Open Hardware Leftovers (Including Raspberry Pi 400 in Hospitals!)
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
The die photo above shows a closeup of a latch circuit, with the diagonal yellow stripe in the middle. For this photo, I removed the chip's metal layer so you can see the underlying circuitry. The bottom layer, silicon, appears gray-purple under the microscope, with the active silicon regions slightly darker and bordered in black. On top of the silicon, the pink regions are polysilicon, a special type of silicon. Polysilicon has a critical role in the chip: when it crosses active silicon, polysilicon forms the gate of a transistor. The circles are contacts between the metal layer and the underlying silicon or polysilicon. So far, the components of the chip match most NMOS chips of that time. But what about the bright yellow line crossing the circuit diagonally? That was new to me. This second layer of polysilicon provides resistance. It crosses over the other layers, connected to the silicon at the ends with a complex ring structure.
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Zach Flower ☛ AlphaSmart 3000
A few years back, I picked up an AlphaSmart 3000 to try and do some writing without the distraction of an entire computer.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Togo hospital employs Raspberry Pi 400 as a thin client
A small Ubuntu server has been in place at Bethesda Hospital since March, speeding up the essential record-keeping previously done by much slower and less secure means. Patient demographic data, medical procedure records, pharmacy sales, and other essential information are securely stored on the system and accessed around the hospital on Raspberry Pi desktop units. Another module is currently in development to record more sensitive medical data, such as logging symptoms, treatment plans, lab reports and official diagnoses. A third module is also being considered so that all pharmacy purchases no longer need to be processed by the ageing inventory software currently in use. A replacement fleet of Raspberry Pi 400 units has been trickling through the hospital for several months now, churning through the work done by much older, bulkier hardware. The Raspberry Pis are working alongside some remaining older laptops and PC towers, but the Ubuntu server has updated and streamlined everything across the hospital.