Smith said. deaths. All the fatal attacks involved either N expanding discipline known as explosive In February, JIEDDO announced that an EFP or a deep-buried IED. The Defense ordnance disposal, or EOD. it had canceled two big predetonator pro- Department plans to spend $5.4 billion U.S. EOD teams travel in 26-ton grams, code-named Alexis and Electra-C, to buy 4000 more MRAPs, making this technology-stuffed trucks called Joint on the grounds that the signals from acquisition program the Pentagon’s third EOD Rapid Response Vehicles (JERRVs) those systems interfered with counter- largest (only missile defense and the Joint that cost more than $1.2 million fully IED jammers such as Duke. A third pro- Strike Fighter are bigger). equipped (the JERRV was also a JIEDDO gram, called Blow Torch, is ongoing. Future combat trucks will mitigate project). The teams, usually made up of An article in the 25 March edition of blasts with more than simple armor- two or three people, strive to disable and The Scotsman newspaper, which quoted ing. Some of the competing designs recover unusual IEDs because of their only anonymous sources, said that U.S. for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the intelligence value. Those recovered IEDs, forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were MRAP’s proposed more agile but no-less- as well as forensic evidence gathered at using specially equipped Vietnam-era blast-resistant successor, take inventive places where IEDs have detonated, are EA-6B Prowler aircraft to clear roads for approaches. For example, to reduce the sent to a laboratory near Baghdad air- convoys by transmitting appropriate sig- organ- and spine-crushing shock from a port for analysis. IED specialists say that nals to predetonate IEDs. (The article said blast that comes from below, some JLTV years of work at that lab have enabled the sweeps are called courtesy burns.) designs suspend their seats from the ceil- them to know, in many cases, such details A former JIEDDO official points to ing, rather than bolting them to the floor. as exactly who built an IED and possibly a tempting but difficult challenge for “If I can vastly mitigate the effects of an where he built it. future predetonators. “It would be a attack, I would argue that that is defeat- If the IED isn’t unusual, or if disabling breakthrough if we could find a safe and ing the IED, too,” says the Lexington it doesn’t seem straightforward, the EOD effective way to predetonate blasting Institute’s Gouré. technicians use special-purpose robots caps,” he says. “To underline the diffi- to place plastic explosives on it and culty, remember that industrial and mili- ver the past 5 years, blow it up. [In next month’s issue, IEEE tary caps are designed to not react to the during which the U.S. Spectrum will publish a companion arti- static electricity that creates lightning.” Department of Defense cle to this one, on EOD in Iraq.] spent more than $13 billion There are other ways to neutralize an ow do you mitigate an on counter-IED efforts, the IED. A type of “predetonator” used in Iraq IED blast? Today, mostly OIED did in fact become less effective. But emits a strong electromagnetic pulse that with armor. Over the past how much of that success is attributable wrecks the integrated circuits in the cell- year and a half, contractors to technology? And was the money well phone or other appliance that triggers an and soldiers have gone from spent? The answers are elusive. IED. The pulse comes from a very high H 3-ton SUVs to 7.8-ton Revas, and from 5-ton At the very outset of the IED problem voltage capacitor discharging very sud- Humvees to 25-ton MRAPs and JERRVs. in Iraq, in mid- to late 2003, with soldiers denly. When its ICs are zapped, the trigger Of course, there are disadvantages. driving around in unarmored Humvees might “fail open”—with no explosion—or it Tons of armor make vehicles too sluggish and contractors in unaltered SUVs, almost might “fail closed,” detonating the IED. to speed away from an ambush. And sim- every IED attack caused a casualty. It now Inevitably, there has been a counter- ple physics and economics confirm that takes roughly six IED attacks to cause one measure, and a cheap one at that. “These in an escalating contest between bombs coalition casualty, according to JIEDDO. are billion-dollar solutions with ten-cent and armor, it’s much cheaper and eas- Slightly more than half of all IEDs countermeasures,” says Daniel B. Widdis, ier to make bigger bombs than to try to are found and cleared without detonat- an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate shield against those bombs with more ing, JIEDDO says. Of those that do deto- School, in Monterey, Calif., who did a tour and more armor. nate, roughly 40 percent of them cause no as an electronic countermeasures special- But armor isn’t the only factor in injuries. More heavily armored vehicles ist in Iraq. [Editor’s note: In response to the life-death equation. MRAPs and are behind that statistic. And the more JIEDDO’s request, IEEE Spectrum agreed JERRVs are much higher off the ground technologically advanced JLTV promises not to disclose the countermeasure.] than Humvees, and parts of their under- further improvements in survivability. More sophisticated predetonators carriages are V-shaped. The V shape There are other indications of progress. are said to mimic the signals of the IEDs’ deflects the force of a blast under the vehi- Insurgent groups typically pay people, triggering devices in order to set them off. cle outward, away from the vehicle. The usually freelancers who are just in it for In the typical case the triggering devices, increased height not only puts more dis- the money, to emplace IEDs. Several years and therefore the specific codes that tance between the passenger compart- ago, the going rate was about $50 per IED. will trigger them, are not known. In an ment and a bomb buried in the road, it Today the rate is $200 outside Baghdad, interview published in the 3 September also makes it more difficult for insurgents and $400 to $500 inside Baghdad, accord- 2007 issue of Aviation Week and Space to target the passenger compartment with ing to a counter-IED training official in Technology, James M. Smith, the CEO of an explosively formed penetrator. Iraq. The higher rates are believed to EDO Corp., said that the predet systems The first MRAPs were delivered to reflect, among other things, the increased transmit sequences of codes very rapidly. Iraq in January 2007; there are now more risk and danger of the job.

34 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org IeD afterMatH: A mine-resistant, ambush-protected truck hit a roadside bomb on an Al Talbiyah street in Baghdad on 19 June. The heavily armored vehicle was significantly damaged, but no one was hurt. Photo: Petros giaNNakouris/aP Photo

JIEDDO director Metz believes the Few of the people in Iraq whose job it It takes risk. Some things are going to factors behind that fee increase suggest is to deal with IEDs would embrace that cost a lot of money, and they aren’t going that the IED problem is solvable and assessment. They wouldn’t deny that it’s to work. Get over it.” also indicate the way forward. “It’s con- their eyes and intuition, along with local The Lexington Institute’s Gouré stant pressure put on those who emplace intelligence, that uncover most IEDs. But believes that a combination of technolo- IEDs that will win the day,” he says. “It’s traveling Iraq’s roads regularly makes gies, including some yet to be fielded, becoming a cost-ineffective and risky them more appreciative of things like along with more survivable vehicles, business to be in.” jammers, Gyrocams, EOD robots, armor, aggressive exploitation of intelligence, How much more can technol- infrared and other sensors, and useful intel and adherence to good operational ogy contribute to that solution? To distilled with the help of a computer pro- countermeasures (simply varying the explain a lull in IED activity in Iraq gram from maybe half a dozen sources. routes taken on repeated missions, for in early 2008, JIEDDO’s most recent Without a doubt, many big-budget instance) might get the rate of IED deto- annual report pointed to several fac- projects and exotic technologies have nations down to 15 or 20 percent from the tors: the cooperation of thousands of fizzled or were quickly and cheaply present 40. That might be good enough. “concerned local citizens” who helped countered by the insurgents. But that “You want to get to a rate that’s tolerable coalition forces locate IEDs and IED- doesn’t mean that some of the technolo- for you but unacceptable to him,” he says. making resources; the military surge, gies under development now or deployed “I suspect that’s exactly how it will end.” which stabilized some convulsive areas in secret aren’t already working, or that And don’t dismiss what’s been by pouring troops into them; and mil- others won’t be part of a more effective achieved so far, Gouré says. With new itary efforts against the networks and set of responses in the next few years. tactics and technologies in both counter- “event chains” that lead to IEDs on the It doesn’t even mean that pursuing IED and EOD, “the American military roads. Less prominent in JIEDDO’s each and every one of those ultimately has invented, in about three or four years, list are technology-related factors, a unsuccessful projects was a mistake. a way of warfare that didn’t exist before. fact expounded on by defense affairs “Defeating the system takes leadership,” That’s lightning speed. writer Sharon Weinberger in a Wired says Lt. Col. Jeremy G. Mansfield, direc- “Could they be less bureaucratic?” he blog that was subtitled in part “Tech tor of Canadian Forces EOD. “That’s asks. “Probably not. That’s the way the barely a factor.” why we pay the generals the big bucks. system works.” o www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 35 pengineeringre SHow will wrigHt, creatoro of The SimS, gave life to His evolutionary—and revolutionary—new game By david Kushner

t’s time to make a creature. Let’s has utterly transformed his industry with start with its body. Stretch down a pair of hits like SimCity, in which players build legs and pull out two arms so that it looks virtual towns, and the best-selling com- long and lean. On one end of the body, pop puter game franchise of all time, The Sims, in on intelligent eyes behind large round which players create virtual people and then I glasses. Add a mop of peppery hair and a watch them interact. In the process, Wright prominent nose and ears. Sprinkle on scruffy has helped forge a new, more toylike frontier semibeard growth. Call it Will Wright. in computer gaming, where the main goal is Now put the creature in its habitat: the not so much to score points or kill bad guys workspace of a computer game developer in but to create cool stuff. Emeryville, Calif. Spread the studios of Maxis The game they’re working on this Software, which Wright cofounded in 1987, bright February day is called Spore, and

over the floors of two nondescript office build- it’s the most ridiculously ambitious sim- S mage ings. Sprinkle the interior with dirt-encrusted ulation game yet. Sure, there’ve been vir- i y TT mountain bikes leaning against cubicle walls tual worlds like Second Life, which let you e g FP/

and overgrown, pumpkin-orange beanbag customize your characters. In games like a on/

chairs. Now surround Wright with others Fable and Black & White, the characters S n of his kind, hunched behind desks, typing at even evolve in appearance and reputation a yan yan r

keyboards, PC monitors glowing. based on how the player defines them: the o: T ho

