New video reveals a well-equipped, modern Foxconn factory

Ever wanted to be one of the lucky ones to visit Foxconn and see how Apple products are made? Well, you’ve just got lucky! Marketplace have released a video on how the iPad 2 is made at Foxconn’s Longhua facility in the city of Shenzhen. The belief among those people who have not seen the facility, but have been hearing a lot about the factories is that it is a stereotypical factory or a Chinese sweatshop. The Foxconn facility in Shenzhen, on the contrary, is a huge facility with dorms for their 50,000 stronghold. The facility has many fast food restaurants, banks, cafes, grocery stores, a wedding photo shop, and an automated library. In addition to that, there are basketball and tennis courts, a gym, swimming pools and a football stadium. The conditions out there don’t seem to be as severe as what has been reported in the past, which includes workers committing suicide or they not being paid enough amount of money as a part of their salary. There are also safety nets placed 20 feet above the ground as a precautionary measure, considering that in the past, several workers jumped to their death. 

It is not just the workers at the Foxconn unit, who do the work of assembling the iPad 2; machines, in fact do most of the heavy tasks that involve pushing the battery into the housing or testing the different parts and sensors of products, such as the Gyroscope that help you play games that require you to  tilt the device. Workers, on the other hand are given tasks, like installing the motherboard and the LED touchscreen display. Interestingly, to ward off boredom arising out of monotony, the jobs assigned to the workers are rotated every couple of days.  

Workers at the factories, are typically here to send the money they earn to their families back home. The conditions in which these workers live in the factory's dorms are seemingly much better, than that back home. Workers also feel that Foxconn is one of the best places to work at, as compared to the other Chinese factories, since they (Foxconn) invest millions into providing the workers with amenities that are scarce near their homes. 

SC court orders telcos to shut operations by June 2

The Surpreme Court may have to suspend operations of telecom companies, who's licences have been cancelled. A report by The Economic Times reveals that the 2G operations of these telcos will be suspended from June 2 and the government wouldn’t go ahead and seek an extension to a four month deadline. In the order passed on February 2, the court had cancelled 122 mobile permits, which were allotted in 2008. It had asked the government to issue new licenses via auctions within four months. The government has clarified that it would need at least 400 days to proceed with the auctions and the process wouldn’t complete before March next year. R Chandrashekar, telecom secretary has said that the operations of quashed licenses will have to stop on June 2, unless the court wants to give an extension.

Shut operations....no extension..

In all, seven companies had filed for review of petitions before the court. However, the Supreme court will not reconsider the cancelling of 122 telecom permits that were issued by former telecom minister, A Raja. Although the apex court will hold hearings on the review plea filed by the Centre, it will not consider extension petition of four-month deadline. Reportedly, an extension of the four-month deadline is also not part of the Presidential Reference that the Centre will make to the apex court.

"The telecom department's (DoT) review petition largely seeks that portions of the SC ruling which appear to foray into the domain of the executive be set aside. In the clarification petition, we have pointed out there is a gap between the four-month deadline set by the SC and the 400 days we require for carrying out the auctions. Unless the apex court responds to this, or accepts curative petition of companies, operations will have to stop on June 2. The DoT is not seeking an extension," revealed a DoT official as per the report.

The absence of any court directives, operators would have to suspend services till the new permits and airwaves are bagged in the upcoming auctions, he said further. This will affect millions of customers of Uninor, Sistema, Idea and Videocon. TRAI has also directed phone companies S Tel and Etisalat to continue operations until the licence validity expires

Mini Internet chips increase computational speed, say MIT researchers

For faster computational chips, manufacturers have been increasing the chips’ computational power by giving them additional cores. For instance – a typical chip may feature six or eight cores, but only one pair of core can work at a time, this means there is a limitation to chips, even if a chip has 100 to 1000 cores. An associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, Li-Shiuan Peh has been looking forward at the cores to communicate in a similar way that a computer with Internet does. The research team has been working on techniques to increase computational speed with low power consumption. By transmitting information into ‘packets’  and each core would have its own router, enabling sending packet down any of several paths, depending on the condition of the network as a whole. Peh and the colleagues will be showcasing this paper called ‘summarizing 10 years of research’ on such ‘networks on chip.’  

Chips as Internet (Image Source)

“Buses have hit a limit,” Peh says. “They typically scale to about eight cores.” The 10-core chips found in high-end servers frequently add a second bus, but that approach won’t work for chips with hundreds of cores. She further explains, “buses take up a lot of power, because they are trying to drive long wires to eight or 10 cores at the same time.” In the type of network Peh is proposing, on the other hand, each core communicates only with the four cores nearest it. “Here, you’re driving short segments of wires, so that allows you to go lower in voltage.” 

A packet of data traveling from one core to another has to stop at every router in between, one of them is stored in memory while the other is handled by router. Apparently, engineers worry that these added requirements will introduce enough delays and computational complexity to offset the advantages of packet switching. “The biggest problem, I think, is that in industry right now, people don’t know how to build these networks, because it has been buses for decades,” Peh says.

These researchers have developed two techniques to address these problems – virtual bypassing and low-signal signaling. In the first technique, a packet arrives at a router and the router looks into the addressing information before deciding the path and sending it. Each router sends an advance signal to the next, it presets the switch and speeds the packet with no additional computation. In the low-swing signaling technique, digital data consists of ones and zeroes, which are transmitted over communications channels as high and low voltages. A PhD student has developed a circuit that reduces the swing between the high and low voltages from one volt to 300 millivolts. The combination of virtual bypassing and low-swing signaling, resulted into the chip consuming 38 percent less energy than previous packet-switched test chips. Although there is more work on it, Peh said, “if we compare it against a bus, we get orders-of-magnitude savings.”

Luca Carloni, an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University who also researches networks on chip, says “the jury is always still out” on the future of chip design, but that “the advantages of packet-switched networks on chip seem compelling.”