- The Balmoral Reef Plate is a small tectonic plate (microplate) located in the south Pacific north of Fiji. Clockwise from the north, it borders the Pacific Plate, the Australian Plate, Conway Reef Plate, and the New Hebrides Plate. The northern and western borders are a divergent boundary while the rest of the borders are transform and convergent boundaries. The Balmoral Reef Plate’s ocean crust is less than 12 million years old and is spreading between the New Hebrides and Tonga subduction. The plate forms the west central part of the seafloor of the North Fiji Basin.
- Unusual circuits in the Intel 386’s standard cell logic (righto.com)
I’ve been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel’s most complex processor at the time, containing 285,000 transistors. Intel’s existing design techniques couldn’t handle this complexity and the chip began to fall behind schedule. To meet the schedule, the 386 team started using a technique called standard cell logic. Instead of laying out each transistor manually, the layout process was performed by a computer.