The software engineers, artists, and oth- more evil your beast, for example, the more P ers who work at Maxis, now owned by video- feared it becomes. LittleBigPlanet, an upcom- riginal

game giant Electronic Arts, have migrated ing game from Media Molecule for Sony’s o

here because Wright is a legend. Over the PlayStation 3 game console, is built around cabe; c past two decades, the 48-year-old Wright, player-made terrains and characters. But ean m who studied architecture and mechanical Wright’s Spore is by far the boldest in terms S ion: engineering at Louisiana Tech University, of unleashing players’ creativity. In Spore T ra ST llu i o- T Pho

36 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org

the players create life itself—starting a single-celled organism that gobbles ists and seven programmers created a with ooze-dwelling, one-celled creatures up microbes and plants to accrue DNA palette of editing tools. They think of it as that learn, grow, and evolve into intelli- points. Once the spore collects enough an “artist in a box” or, as Maxis software gent beings with advanced cultures and DNA, an editing palette pops up that lets engineer Colin Andrews puts it, “Mr. technologies, able to conquer their plan- you design the next evolutionary stage of Potato Head on steroids.” Maxis released ets and outer space. the creature’s body. Your creature is then a stripped-down version of the tool pal- Computer gamers everywhere have thrown into a three-dimensional envi- ette, known as the Creature Creator, on eagerly awaited Wright’s latest project ronment where it must dodge predators 16 June to build buzz for the game. Eight since he began talking about it in 2000. and find a partner with which to repro- days later, early adopters had created Spore is finally due to be released this duce. By the third stage, your creature is more than a million creatures. month, more than a year behind sched- fully evolved and you switch to control- To understand why the Creature ule. Wright attributes its recent delays ling its entire tribe, as you would in real- Creator is so compelling, consider its to localization, the process of tailoring time strategy games like Electronic Arts’ incredible flexibility. Say a player wants the game to different countries and lan- Command & Conquer. to make a building. Spore provides a guages. Others around the Maxis office Next up is the civilization phase, in menu of architectural elements to tinker cite the boss’s high expectations. Wright which you can assemble vehicles and with: windows, doors, that kind of thing. concedes their point but shrugs it off. buildings to bring your tribe’s city to life, The player clicks and drags the pieces “For games, it is a long time, but for me in the spirit of SimCity or Civilization. If onto a base structure and can stretch or it’s not a big deal,” he says, sipping coffee you succeed in conquering your planet shrink them along several axes. From in his cluttered corner office. “I’d rather and avoiding an enemy takeover, you the game’s perspective, each build- spend a couple of extra years and have it graduate to the fifth and final level: outer ing’s design is simply a list of instruc- be a big seller than short it by a year or space. Here the object is to fight off invad- tions; when the player is finished tinker- two and have it be mediocre.” ers and take over other planets. ing, those instructions direct the game Spore is anything but. Other games Developing a game in which the play- engine to generate an image of the build- may look and sound better, but few games ers create all the key parts—the charac- ing and place it within the Spore world. are as original as this one. It offers play- ters, buildings, and vehicles—poses an Simple enough. ers far more choice and open-ended play obvious conundrum: “There’s no con- Then there’s the process of making a than any game before it. If Spore lives tent,” says Maxis technology fellow Chris creature, which offers a whole other level up to its creator’s vision, it will likely be Hecker. “Initially, the problem was, well, of variety and complexity. For instance, heralded as one of those milestones that what is [Spore] supposed to be?” each creature can have any number of redefines what a game can be—just as When you boot up most games for the features and appendages—eyes, mouths, Doom, a first-person shooter game, pio- first time, you’re immediately immersed legs, feet—which can be stretched and neered fast-action multiplayer competi- in an existing world, complete with a cast curled like clay into outlandish shapes. tion in 1993 and Guitar Hero delivered the of characters who behave in predeter- But that indeterminacy presents an thrill of music performance by introduc- mined ways. Perhaps the game has tree- unusual problem: how exactly does a ing a guitar-shaped controller. lined streets or castles with dungeons game company write software that gen- The anticipation—and pressure—is and moats. Maybe colonies of dwarves erates realistic movements for “an eight- high. “I call Wright a genius because he and trolls populate those worlds, or legged, two-headed thing with four truly is one of the most innovative develop- maybe gangsters do. These objects are all mouths and no neck?” Wright says. “We ers out there,” writes one gaming blogger. encoded in the game’s original software don’t know what we’re animating.” “Spore...is creating an entirely new genre.” exactly as the developers envisioned and To convincingly evoke even the animated them. wackiest animal a player could design, he game unfolds through In Spore, that model doesn’t apply. the game code had to be able to apply five stages, each of which Almost nothing exists until the player the knowledge of a human animator, on riffs on an established genre makes choices about each object’s shape the fly—the ability to understand body of play. It starts, fittingly, in a and texture. To enable that design pro- language and subtle facial expressions T two-dimensional world, with cess, the relatively small team of 20 art- and then to encapsulate those qualities 38 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org abstractly in software. Wright decided how they stumbled around, and then sim everything: through the course of to build Spore’s real-time animation adjusted the software’s algorithms, the game, creatures evolve from single-celled organisms into hyperadvanced societies. around a technique called procedural essentially creating a virtual island imageS: elecTronic arTS generation. The “procedure” in Spore is of Dr. Moreau. “We have these tests a set of algorithms that execute a play- where we take 10 totally crazy, random er’s designs, generating entirely new creatures and run animation on them,” the animal lumbers awkwardly but con- content in the midst of game play. Other Wright says. “And we find out that it vincingly across the screen. Indeed, the game developers have used the tech- works for these seven, but for these two little legs scurry just fast enough to keep nique for years in a limited way, but no the legs look weird and for this one the up with the long ones. But Wright isn’t game has ever relied on it so heavily to back isn’t straight enough. We’re refin- done with him yet. “What would it take create highly customizable yet lifelike ing those algorithms all the time.” to make any creature sad?” he asks, tap- creatures in real time. ping away at the keyboard. Suddenly this So the Maxis team had little to go on o illustrate, Wright goes alien being adopts a recognizably sad as they tried to figure out how to make over to his Dell computer and, pose, dropping its torso, curling down their exotic beasts move. Wright, who with a few pecks at the key- the edges of its mouth, and dully droop- builds BattleBots for fun and possesses a board, brings up the game’s ing its eyelids. You feel kind of sorry for voracious intellect and curiosity, decided Creature Creator on screen. He the little guy. to hit the books. He began reading up on T starts with a short, fat torso and attaches This beast is relatively straightfor- biomechanics—in particular, the phys- birdlike wings on its sides for ears. From ward, but the Maxis team had to allow ics and physiology of how animals move. a palette of eyeballs, he clicks and drags for the most twisted possibilities a player “Depending on the leg length and how a pair of big round eyes and drops them might dream up—for instance, a creature supple the spine is,” he says, “you can get onto the beast’s shoulders. He continues to with no limbs. “Now the game has to deal a characteristic oscillation of the [torso] tweak the anatomy, equipping the creature with all the ramifications of that,” says of the creature over the ground.” with legs, arms, hands, and so on. Hecker. “So how do you pick up a piece To get a creature to walk or run Even as Wright experiments with dif- of fruit?” convincingly, the software engineers ferent looks, the beast begins to move— In conventional animation systems, encoded an overarching set of rules on wiggling its newly attached limbs and the concept of a limb may be encoded how to generate movement. The anima- blinking its new eyes. It even seems to not as an object but rather as a set of spa- tion algorithms start by looking at the show its approval of certain choices by tial transformations that can be applied number of legs, the length of each leg, smiling and nodding. to a body. To accomplish this, an anima- and the creature’s bodily symmetry to Based on each new creature’s fea- tor can assign labels to parts of a charac- calculate something called a walking tures and shape, the animation software ter’s skeleton. When a character reaches ratio. If one side has twice as many legs determines the sounds it can make, the for that fruit, the animation might state as the other, for example, the ratio would way it dances, and much more. A skinny something like, “Rotate bone 1 from 0 to be one to two. The algorithms will also beast with a beak and decorative tufts of 52 degrees.” compute the rhythm of a creature’s foot- hair may flutter its eyelashes and emit But in Spore the skeleton is unknown falls—the length of time between, say, a a high-pitched warble, while a hulking until the game is already in play. So front leg and a back leg hitting the ground creature with spikes along its spine may instead of using labels, the program- in a single stride. The overall gait takes blink slowly and communicate in a bari- mers encode generic descriptions of each all these factors into account, along with tone growl. Those traits in turn end up body part, referring to a specific limb by the dimensions of the torso and head (or influencing whether the creature greets describing its context relative to other heads, as the case may be). The result is other species with a friendly advance or body parts. Let’s say a creature throws a convincingly lifelike motion. with an attack, and the fate of its civili- a punch at a bad guy. The animation may The Maxis team then had to see if zation depends on those nuances. dictate the action with instructions that those movement rules worked on actual Wright clicks on a button to test the would read something like, “Move upper Spore beings. The team devised a huge creature he’s just designed. With short leftmost grasper from rest position to a menagerie of test creatures, observed legs on one side and long legs on the other, position parallel to your leftmost head, www.spectrum.ieee.org SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 39 then move to some position relative to To do that, Maxis devised the the code requires that certain values the enemy’s topmost nose.” The code ana- Pollinator. This tool lets players easily or quantities be more or less randomly lyzes the body in search of the parts that search through the buildings, vehicles, assigned. Algorithms embedded in the match that profile. In short, rather than and beasts created by other gamers and game’s software can generate those directing bones to assume prescribed incorporate them into their own worlds. strings of seemingly unrelated num- positions, animators are using higher- They can also sort through the stuff by bers, but the starting value—or seed— level directives to describe what the theme—whimsical or Wizard of Oz, futur- must vary so as to avoid generating the bones should do. This strategy was key istic or “Futurama.” This is what Wright same string of numbers each time the to opening up a much wider field of char- means when he describes the game as “a algorithms are run. “We want the plan- acter types and activities—though it cer- massively single-player experience”: it’s ets to be ‘random,’ but we also need to tainly didn’t make writing the game easy. a one-person game that can draw on be able to re-create it exactly when you The code can look for a limb by using a many sources. While the Spore DVD will come back later,” Andrews explains. description that may be satisfied by one ship with some ready-made creatures “Storing the seed lets us do that.” body part, several, or none. Coping with and buildings—so that a player’s crea- The programmers also had to winnow indeterminate results, down the list to just the while keeping the ani- core guidelines needed mation interesting by to reconstitute a planet— not simply ignoring extra or building, creature, or limbs, drives up the com- spaceship. Sometimes plexity of the game code. that meant making tough And then there are choices that in effect cur- the creatures that are tail a player’s creativity. so weird they defy the Originally, for instance, game’s generalized rules Spore’s Creature Creator of movement. To catch allowed players to design those freakish cases, animals with looped the code checks for cer- spines. Unfortunately, tain features: for exam- doughnut-shaped ani- ple, does the creature mals raised all sorts of have any kind of paw or exceptions to the anima- claw? If not, a separate tion rules. The solution: set of instructions will bye-bye, doughnuts. govern the creature’s To manage the flow of movement, instructing so many player-created it to use its mouth as a composing creatures: an editing palette gives Spore players free rein creatures and items, and hand. And because the to create unique and curiously realistic characters. to help players find con- creature has no legs to tent they like, Spore uses use in calculating movement, it gets an tures aren’t initially running around in the same kind of collaborative filtering inchwormlike slither. Rather than try an empty universe—the rest of the con- that sites like Amazon and Netflix have to write very complex algorithms that tent will come from the players, who can made popular, based on the preferences cover every imaginable kind of beast, upload their creations to Maxis’s game of other players who have chosen a cer- the programmers instead identified a servers for others to access. tain design. Players will also be able to few exceptional creature skeletons and To store and sift through such a huge subscribe to Sporecasts—a kind of RSS wrote code that chooses different sets of amount of data, the Maxis team had to feed of content other people create for the rules for them. “It just kind of ripples out compress the data files down to a man- game. As Spore spreads, stars of content in a lot of different ways,” Hecker says. ageable size. Here, the hurdle became design will likely emerge, as they have “how do we keep the data rate really low in Second Life and in other online gam- t’s one thing to create and animate so that even if I’m not on the Internet I ing communities. a creature in Spore, but Wright and his can still have the local database with lots “I can imagine so many cool possibil- team knew that players would also want and lots of content?” Wright says. ities that we’re just scratching the sur- to share their creations. “What we saw With its detailed terrains and texture face of,” Wright says. He envisions Spore with The Sims was that people loved maps, one planet in Spore could occupy races centered around user-designed I downloading tools and creating stuff in 10 megabytes of space on a player’s hard vehicles and flying games featuring the game,” says Wright. Players routinely drive. “We don’t have the disc space to users’ spaceships. surfed Web sites specially set up for trad- deliver a million planets,” says Maxis But Wright’s imagination stretches ing Sims add-ons, such as modifications art director Ocean Quigley. When a only so far. He anticipates the day when to a character’s appearance, houses, and player creates a planet, an instruction Spore players take charge and steer the furniture. But the experience was a has- list for generating that world is saved game into unseen territory. “That’s when sle because players had to find and then along with certain seed values, which the fans become an even larger designer import each item into the game one by one. are like keys that the software uses to [than us],” he says. “In some sense, we’re “We wanted to basically make that [pro- reopen the world later. To conjure up kind of codesigning Spore. Fans are going cess] part of the game play,” he says. lots of different planets for each game, to drive its future.” o

