Re: Raspberry Pi goes to war

But, almost every patent is "obvious", after it's been issued.

Identifying the *need* is the biggest issue. Once you've gone and drawn attention to a perceived need, others will step in and come up with ways around your claims.

(Rotary) Tablet presses operate at rates that far exceed the technology's ability to "weigh" the individual tablets produced. Unlike *eggs*, which can have a nominal size, averaged out by the other ova in the container, tablets have to meet individual specifications to ensure the "actives" in EACH dose meet the criteria defined by the manufacturer and approved by the FDA (or equivalent organization).

You can't say, "Well, over the course of 10 days, the AVERAGE dose will be on target..."

The easiest way to "control"/monitor tablet weight is to monitor the forces exerted as the tablet is being formed, to a specific geometry -- if the forces increase, then there must be more material in the fixed-size cavity. Unlike weighing individual tablets at 200/second, it is relatively easy to monitor those forces at that rate and selectively "discard" any found to be outside the control limits for the process.

But, once you think about it, you could just as easily exert a constant FORCE and monitor the dimensions of the formed tablet -- a thicker tablet formed under a constant force obviously contains more material!

Which approach is better at ensuring accurate monitoring? Which is better at ensuring accurately produced tablets?

Both suffer from the realities of any physical process: if the cavity in which the tablet is formed deviates from other "identical" cavities (typically, you produce several dozen tablets "at the same time", each in a different cavity), then your basic assumption is off.

There are at least three STATIC mechanical tolerances in the fabrication of each "tabletting station", not to mention the instrumentation that is used to monitor production.

I.e., the "patentable idea" opens the door for myriad other claims that address the practical limitations of the "big idea".

The first ones that I bought were Cree SiC. It took 50 mA to make a decent amount of light.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I have a nice powerful blue laser :-)

From ebay, from China!

Your imagination isn't backed up by much real-world information. There seem to be quite a few free electron lasers around the world at the moment. So far they are just expensive research tools, so there aren't all that many.

Once somebody works out how to make one that is good enough to use as a light source for EUV lithography, people will copy it repeatedly.

Of course, there may be other ways of doing sub-micron lithography - I worked on a shaped beam electron beam microfabricator for a while, until the project got too expensive and got cancelled. Bell labs built such a machine and sold five of them to European Semiconductor Structures in Aix-en-Provence, but they only delivered 10% of the promised writing rate and ESS went bust. I only go to hear about that some 15 years later when I ran into the then director of ESS while my wife was being inducted a fellow of the UK royal society, and I got to gossip with him at the ceremony.

Ah, you're trying to shoot down F35s, aren't you?

;-)

Jeroen Belleman

I have talked to some of the people trying to do it. They envision their source feeding multiple fabs.

It might be a square mile of gear and cost $100B and make a LOT of EUV. It would make sense to have one and plop a bunch of fabs around it. Sell the EUV.

We did several subsystems for the Jlabs CEBAF accelerator. It's a big deal. Lots of liquid helium.

A tin droplet (we worked on that too) is an incoherent source that sprays EUV (and tin) in all directions.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Na, those fall out of the skies all by themselves or some agent will park next to their base and use drones, like Ukraine did in Russia.

Many years ago I sometimes went to that airbase and looked at things starting and landing always passed it on the way to Leeuwarden, Many people there with radios to hear the tower, take pictures (F16 back then), there were airshows too, and F16 crashes nearby! Just a few km from here.

You haven't got a clue how big it might have to be. It might equally fit on a tabletop.

Of course it does. It depends on getting one tin droplet very hot indeed

- much hotter than the surface of the sun - so that the thermal emission from that blob pf plasma includes a useful amount of EUV.

Electron beams and wigglers make a lot more sense, but they don't emit enough photons - or at least not so far.