- The Statue of Lenin is a 16 ft (5 m) bronze statue of Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. It was created by Bulgarian-born Slovak sculptor Emil Venkov and initially put on display in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1988, the year before the Velvet Revolution. After the revolutions of 1989 and dissolution of the Soviet Union, a wave of de-Leninization in Eastern Europe brought about the fall of many monuments in the former Soviet sphere. In 1993, the statue was bought by an American who had found it lying in a scrapyard. He brought it home with him to Washington State but died before he could carry out his plans to formally display it.
- Die shrink: How Intel scaled down the 8086 processor (righto.com)
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I’ve been studying its die.1 I came across two 8086 dies with different sizes, which reveal details of how a die shrink works. The concept of a die shrink is that as technology improved, a manufacturer could shrink the silicon die, reducing costs and improving performance. But there’s more to it than simply scaling down the whole die. Although the internal circuitry can be directly scaled down,2 external-facing features can’t shrink as easily. For instance, the bonding pads need a minimum size so wires can be attached, and the power-distribution traces must be large enough for the current. The result is that Intel scaled the interior of the 8086 without change, but the circuitry and pads around the edge of the chip were redesigned.