40 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectrum.ieee.org

bEyond silicon’s ElEmEntal

logicIn the quest for speed, key parts of mIcro- processors may soon be made of gallIum arsenIde or other III-V semIconductors By Peide d. ye

he first general-purpose Through the magic of photolithography, bil- microprocessor, the Intel 8080, lions of them are routinely constructed en released in 1974, could execute masse on the surface of a silicon wafer. about half a million instructions As these transistors got smaller over the t per second. At the time, that years, more could fit on a chip without rais- seemed pretty zippy. ing its overall cost. They also gained the abil- Today the 8080’s most advanced descen- ity to turn on and off at increasingly rapid dant operates 100 000 times as fast. This rates, allowing microprocessors to hum along phenomenal progress is a direct result of the at ever-higher speeds. all artwork: bryan christie design bryan artwork: christie all semiconductor industry’s ability to reduce But shrinking MOSFETs much beyond their the size of a microprocessor’s fundamental current size—a few tens of nanometers—will be building blocks—its many metal-oxide- a herculean challenge. Indeed, at some point in semiconductor field-effect transistors the next several years, it may become impossi- (MOSFETs), which act as tiny switches. ble to make them more minuscule, for reasons

www.spectrum.Ieee.org september 2008 • Ieee spectrum • NA 43 TOMIC-LAYER DEPOSITION provides one means for coating a semiconductor wafer with a high-k aluminum oxide insulator. the abenefit of this technique is that it offers atomic-scale control of the coating thickness without requiring elaborate equipment.

1. apply the gas trimethyl 2. apply water vapor, which aluminum, which reacts with the reacts with the adhered hydroxyl groups attached to the trimethyl aluminum, forming a surface of the wafer, creating thin coating of aluminum oxide. a one-molecule-thick veneer.

the repeated Water vapor application of trimethyl Trimethyl aluminum Methane by-product aluminum and water vapor in alternating steps serves to build up the insulator into a many-atom-thick layer (shown schematically here as just a thin vertical slice).

of fundamental physics rather along with other researchers it as a III-V semiconductor. There than nuts-and-bolts engineering. in industry and academia, have are more than a dozen such com- So people like me have been look- recently made some advances that pounds, including gallium nitride ing at other ways to boost their might soon allow transistors built and indium phosphide, but gal- speed. In particular, we’ve been with gallium arsenide or a related lium arsenide is the most com- laboring to build them using com- compound to be used for large- mon example and therefore the pound semiconductors like gal- scale digital ICs. That capability best studied. It currently accounts lium arsenide, which would allow would go a long way toward bring- for about 2 percent of the semi- such transistors to switch on and ing us microprocessors that can conductor market. off much faster than their silicon blaze along at triple or even qua- Gallium arsenide devices cousins can. druple the speed of today’s best. cost a lot more than ones built of This strategy is by no means Achieving that goal will no doubt silicon—the raw materials are new. Practically ever since the sili- require other improvements in about 10 times as expensive—but con MOSFET was invented in 1960, semiconductor technology to take they serve well for certain special- engineers have been attempting to place in parallel, but gallium arse- ized applications, including high- come up with a gallium arsenide nide or something close to it could efficiency solar cells, laser diodes, version suitable for large-scale be key. No wonder some of us have and one very special kind of field- integrated circuits. No one has yet been unwilling to give up on this effect transistor: the high-electron- succeeded. Those repeated fail- remarkable material. mobility transistor, or HEMT, ures have led to the oldest joke in which is used in cellphones, com- Silicon Valley: gallium arsenide— allium arsenide’s munication systems, and radars, it’s the technology of the future, two main compo- among other things. and it always will be. nents come from HEMTs are remarkable devices But that perennial skepticism the third (gallium) because they overcome a fun- may be about to vanish. My col- g and fifth (arsenic) damental problem of solid-state leagues and I at Purdue Uni- columns in the right-hand portion physics. Semiconductors, as their versity’s Birck Nanotechnology of the periodic table of elements, name implies, normally don’t Center, in West Lafayette, Ind., which is why cognoscenti refer to conduct electricity all that well.

