If you have ever filed a patent, you will know that after writing it up in your engineering notebook one of the next steps is to do some preliminary research on prior art. The problem is that searching for prior art is not exactly the easiest thing in the world. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provides a very up to date database of patents and disclosures but the search functionality and presentation is mediocre at best. Google has also ventured into the patent search field and scientific publications with Google Patent Search and Google Scholar. Both tools are pretty good, for example, Google Patent Search, unlike the USPTO, allows one to view all the related images without the need of a plugin. Additionally, the full patent document can be downloaded as a PDF for future reference. On the downside, on occasion I have found it to be a bit out of sync with the USPTO and also not listing all the related citations. Further, I would also be concerned about whether Google stores the search terms and if they might get published.

Google though, is not alone in the intellectual property search and exchange game. Today, SparkIP launched SparkIP.com, which is billed as an intellectual property exchange for the scientific community. Ed Trimble, the Chief Executive Officer of SparkIP, will be familiar to many since prior to SparkIP he was the CEO and founder of EzGov Inc., before it was acquired by ChoicePoint. In essence, SparkIP intends to bring universities, innovators, corporations, attorneys, and researchers together and make the research on emerging technologies as well as the brokerage of IP easier. For now, the SparkIP database contains over 3.5 million US patents, with plans to add patent applications and international patents in the upcoming weeks. They are also seeking to partner with universities and labs from around the world and make their technology listings available on the site.

What is unique to SparkIP, as opposed to the other sites mentioned before, is their concept of SparkCluster maps. Basically, any search on the site will return a list of SparkClusters, each of which is a map of contextually related items which are arranged in clusters. Each cluster is represented as a node which is connected to other related nodes via edges. The size of the nodes represents the number of items that are contained in that cluster. Clicking on a node brings up another screen that shows filtered items based on the query. One also receives additional options such as that ability to filter by assignee name and date range.  The visual presentation is very appealing and the navigation is quite intuitive, except for the required double-click in the SparkCluster view. On the other hand, either the database might still be incomplete or the search functionality might need some improvements, since queries for recent patents that yielded results on other sites yielded none here. Overall though I think that this clustered approach and visualization has great potential in terms of IP search, and the dreaded search for prior art might become a lot less time consuming soon.

Last month, Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at the university, titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Randy is a professor of computer science, and is the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), as well as the creator of the Alice educational program.  If you don’t know, the ETC is one of the premiere programs in the country that brings engineers and artists together and simply creates some amazing stuff – As a matter of fact the program has such a high reputation that companies have signed agreements that guarantee that they will hire students who have completed the program. On a sad note though, Randy is dying from pancreatic cancer, and this last lecture was his farewell advice on how to achieve your childhood dreams. This might not seem directly related to semiconductors and startups, but one should never forget that inspiration is one of the key factors that enables individuals to reach beyond what seems possible and come up with new ideas and approaches to difficult problems. Randy fills this lecture with priceless lessons learned and so much inspiration that regardless whether you work for a large corporation or a small startup you are bound to find some useful advice in his words. Some of my favorite quotes include: experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted; enabling the dreams of others is more rewarding than enabling your own; brick walls are there for a reason: they let people prove that they want something bad enough. So fix yourself a cup of coffee, for the lecture is about an hour and a half long, sit back and absorb all the great lessons that Randy has to offer in the video below.

There are many companies working on replacement technologies for current memories. From T-RAM Semiconductor’s Thin-Capacitivel-Coupled-Thyristor (TCCT) technology, to Innovative Silicon’s Z-RAM, and Freescale’s Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). So far these companies have delivered a lot of papers and presentations, patent filings, a few licensing agreements, and even several consumer samples. But can these technologies really replace DRAM, Flash, and SRAM? The other day designnews.com, posted a short article titled: MRAM Shows Potential to Move Beyond Flash, SRAM. The article is mostly a summary of the advantages that MRAM offers over DRAM and Flash, including MRAM’s ability to retain data even when completely turned off and its superior write performance and endurance when compared to Flash. Freescale has a very nice technical brochure that explains the MRAM technology in detail, in case you need some bedtime reading. Currently, Freescale offers three different MRAM parts all of which run at 3.3V. Personally, I think that MRAM technology has real potential to take off once Freescale figures out how to lower the voltage and embed some of the MRAM technology into its SOC products. For example, a last level cache could benefit from this technology since shutting it off to conserve power would no longer require for all the data to be evicted from the cache first to not compromise the integrity of the system. Whether or not MRAM will be utilized this way will depend on the read and write speeds of MRAM as compared to SRAM at these lower voltages, as well as on area demands and noise tolerance. Nevertheless, it is nice to see that in the near future circuit designers might have a larger choice of technologies from which they will be able to choose when designing memories.