Recommend a hex calculator?

Ok, I realize this is not what you are asking for, but whenever I need a programmer's calculator I'm usually sitting infront of a PC (Windoze based) and the built-in calculator uses F5 F6 and F8 to switch between hex, decimal, and binary. It also has a larger display than most physical calculators (2^64-1 in binary is no problem). Entering hex digits with one keystroke is no problem either :) Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of M$ products but I find that I use CALC and NOTEPAD very frequently during the course of my day. This could be because I don't actually have a calculator or a notebook on my desk. Come to think of it, even my oscilloscope and logic analyzer are PC-based.

I still haven't found a PC-based soldering iron though :(

--Tom.

When I am in front of a computer and keyboard I just use a Python interpreter session. There are also plenty of good programmer's calculator programs that run on Linux/X11 (which is what I would be in front of). But, there are still regular occasions when I want to use a regular calculator. In any case, I'm mostly satisfied with my 15 year old TI-34. I just need to find something similar for somebody else who wants one.

Some of Intel's original 65nm processors would probably melt solder if you ran them without heatsinks. The new 45nm ones with the new secret-formula gate insulation and metal gates are supposed to be a lot better. It's interesting that the M in "NMOS", "PMOS" and "CMOS" stood for "metal" as the gate material, when the gates haven't been metal for decades.

But now they're switching back to metal again.

Reference? The O is Oxide - Metal Oxide... as an insulator. I don't think that has anything to do with what the gate material is.

Not so on the HP48s. The base is selected from the LCD with menu bar buttons immediately below.

I love my HP48 as a calculator, but admit that base mode is a bit cumbersome. You need to enter a '#' prefix on each entry to use base mode, which gets annoying. Also using the 'alpha' key for A-F is a PITA.

I should add that I use the PC HP48 emulator more than my real 48...

I recall one of my old casio scientific solar-powered calculators had the most efficient base mode of any calculator I've used. Alas it died of over-use when a few of the keys stopped working... and I've yet to find a replacement.

Regards,

I'm still using my 20-odd year old Casio fx451M, even though the plastic is gradually shredding. Base conversions are exactly how a calculator should work. The only thing I'd quibble about is that display is too short, so you can only get 11 bit binary. Oh, and the volume conversions give American gallons to litres, but not Imperial.

An article a month or two in IEEE Spectrum written by some R&D guy from Intel.

The insulator used to Si02 didn't it? I've never heard anybody in the semicon industry refer to Si02 as "metal oxide".

According to the article in IEEE Spectrum, that's what it meant. I wasn't there when the term was invented, so I can't vouch for it.

Not according to Wikipedia's entry on "CMOS":

The phrase "metal oxide semiconductor" is a reference to the physical structure of certain field-effect transistors, having a metal gate electrode placed on top of an oxide insulator, which in turn is on top of a semiconductor material. Instead of metal, current gate electrodes (including those up to the 65 nanometer technology node) are almost always made from a different material, polysilicon, but the terms MOS and CMOS nevertheless continue to be used for the modern descendants of the original process. Metal gates have made a comeback with the advent of high-k dielectric materials in the CMOS process, as announced by IBM and Intel for the 45 nanometer node and beyond.

The way to make your own calculator would be to start with an existing hardware platform. To me that means using a PDA and writing software for it. Many have done that and there are any number of programs out there... a lot of them free or open source.

I did! Well, technically not a PC, but a unit we were working on containing many DSP and FPGA chips had a fan failure. Before anyone noticed it, some of the higher power density chips unsoldered themselves and fell off the board! We didn't try to put them back on...

And yet it is, of course. Like most metal oxides, it's non- conductive because the oxygen bonds the valence electrons.

Interesting. I always assumed that "metal oxide" was referring to the dielectric material being a metal oxide, not to the gate/dielectric layers being metal and oxide respectively.

Makes me wonder if the wikipedia author and the guy from Intel had the exact reverse blind spot, reading MOS as Metal/Oxide Semiconductor. :-)

Clifford Heath.

Yes, technically Silicon is a metalloid or semi-metal" it's on the border between metals and none metals. But, I've never heard anybody in the semicon industry ever refer to silicon as a metal or to Si02 as a "metal oxide".

Except nobody in the industry ever refers to Si02 as a "metal oxide".

I suppose it's possible that Wikipedia, the guys from Intel, and the editors at IEEE Spectrum are wrong and you're right.

:-) I wasn't claiming to be right, just to have experienced one of those moments like when you see one of those "reversible" images flip... a strange feeling after 30+ years of seeing it the other way.

Silicon isn't a metal. It's a metalloid. There are indeed some MOSFETs with high-dielectric-constant gate insulation actually made from metal oxides, but that's another story.

It started as a layer description.

Via Google etc. you can see some confusion creeping in as some expand MOS as "Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor" (layer description) and others as "Metal-Oxide Semiconductor", and others avoid the problem by avoiding the hyphens entirely.

In patents, "Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor" (layer description) came first.

Patent number: 3352712 Filing date: Aug 28, 1964 Issue date: Nov 1967 Inventor: Murray A. Polinsky Assignee: Radio Corporation of America

The first patent with "Metal-Oxide Semiconductor" appeared in 1971

Patent number: 3726726 Filing date: Jan 4, 1971 Issue date: Apr 1973 Inventor: Yordan Dimitrov Kasabov Assignee: Tzentralen Institut za Element

"Among the three acronyms, IGFET is the most general, since it does not specify the material used for the gate or the insulator. This acronym, though, is not in wide use. Today, the most popular acronyms MOST and MOSFET have come to mean the same as IGFET and do not imply that metal and silicon dioxide are necesarily used for the gate and insulator."

You can find this at:

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

With me it always seems to be pronunciation of a word that I've seen in print for years but hever heard before and it turns out I've been pronouncing it incorrectly in my head.

Wow, I had completely forgotting "IGFET". I haven't heard/seen that in decades.