44 NA • Ieee spectrum • september 2008 www.spectrum.Ieee.org Usually, they must be doped with at the interface fails to bond with with higher dielectric constants, other kinds of atoms to become the adjacent silicon dioxide, leav- which could be made physically electrically conductive. But those ing what’s called a dangling bond. thicker without compromising impurities tend to interfere with These defects disrupt the flow of the electrical functioning of the the movement of electrons through electrons in the channel, but they transistor. Eventually, suitable the semiconductor’s crystal lattice, are rare enough that they don’t compounds were found. Intel, for limiting the conductivity that can materially degrade the perfor- instance, is now using a hafnium- be obtained. mance of a transistor. based gate insulator on some of its In HEMTs, electrons are intro- Gallium arsenide is a different most advanced microprocessors duced into a III-V semiconductor story. When it oxidizes, it forms a [see “The High-k Solution,” IEEE not by doping but by placing the complex mixture of Ga2O3, As2O3, Spectrum, October 2007]. material in contact with another and As2O5. Beginning in the 1960s, To control the thickness of III-V compound that is doped. some researchers tried using these “high-k” dielectrics (a des- In essence, electrons fall a short these native oxides for a gate ignation that refers to the symbol distance into the undoped mate- insulator, but that tactic proved used for a material’s dielectric rial, allowing a thin layer of it— worse than useless because the constant, the Greek letter kappa), the channel—to conduct electric- native oxides create all kinds of manufacturers apply them to the ity extremely well whenever the defects at the interface with the silicon substrate using a tech- transistor is switched on. gallium arsenide, which destroy nique called atomic-layer depo- HEMTs can be used singly or the electrical conductivity of the sition. It’s quite ingenious, really. in integrated circuits with, say, adjacent channel. Clearly, a bet- The trick is that you employ a 100 or even 1000 of them clustered ter material needed to be found if chemical carrier molecule that together, but they can’t yet work there was to be any hope of mak- sticks to the target surface but for microprocessors. The problem ing gallium arsenide MOSFETs not to itself. Such a chemical thus is that too many of the electrons for digital ICs. deposits a one-molecule-thick that are supposed to flow through veneer. A second treatment with the channel from the transis- esearchers con- another carrier molecule removes tor’s source electrode to its drain tinued the decades- the first carrier, leaving a two- instead seep out the controlling long quest, testing atom-thick layer of the desired input electrode—the gate—creat- silicon dioxide, sil- material behind. Repeated appli- ing heat. With millions of leaky r icon nitride, silicon cation of the two carrier gases, one transistors crowded together oxynitride, and aluminum oxide, alternating with the other, allows on the same chip, things would among other candidates. They also chip makers to deposit various quickly get hot enough to melt. tried adding a third material, such high-k gate insulators on silicon In a silicon MOSFET, a layer of as sulfur, silicon, or germanium, with atomic-level precision. intervening insulation (traditionally between the substrate and the insu- In 2001, Glen Wilk, then my col- silicon dioxide) prevents electrons lator to negate the pernicious effects league at Bell Labs, and I decided from slipping out of the channel of dangling bonds. Yet the results to try to put a high-k gate insula- into the gate. In a HEMT, the chan- always proved disappointing, and tor—in this case, aluminum oxide nel is separated from the gate by a by the early 1990s most investi- (Al2O3)—on top of gallium arse- semiconductor, which, as you might gators had simply given up. Two nide using atomic-layer deposi- expect, is somewhat conductive. notable exceptions were Minghwei tion, which was all the rage at the What’s needed here, of course, is an Hong and Matthias Passlack at Bell insulator, but for decades there have Labs, who had developed a way of been no good gate insulators avail- depositing a combination gallium Al2O3 gate insulator p-type In0.65Ga0.35As able for gallium arsenide. From time oxide–gadolinium oxide insulator to time over the years, researchers on a III-V substrate, a strategy that Gate seem to uncover a promising mate- Passlack later refined at Motorola Source Drain rial, but nothing ever really panned and at a company Motorola spun off out—until recently. in 2004, Freescale Semiconductor. Channel It’s easy enough to understand, At that time, the engineers at least in general terms, why find- making silicon MOSFETs were n-type regions ing a gate insulator for silicon was beginning to experience trou- easier than it has been for gal- ble with their gate insulator p-type In0.53Ga0.47As lium arsenide. Silicon dioxide is a too. As the dimensions of these native oxide of silicon—a naturally transistors shrank, the silicon p-type InP substrate forming coat that grows when sili- dioxide insulating the gate no con is exposed to oxygen. By good longer functioned well. Indeed, fortune, silicon dioxide makes for it became so thin that electrons AN ExPERIMENTAL TRANSISTOR of indium gallium arsenide (blue) is built on a bed of indium phosphide (gray). an excellent chemical marriage could pass through it as if it were positive voltage applied to the gate draws electrons into the with the silicon it covers: only a sieve. Great effort went into channel between the silicon-doped n-type regions beneath one out of 100 000 silicon atoms finding alternative materials the source and drain electrodes, allowing current to flow. www.spectrum.Ieee.org september 2008 • Ieee spectrum • NA 45 once. If you want additional coats— content allowed us to engineer

that is, a thicker film of Al2O3—just the substrate’s electronic prop- years In the makIng repeat the application of trimethyl erties as required, instead of try- aluminum and the second carrier, ing to work around the givens of 1960 Dawon Kahng 1995 minghwei and martin m. Atalla Hong and matthias water vapor, in alternating steps. a particular material. After much at bell Labs invent passlack at bell Labs Once you grow a suitably thick experimentation, we settled on a the mOsFet. deposit a gallium layer of aluminum oxide on gallium composition that had a 65:35 ratio oxide–gadolinium arsenide in this way, you use tradi- of indium to gallium. With it we 1965 Hans becke, oxide insulator on robert Hall, and a III-V substrate. tional lithography to construct the were able to build a MOSFET that Joseph White at drain, source, gate, and other com- carried more than 1 ampere per rcA devise the first 2001 the author ponents of a MOSFET. No special millimeter of channel width—the gallium arsenide of this article, peide processes are required. The rub highest current density ever pro- mOsFet using Ye, and Glen Wilk is that the transistor you’ll end up duced in four decades of work silicon dioxide for deposit an aluminum the gate insulator. oxide insulator on with will be a dud: it won’t pass any on gallium arsenide MOSFETs. a gallium arsenide more current through its channel Indeed, it was so large that it ini- 1979 takashi substrate using than did some of the failed designs tially sent our semiconductor mimura at Fujitsu atomic-layer of decades past. parameter analyzer off scale! Laboratories deposition. invents a type of One well-known difficulty gallium arsenide 2005 Intel hen I came to with this approach is that indium Fet: the high- announces interest in Purdue three and gallium arsenide has very poor electron-mobility III-V semiconductors a half years ago, Yi mechanical properties, so poor transistor (Hemt). for future Xuan, a postdoctoral that it would be problematic, if microprocessors. w investigator in my not impossible, to use it to make 2007 the author research group, and I took on this wafers. Pure gallium arsenide and his colleagues problem of dismally poor current is much more robust. Our wafer measure record- capacity. At about that time, Intel supplier, a UK-based company breaking current for a III-V mOsFet. announced that its engineers were called IQE, was able to overcome seriously considering the use of this hurdle by growing a thin III-V semiconductors in its future layer of indium gallium arsenide time. After 2003, our team con- chips. IBM, too, made its interest in on a thick base of indium phos- tinued to study this approach at this technology known. The quest phide. These two compounds Agere Systems, in Allentown, Pa., for speed, it seemed, was driving a have crystal lattices of similar a spin-off of Bell Labs and Lucent renaissance in research on how to sizes, so they bond reasonably Technologies, where our group make III-V semiconductors for dig- well together. And the mechan- had been moved. The maneuver ital applications. But despite all this ical properties of indium phos- succeeded better than we could attention from some of the biggest phide, while not ideal, proved have dreamed. guns in the industry, nobody had good enough to allow us to con- That’s not to say we were able a clear idea about how to achieve struct various test transistors. to make a perfectly functioning sufficient current-carrying capacity Passlack and his colleagues MOSFET out of gallium arsenide for III-V MOSFETs. The challenge at Freescale Semiconductor and straight off. Rather, what stunned was greatest for those operated in the University of Glasgow have us early on was that atomic-layer enhancement mode, meaning that also been experimenting with deposition allowed us to apply the electrons flow from source to drain indium gallium arsenide over the

Al2O3 despite having done nothing only when a voltage is applied to the past few years, using a gallium to remove the troublesome native gate, as is the case for the silicon oxide–gadolinium oxide insula- oxide from the gallium arsenide. MOSFETs found in digital ICs. tor. Hong, who is now at National The reason, as researchers at the Based on published work car- TsingHwa University in Taiwan, University of Texas at Dallas have ried out almost a decade earlier at continues work on this combi- recently detailed, was that the first Bell Labs and on my own research nation as well. Although such carrier, a molecule called trimethyl on depletion-mode MOSFETs, MOSFETs have shown a reason- aluminum, eats away at gallium which switch off when voltage is ably good ability to carry current, arsenide’s native oxides, which applied to the gate, I realized that they would be difficult to manu- despite all reasonable precautions a related III-V semiconductor— facture. The problem is that they tend to cover the substrate. It’s the indium gallium arsenide—would require two applications of a high- atomic-scale equivalent of the mold serve better for the channel. In this vacuum deposition technique on an old porch floor. And as any compound, indium atoms substitute called molecular-beam epitaxy: homeowner knows, if you want to for galliums to a degree that can be one to lay down the indium gal- repaint those boards, you’d better adjusted arbitrarily. That is, you can lium arsenide and then a second to scrape off the gunk first. have mostly indium atoms, mostly coat it with the gate oxide. Doing Using trimethyl aluminum was gallium atoms, or a 50:50 mix of the molecular-beam epitaxy twice, all like having an all-in-one product two bonding to the arsenic atoms. the while keeping things under that strips, primes, and paints all at Tinkering with the indium high vacuum, is possible in the

46 NA • Ieee spectrum • september 2008 www.spectrum.Ieee.org lab, but it would be a challenge for want these transistors to be able to any advantage over silicon for posi- industrial-scale production. operate at low voltages, for instance, tive charge carriers—the “holes,” Research groups at the National so as to reduce another trouble- which are sites in the semiconduc- University of Singapore and at IBM some source of heating: the power tor’s crystal lattice that are defi- are pursuing yet another design that expended at the moment the tran- cient in outer-shell electrons. So has lately shown promise, one that sistors switch states. (Indium-rich it would be very difficult to make uses chemical means to add a layer indium gallium arsenide holds great a high-performance p-channel of amorphous silicon between the promise in this regard.) Designers MOSFET using gallium arse- semiconductor and the gate insula- will also want to ensure that very nide or another III-V compound. tor. This approach resembles a strat- little current flows when a tran- The current consensus is that egy that was attempted two decades sistor is nominally “off,” so that the semiconductor industry will ago and is similar to work going on power isn’t expended—and heat probably employ germanium for now at the University of Texas at isn’t generated—uselessly. Doing those transistors. The Duallogic Austin and at the State University so, all while making these transis- academia-industry consortium in of New York in Albany. tors as tiny as today’s silicon won- Europe, for example, is working What’s more, some researchers ders, will be no small feat. to combine germanium and III-V are looking to build a very different In addition, it is likely that semiconductors in this way. kind of III-V field-effect transistor manufacturers will have to find The III-V devices that my suitable for digital applications, ways to place III-V semiconduc- Purdue colleagues and I have one that can function without a tors on top of a silicon wafer. That recently constructed represent a gate oxide at all. These devices is, chip makers will surely aim to whopping leap forward, as these operate similarly to HEMTs in use the compound semiconductors MOSFETs are both easy to fabri- that a semiconductor provides only where they’re needed rather cate and able to carry record cur- the barrier between the gate and a than trying to replace silicon rents. The competing designs offer highly conductive, undoped chan- entirely, although getting all some attractive features too. Still, nel. Intel and UK-based QinetiQ in these materials to work properly many barriers stand in the way of particular have over the past few together turns out to be a tricky their widespread use. In particu- years achieved impressive perfor- undertaking and the subject of lar, chip makers will have to learn mance with a transistor fashioned much research. to mix and match some very dif- this way using an indium anti- One reason for keeping as much ferent kinds of semiconductors on mony channel. Jesús A. del Alamo silicon as possible around is that it a single wafer. Perhaps chip mak- and his colleagues at MIT are also has considerably better physical ers will have to weave together a investigating how to make such properties for making the large patchwork quilt of indium gal- HEMT-like transistors smaller wafers used in semiconductor man- lium arsenide and germanium on and less prone to gate leakage so ufacturing. Also, silicon is cheap a bed of silicon, or maybe it will that they may one day serve for and environmentally friendly, be something even more compli- digital applications. whereas gallium arsenide is expen- cated. But if there’s any lesson to be Indeed, much work goes on sive and, because it contains arse- drawn from the past four decades around the world on bringing nic, potentially quite toxic. of dizzying advances in comput- III-V semiconductors into what Another reason not to expect ing power, it’s that this industry has long been the sole domain of an all–gallium arsenide micro- thrives on a challenge. o silicon. In addition to the efforts processor anytime soon is that being mounted in industry, aca- III-V semiconductors can speed To ProbE FurThEr Details of the demic teams have formed centers up only half the transistors in a author’s work in this area are avail- of research at the University of CMOS chip: the n-channel ones, able in “high-Performance Inversion- California at Santa Barbara, the which carry current in the form Type Enhancement-Mode InGaAs University of Glasgow, and the of negative charges—electrons. MoSFET With Maximum Drain University of Tokyo, specifically CMOS integrated circuits require Current Exceeding 1 A/mm,” by Y. to carry out these investigations. a combination of both n-channel Xuan, Y.Q. Wu, and P.D. Ye, IEEE and p-channel MOSFETs, which Electron Device Letters 29:294, onsiderable prog- together draw power only when April 2008. ress will yet have to they switch states, such as when To learn more about the use of a be made before any an n-channel transistor turns on gallium oxide–gadolinium oxide insu- of these new kinds and the p-channel transistor that’s lator on a III-V substrate, see “high c of field-effect tran- wired in series with it turns off. Mobility III-V MoSFET Technology” sistors replace their slower silicon When not switching between states, by M. Passlack, r. Droopad, K. counterparts in microprocessors, such a complementary pair draws rajagopalan, J. Abrokwah, P. memory chips, and other digital ICs. no power, which is what makes Zurcher, r. hill, D. Moran, X. Li, h. In particular, device engineers will CMOS chips so energy efficient. Zhou, D. Macintyre, S. Thoms, and I. have to optimize many parameters Although gallium arsenide Thayne at http:// www.gaasmantech. besides current-carrying capac- allows electrons to move through org/Digests/2007/2007%20Papers/ ity and gate leakage. They’ll also it especially easily, it doesn’t offer 12c.pdf. www.spectrum.Ieee.org september 2008 • Ieee spectrum • NA 47 Jon Rubinstein oRchestRated a little music From PodFather playeR foR steve Jobs that tuRned apple aRound. to Palm’s Pilot can he Repeat that magic at palm? by tekla s. peRRy

lash back ten years. Apple is a ‘Yeah, I know exactly what to do with that,’ ” company bleeding money, thought he recalls. by many to be in a death spiral. Its Some four months before, Steve Jobs, his head of hardware development, boss, told him to check out the possibility of a 41‑year‑old electrical engineer designing an Apple music player. “He told named Jon Rubinstein, is busy me to see what it would take to do it and see cutting projects and people and if I think we can do it,” Rubinstein recalls. launching the G3 and iMac com‑ “My first reaction was ‘Hey, we’re really busy puters. He’s living in Palo Alto, right now. I don’t need more on my plate.’ ” Calif., with a cat for companion‑ But, of course, that’s not the sort of thing ship, working seven days a week, and sub‑ you say to Steve Jobs. So what Rubinstein F sisting on take‑out food at the office. actually said was, “Okay, I’ll go take a look Then came the iPod. at it.” He did the research and decided that In 2001, on a business trip to Japan, a music player just didn’t make sense for Rubinstein visited Toshiba, where his hosts Apple at the time, because the device would trotted out a 1.8‑inch hard drive they were have to be too big and clunky to be appealing working on. They thought it was interesting or it simply wouldn’t hold enough songs to be but weren’t really sure what they could do useful. He shelved the idea indefinitely. with it. Perhaps Jon had some ideas? Then he saw the Toshiba hard drive. The You know those hokey cartoons where lightbulb went on. And the rest is consumer the lightbulb goes off over somebody’s head, electronics history. indicating a brilliant idea? That was Jon, sit‑ Suddenly, he was running a crash project ting there in that Toshiba office. “I’m, like, to develop a little music player that became

48 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectRum.ieee.oRg mark richards mark

www.spectRum.ieee.oRg SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 49 the iPod, which revolutionized the music end Gordon Bell, hired Rubinstein to help $11 billion the previous year. Its Power industry, pushed Apple into the Fortune design a new kind of compact, graphics‑ Macintosh computers were running tired 200, launched a thousand business‑school oriented supercomputer. six‑year‑old System 7, and it had only case histories, and will be described in Then, in 1990, Steve Jobs came calling. 3 percent of the personal computer mar‑ books (or whatever succeeds them) a cen‑ He wanted Rubinstein to help develop ket, down from over 9 percent in 1993. tury from now. reduced‑instruction‑set computing work‑ Rubinstein and the rest of Jobs’s execu‑ stations at NeXT Computer, the quirky but tive team revamped the company’s culture, hese days, Rubinstein lives in influential start‑up Jobs launched during product line, and engineering teams. By a San Francisco high‑rise with his his years of exile from Apple. Alas, NeXT mid‑1999 the company’s computer busi‑ wife of six years and two dogs. ness was becoming healthy again, t(The cat died.) He takes the train to although its market share, still Sunnyvale, where, as executive chair‑ hovering around 3 percent, was man of the struggling smart‑phone hardly more than a footnote in the maker Palm, he’s tackling another PC marketplace. turnaround. If all goes well, he’ll soon be competing more or less head‑to‑ nd then came iTunes. In head with his former mentor—Jobs. late 2000, Apple was caught But not everything has changed. short when Hewlett‑Packard Rubinstein still pads around the a introduced computers with house barefoot, buys his jeans built‑in CD burners. Apple needed at budget retailer Mervyns, and to add burners to its line quickly gripes about the cost of running and also develop software to sup‑ shoes. His income, place of resi‑ port them. It bought the rights to dence, and age suggest he should be an MP3 player called SoundJam driving a Porsche Carrera or maybe and brought one of its developers, a Mercedes SL 550. But he doesn’t Jeff Robbin, who had worked for even own a car. “I do drink better Apple in the 1990s, back to the com‑ wine these days,” he says. pany to work on the project that At Palm, Rubinstein is essen‑ would be iTunes. The main thing tially expected to do what Steve he needed to add was the ability to Jobs did for Apple. That is, take a seamlessly burn CDs from within once‑high‑flying company head‑ the program. ing for oblivion and, through prod‑ That first generation of iTunes uct innovations, make it a player mostly stored music in a library again. Palm helped create the and burned CDs from that smart‑phone market with the Treo, library. But it also had to sup‑ then lost ground to the BlackBerry port at least some of the digital and, more recently, the iPhone. music players then on the market. Rubinstein’s job is to get Palm back So as part of the iTunes into the race. “Palm can be saved,” says ran out of money before it could ship the man in project, Apple engineers Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner’s anything Rubinstein worked on. the plaid bought various digital San Jose, Calif., office. “They had a great With Jobs’s blessing, Rubinstein flannel shirt: music players, includ‑ few people who product, though they stuck with it too took some of the technology he had see this casually ing Creative’s Nomad, long. Their name is known.” been developing and started a com‑ dressed engineer Diamond Multimedia’s Rio, But, says Dulaney, the next product pany called Firepower Systems realize that he and Philips’s Nike. is critical: “If they don’t come up with a to build PowerPC‑based personal managed the birth “They were horrible,” of the ipod. good piece of hardware next, they’ll be computers. However, when IBM photo: mark richards Rubinstein recalls. “The crippled.” The rumor mill says that prod‑ killed its own PowerPC line and small solid‑state ones could uct will be a Web‑surfing phone that will stopped investing in the market, hold, like, six songs. The blow the iPhone out of the water and that Firepower’s business was pretty much hard‑drive ones were really big and ugly it’ll be coming in the first half of 2009. destroyed. Still, he made a tidy profit six and took all day long to download music. months later when he sold Firepower to It was just an awful experience. ubinstein says he’s always been Motorola. Weary of the high‑tech merry‑ “We started kicking around the idea “a product guy.” It’s just that the go‑round, at age 40 he began what he of doing our own music player. Steve told hardware keeps getting smaller. First, intended to be an extended vacation. me, ‘Look into it.’ We all wanted one that r in the early 1980s, after he gradu‑ But in January 1997 Jobs called again. was better than what was out there, but ated with a master’s in engineering from He was selling NeXT to Apple and wanted we were really busy.” Cornell, he worked on test methods for Rubinstein as senior vice president of Rubinstein formed a small team to computer production at Hewlett‑Packard. hardware engineering. How could he investigate. They looked at technologies Then he helped design subsystems for the say no to the great persuader? Apple and tossed around ideas, but they just HP 9836 workstation. In 1986, start‑up was at a low point, with annual sales of couldn’t identify a “home run product,” as Ardent Computer, headed by industry leg‑ US $9.8 billion, down from more than Rubinstein puts it. Continued on page 52

50 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.spectRum.ieee.oRg book computers: when active, the drive Jobs, coincidentally, was in Tokyo for Palm’s Pilot drew 1.3 watts compared with the 2.3 of the Macworld conference, so Rubinstein Continued from page 50 its 2.5‑inch brethren; while asleep, it didn’t have to wait for morning in needed only 0.05 W compared with the California to call him with the news. He “I kept telling Steve that it wasn’t time 0.10 of a typical 2.5‑inch drive. With some met Jobs at the hotel and uttered eight yet,” he recalls. Jobs trusted Rubinstein’s smart engineering, that lower consump‑ words that would set in motion one of the instincts and, uncharacteristically, didn’t tion meant approximately 10 hours of great revolutions in consumer‑product push too hard. playing time. history. “I said, ‘Hey, I know how to do In February of 2001 Rubinstein went “It clicked right away,” Rubinstein this now.’ He goes, ‘Great, I’ll write you a to Japan on an annual trip to visit hard‑ recalls. “I had visited lithium‑ion bat‑ check.’ That’s what he always would say ware suppliers and look at technologies tery manufacturers. I instantly knew when we kicked off a project.” It meant under development. It was a whirlwind— exactly what battery we’d need to that Rubinstein now had authorization to about four days and seven companies. It use. I’d been to display vendors, and pull together a development team and start was at the end of his otherwise routine the capability, size, and costs of dis‑ them working full‑out on the project. meeting with Toshiba executives that plays that were coming would make The full‑time development team was they showed him the tiny disk drive. this extremely feasible.” The prices of small, between six and eight people Rubinstein’s mind was churning, even small LCDs had plunged, thanks to the during much of the project. Rubinstein as he tried not to let his expression demands of the cellphone industry. brought on Tony Fadell as a consultant to change. He immediately recognized the But “the key element was the drive,” he help figure out the details; he later hired minuscule marvel as the missing piece insists. “Before that, we had two choices— Fadell to run the group. Jonathan Ive, of the music‑player puzzle. Almost all do a big clunky device or do a device that Apple’s senior vice president of industrial of the other disk drives available then held a dozen songs. Neither made sense. design, made prototype after prototype. were a comparatively clunky 2.5 inches But once I saw the 1.8‑inch drive I said, Phil Schiller, then Apple’s head of prod‑ in diameter. The 1.8‑inch drive offered ‘Okay, now I know how to do it.’ ” uct marketing, jumped onto the idea of up to 5 gigabytes, compared with 25 for Talk about good timing. Had the scroll wheel; he had the insight that it the larger units, but 5 GB was enough to Rubinstein made that routine trip to should scroll more quickly the longer it’s hold about 1000 songs in the MP3 for‑ Japanese suppliers a month earlier, turned, an innovation that has been end‑ mat. And the diminutive drive sucked the drive might not have been ready lessly imitated. Jeff Robbin led a team that down roughly half the power of the to show; a little later, and a competitor worked closely with Jobs on the iconic 2.5‑inch drives then standard in note‑ might have seen it first. software interface.

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401-Qo SCEA_4th pg.indd 1 8/10/06 11:31:54 AM Along the way, more than 100 engi‑ design, tested it, and helped Toshiba neers within Apple worked on the proj‑ shake out the production process. Jon Rubinstein ect, hundreds more at the companies Rubinstein told his Toshiba colleagues IEEE SEnIor MEMbEr that would supply subsystems. And he’d buy every 1.8‑inch drive the com‑ TITlE: Executive Chairman, Palm Inc. of course, iTunes and the online music pany could make. “They were a little sur‑ DaTE of bIrTh: 13 October 1956 store developed in parallel with the iPod prised,” Rubinstein recalls. And that was EDucaTIon: BSEE 1978, M.Eng. 1979, share credit for the device’s success. all he told them until Jobs officially intro‑ Cornell University; MSCS 1985, Colorado duced the iPod. “I told them not to worry; State University he iPod project got under way it was for a hot new product,” he recalls. If faMIly: Married to Karen Richardson officially in March 2001, with at some point they figured it out on their coMpuTEr: Black MacBook Jobs demanding a product out for own, they never let on to Rubinstein. Christmas. That meant it would have Convincing people throughout the car: None; relies on public transportation t or rents a Zipcar to be in mass production by October— company to take a little time for this top‑ seven months away. So the tiny team secret skunk‑works effort wasn’t hard, MoST rEcEnT book rEaD: The Path Between the Seas: The Creation acted more like hunter‑gatherers than Rubinstein notes, even though most peo‑ of the Panama Canal 1870–1914 by David like farmers. They didn’t start from ple at the company weren’t aware that the McCullough scratch; they had to rely on existing proj‑ project existed. People were pulled over favorITE rESTauranTS: Masa’s, ects within the company, adapting them to iPod development as needed; “the hard Aqua, and Yank Sing, all in San Francisco to their goals. Apple’s display group part was focusing them back onto their lEISurE acTIvITIES: Distance helped them choose screen technologies normal jobs,” he says. running, biking, scuba diving, skiing and build the display drivers and related Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley econ‑ components. The power supply group omy was slipping into free fall as the took the specs from the iPod team and dot‑com boom went bust. Apple stock fell process still being worked out, the 9/11 ter‑ designed the “wall wart,” Rubinstein from $55 a share in mid‑2000 to around rorist attacks rocked the world. The ensu‑ says, as well as the power‑management $12 a share in mid‑2001. “We just kept our ing security measures trapped some of the circuitry that would go inside the device. heads down,” Rubinstein recalls. “We key engineers on the project in China and And the mass storage team worked closely were busy. We thought when the economy left others stuck in the United States try‑ with Toshiba to finish the tiny hard drive, turned around we’d be well positioned.” ing to get overseas to the factories. which had simply been a prototype when Then, just as iPod production began in Nevertheless, by October, just as Jobs Rubinstein saw it. They debugged the China, with kinks in the manufacturing had decreed, iPods Continued on page 54

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www.spectRum.ieee.oRg SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 53 e08_ieee_178x121_ess_USA.indd 1 09.06.2008 15:05:36 Uhr Continued from page 53 were rolling off assembly lines. They worked well, except for one nasty bug. At roughly 10 hours of use, “battery life was good,” Rubinstein says, “but a bug made it look like batteries were going bad.” A software update a few months Visit our website for thousands of standard products later fixed the problem. From the moment he’d seen the www.picoelectronics.com 1.8‑inch disk drive, Rubinstein hadn’t TRANSFORMERS & had much doubt that the eventual Miniaturized INDUCTORS product would be a runaway hit. But From 1/4" X 1/4" • Surface Mount even he was unprepared for the vis‑ Plug-in • Toriodal • Insulated Leads ceral reaction it provoked—even in himself. “We all wanted one,” he says, SURFACE Plug-in Mount “and that’s usually key. And everyone who used one loved it.”

kay, you may know some of DC-DC CONVERTERS Low Profile that history. But what you prob‑ Surface Mount • PC Board Mount Single and Dual Output • Up to 10,000V Std. ably don’t know is that during the precise period the iPod design saga SURFACE Plug-in o Mount was playing out, a whole other drama was overpriced. “I told everyone, ‘Look at unfolding in Rubinstein’s personal life. Just what some people will pay for a pair of before the discussions about doing a lit‑ Nikes.’ ” It’s an interesting comparison, tle music player began in September 2000, in view of the fact that he himself looks Rubinstein met Karen Richardson, then for discounts on last year’s sneakers. DC-DC CONVERTERS High Power CEO of E.piphany, a company launched by Sales were solid but not spectacular. Regulated, Up to 400 Watts Up to 100 volts Standard Rubinstein’s close friend Steve Blank. As it turned out, the obstacle wasn’t price INdustrial Military Blank knew what Rubinstein was but PC compatibility. In intense debates looking for in a woman—“smart, tough, within the company, Rubinstein sup‑ and pretty,” he says, “maybe in that ported opening up the iPod to Microsoft order,” and Richardson had it. Blank Windows. He based his argument on his was also pretty sure that Rubinstein was experience with the AirPort Express DC-DC CONVERTERS High Voltage right for Richardson. People had been wireless base station, which actually did Up to 10,000 VCD Output Up to 300 Watts trying to introduce the two for years, but support PCs but lacked a PC setup assis‑ NEW Dual Outputs New Regulated Output busy schedules got in the way. “It was tant and a dedicated marketing channel. like the Keystone Cops,” Blank recalls. As a result, AirPort didn’t do nearly as “My wife and I kept having these big well as it could have, had the company events. We’d invite them both. First gone after the PC market. But the inter‑ one made it, the other didn’t. Then the nal thinking was that the purpose of other made it, and the first one didn’t.” AirPort products was to sell more Macs. AC-DC POWER SUPPLIERS Finally, Blank got them both to his “We didn’t understand that it would be a Linear • Switches • Open Frame house for a small dinner party. Within multibillion‑dollar business, so we basi‑ Low Profile • Up to 200 Watts 30 days they were an item. cally handed the business to Linksys.” So, in the midst of shepherding the Rubinstein didn’t want Apple to iPod and running the rest of Apple’s repeat that mistake with the iPod. It mechanical engineering, chip design, didn’t. Within six years of its introduc‑ industrial design, and several other tion, Apple sold 100 million iPods. By POWER FACTOR departments, Rubinstein was also help‑ comparison, DVDs sold 44 million units CORRECTED MODULES ing to plan a wedding for 13 October 2001— in the same initial time span. Universal Input • 47-440 hz 10 days before the planned iPod launch, Even as he took the helm of the newly to 1000 Watts • 99 Power Factor postponed a bit so that Rubinstein could created iPod division, Rubinstein began get away for a one‑week honeymoon to talking to Jobs about making a graceful local beach retreats Big Sur and Stinson exit from Apple. He gave Jobs 18 months’ Beach. Rubinstein had to interrupt his notice—time enough to bring out the honeymoon only once to go to the office next generation of iPods, the Video iPod Call toll free to recut the audio track for the video to and the Nano—and even get the iPhone 800-431-1064 be shown at the launch. team assembled and some of the core for PICO Catalog The reaction at the introduction was technologies in place. Fax 914-738-8225 mixed. People thought the new device The conventional wisdom on was cool, Rubinstein says, but at $399, Rubinstein’s departure was that he’d had PICO Electronics,Inc. 143 Sparks Ave, Pelham, NY 10803-1837 www.spectRum.ieee.oRg E-Mail: [email protected]

CYAN prints as Pantone 3268C ipad: Jon Rubinstein supervised the construction of his mexican retreat, a 1500‑square‑meter villa in a coastal community. he approached the house’s construction as though he were putting together a big ipod, finding the best components and making them work together. photo: miguel garcia

Rubinstein left Apple in the spring of 2006 a rich man; the profit from the stock options he exercised in 2004 alone was $26.3 million. He would never have to work again. But he knew he would.

e went to Mexico. Some years before, he had bought land in a coastal community on the Pacific. h He planned to build a 1500‑square‑ meter house on the property from a design by the Mexican architect López Baz y Calleja. Rubinstein decided to supervise the construction, which had a bitter falling‑out with the notoriously that I deserved an award for that. We did already begun. mercurial Jobs. Not so, Rubinstein says. “I some really great products together.” “Supervise” quickly came to mean just wanted to take a break,” he explains. Jobs, says Rubinstein, drove him to “minutely engineer,” especially for the “There was nothing negative about it. We do things he wouldn’t have done on his house’s extensive and state‑of‑the‑art tech‑ announced [the resignation] to Wall Street own. “And I added the discipline and nical subsystems. He designed the home’s six months before I left. I was not leaving execution that it takes to continue get‑ computer networks, of course, along with because I was mad. I was just tired. I had ting products out the door,” he says. its electrical system and backup sys‑ worked with Steve for 16 years. He said “We did well together.” tems that would Continued on page 56

the essence of electronics

components.systems.automotive.embedded.wireless.micronano-systems.

get the whole picture electronica: the world’s leading trade fair for electronic components, systems and applications. The latest electronica 2008 topics, trends and technologies, experts and decision-makers, the complete range of industry know-how components | systems | applications and the place to ﬁ nd everything that moves markets now and in the future. www.electronica.de 23rd world’s leading trade fair Be sure to visit the concurrent trade fair www.hybridica.de New Munich Trade Fair Centre German American Chamber of Commerce, Inc., Tel. (212) 974 1880, [email protected] November 11–14, 2008 www.spectRum.ieee.oRg SEptEmbEr 2008 • iEEE SpEctrum • NA 55 e08_ieee_178x121_ess_USA.indd 2 09.06.2008 15:05:36 Uhr Continued from page 55 Anderson and Roger McNamee, compensate for Mexico’s along with Palm CEO Ed frequent outages. He designed Colligan. Elevation was con‑ a water system that stores sidering buying a 25 percent drinking water from the stake in Palm and taking on city’s irregular supply and the challenge of transforming filters it, along with a sepa‑ the company. They wanted to rate system that collects and know if Rubinstein would be stores rainwater for irriga‑ willing to come on board if the tion. He even helped design purchase went through. a compact waste‑treatment Rubinstein had been plant for the house. a friend of Anderson and He approached the house McNamee for years but had as though it were a big iPod. never met Colligan. So a few He looked around, found the days later Colligan flew down ready.set. best components, and then to Mexico so the two could designed custom systems to spend a few days getting to make them work together. know each other. The fact that accelerate! For example, here was one the struggling Palm, a once‑ problem: the heat pump that innovative leader, was in a warmed the Jacuzzi was slow. position similar to Apple’s Solution: integrate that sys‑ at the time Rubinstein joined tem with the house’s robust appealed to him. And he saw hot‑water system, using heat a lot of potential in mobile accelerate! exchangers and various con‑ devices; there would be multi‑ CAREERACCELERATORFORUM trollers and timers to allow the ple winners, and Palm could recirculating water to pick up easily be one of them. “I liked Autumn Online heat from the house system. the idea of another recovery Conference & Exhibition His pal Blank had just project,” he says. “I also love finished building a big doing products and being in October 16, 2008 house when construction on a space where the trend is Rubinstein’s began. Blank your friend.” recalls giving Rubinstein a They weren’t asking him to In-Demand tour that included his pool take on the full‑time respon‑ Engineering Skills for the Next house, a Rube Goldberg sibility of running the com‑ nightmare of crisscrossing pany—Colligan would do that. 5 Years...Are You Qualified? pipes and labyrinthine con‑ Instead, Rubinstein would nections—typical, he says, oversee major decisions and Session 1: Are You Management Material? for pool plumbing. “I think he get involved in the nitty‑gritty Who Will Fill the Management Slots was rolling his eyes,” Blank details as much or as little as in the Future? says, chuckling. He recently he felt he should. He would set Industry companies need executives who can saw Rubinstein’s pool water Palm’s course. But he’d also integrate technological innovations into their system and was stunned. have a little time for a per‑ firm’s strategy, can justify and secure funding for “The plumbing looks like a sonal life—in theory, anyway. technology initiatives, and who can lead combined circuit board layout,” he mar‑ Rubinstein took only a day or technical/line management teams that deliver vels. “I don’t know how he did two to decide to go for it. results quickly and on budget. it. There’s not a single pipe So now he’s executive chair‑ that crosses another.” man of Palm, where he runs Session 2: Career Opportunities in Rubinstein spent a year and product development. He spent Consumer Electronics – What Technical a half working on the house, his first few months tweaking Skills Are Most in Demand Today? running, biking, kayaking, the company’s product plans. The spectacular growth of the consumer electronic scuba diving, and just hang‑ Now he’s pushing those plans products sector and the need for shorter developing around with his wife. He forward, sometimes from his ment cycles are requiring semiconductor suppliers got regular calls inviting him management seat, sometimes to work more closely with CE producers to improve to serve on corporate boards getting into the design work design processes and help bring CE products but turned every single one of itself. And he spends a fair to market faster. them down. After the insanity amount of time working his at Apple, it was just too much industry contacts to recruit Sign up today! fun doing nothing. engineers, software writers, www.spectrum.ieee.org/caf Then, in May of last year, and other tech specialists. he got a call from Elevation On a typical day, Rubinstein Partners principals Fred catches Continued on page 58

www.spectRum.ieee.oRg Palm’s Pilot Continued from page 56

up on e‑mail and phone calls on an 8:00 a.m. train from San Francisco. At the Mountain View station he hops on a Caltrain shut‑ tle, just another middle‑aged engineer in a cotton shirt and jeans, which takes him to Palm’s Sunnyvale offices; he arrives around 9. He’ll leave Palm between 6:30 and 7 p.m., earlier if he has scheduled meetings in San Francisco. Then he’ll have dinner with his wife. And so far, at least, it looks like that idea of having a personal life wasn’t a pipe dream. On Fridays he works from home. He’ll spend time in his home office on weekends, but he takes off for long runs and bike rides through San Francisco or Marin County. He spends a few weeks a year at his Mexico digs; Celebrating the Vitality of Technology they’re fully wired, and the IP phone he uses for his main contact number can ring him just about anywhere. Palm hasn’t yet announced any of the products that originated under Rubinstein, although he has tweaked some recently released products and says that quality and reliability are improving. He helped cancel several Today’s technologies are changing at projects, including an ultrathin laptop a pace faster than ever. Every issue of just before it was scheduled to ship. He the Proceedings of the IEEE examines expects the first products completely new ideas and innovative technologies designed under his watch to begin hit‑ to keep you up to date with develop- ting the market in 2009. ments within your field and beyond. Our These days, Blank says, Rubinstein unique multidisciplinary approach puts is “a product development machine. today’s technolo- Steve [Jobs] beat him into becoming No other publication gies in context, keeps you in touch this machine, but he doesn’t need to be and our guest with the evolving world beaten any more; maybe that’s why he editors bring of technology better left. He understands every part of prod‑ you the expert than the Proceedings uct design, from idea through manufac‑ of the IEEE. perspective you turing. Everything.” What Rubinstein still has to prove is need to understand the impact of new whether he’s a creative genius as well as discoveries on your world and your work. a brilliant implementer. “The jury is out on that,” Blank says. But he adds that he Enrich your career and broaden your personally has made a big investment in horizons. Subscribe today and find Palm stock. out why the Proceedings of the IEEE Everywhere in the world Rubinstein is consistently the most highly cited goes, he sees people with iPods. None general-interest journal in electrical and of them know that this lanky American computer engineering in the world!* made the iPod happen. He doesn’t have *Source: ISI Journal Citation Report (2004) Jobs’s instant recognizability, and that’s just fine with him. “As an engineer,” he says, “you Call: +1 800 678 4333 couldn’t ask for any more than what or +1 732 981 0060 I’m doing. I helped turn Apple around; Fax: +1 732 981 9667 I helped create the iPod. My role is to Email: [email protected] make people happy with great products. www.ieee.org/proceedings I’m just a product guy.” o

www.spectRum.ieee.oRg

6/26/06 10:48:25 AM the data By Prachi Patel-Predd

Data Breaches

illie sutton famously breaches, while 20 percent are in IndustrIes represented said that he robbed the food and beverage industry. Education 3% Other 3% wbanks because that’s that’s just one surprising where the money was. You might statistic in a new global study Entertainment 3% think that today’s thieves would of some 500 security breaches do the same, possibly by hacking handled by Verizon Business’s risK into atm machines. Yet it turns team between 2004 and 2007, out that financial services account involving more than 230 million Financial for only 14 percent of data data records. Verizon’s report sorts services Retail 14% attacks into seven categories. 35% hacking is, unsurprisingly, a cyber- tHreat categorIes criminal’s favorite weapon. errors, such as incorrect network settings, Food & 60 directly led to just 3 percent of the beverage and 20% breaches, but by giving bad guys a Technology 59%

(3%) leg up they ended up contributing services

to breaches to many more. 13% 50 in a disturbing trend, in the Government 2% Hacking study’s first year only 8 percent (62%) of all attacks involved partner Hospitality 2% Manufacturing 5% organizations, such as vendors

40 31% and customers, but by 2007 fully 44 percent did. twenty-four Breakdown of HackIng Errors directly leading contributing percent of all attacks originating

Malcode outside an organization came from iP addresses in eastern europe.

22% Unknown 30 such addresses can’t always lead vulnerability Back door Percent 5% to a particular attacker’s exact 15% Misuse 15% location, but some clear patterns emerge. For example, attacks Application and 20 on point-of-sale systems were service layer 10% Physical frequently traced back to eastern Known 39%

0.4% europe and russia, while web vulnerability

Deceit graffiti and other defacements 18% 10 often originated in the middle east. Operating the full report is available at systems/ http://www.verizonbusiness.com/ platform layer

Environmental resources/security/databreach 23% 0 report.pdf. o

Percentage of attacks from outside an organization ...... 73 LocatIon of attackIng Ips Middle East 5% Africa 1% Percentage of attacks implicating business partners ...... 39 Western & Southern Europe 9% Percentage of attacks from internal sources ...... 18 North median number of records compromised America 23% South from external attacks ...... 30 000 America Eastern 3% Europe median number of records 24% compromised from partner attacks ...... 187 500 For more East Asia on insider 12% cyberattacks, South & median number of records see “When Friend Southeast Asia Is Foe” at http:// compromised from internal threats ...... 375 000 14% spectrum.ieee. org/sep08/ Northern & Central Asia 9% Percentage of internal attacks by it admin...... 50 moredatainfo.

Source: “2008 Data breach investigations report.” Verizon business riSK team

72 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • SEptEmbEr 2008 www.sPectrum.ieee.org