| The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete (Enterprise)by George Gilder  (3 customer reviews)Hardcover: Monday, April 25, 2005 (W. W. Norton & Company)
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Editorial ReviewsBook Description A best-selling author goes behind the scenes at a cutting-edge technology company poised to change the way computers see. Thanks to the digital technology revolution, cameras are everywhere—PDAs, phones, anywhere you can put an imaging chip and a lens. Battling to usurp this two-billion-dollar market is a Silicon Valley company, Foveon, whose technology not only produces a superior image but also may become the eye in artificially intelligent machines. Behind Foveon are two legendary figures who made the personal computer possible: Carver Mead of Caltech, one of the founding fathers of information technology, and Federico Faggin, inventor of the CPU—the chip that runs every computer. George Gilder has covered the wizards of high tech for twenty-five years and has an insider's knowledge of Silicon Valley and the unpredictable mix of genius, drive, and luck that can turn a startup into a Fortune 500 company. The Silicon Eye is a rollicking narrative of some of the smartest—and most colorful—people on earth and their race to transform an entire industry. 12 illustrations. |
Reader Reviews |
 The Digital Camera is creating a breakthrough digital revolution, Tuesday, October 11, 2005The Digital Camera is creating a digital revolution. Craver Mead is leading the digital revolution. The Japanese pushed CCD technology creating a $20 billion industry for digital cameras and cam recorders. CCD dicards 2/3 of its light values and uses forward propagating Neutral Networks of surrounding pixels to calculate pixel color. The Foveon chip can collect 100% of the color information per pixel using a single-chip solution and the impact will be smaller imaging, cheaper cost, higher quality, and less power power consumption. As computer computation levels increase, it seems very probable that the Foveon chip will be capable of transferring electrical signals with high connectivity and integrated connectors directly into the retina for transmission to the brain, a computer chip capable of restoring sight. Mead discovered that retina power voltage did not increase but that connectivity increased. Misha brought to light the biological mechanics of how the retina worked. Mead used Misha's work to build a silicon prototype of the retina. The threshold value is 120 million silicon rods matching the biological equivalent in the retina. In the future, the Fovean chip processor will follow in the success path of the digital signal processing hearing device. Hopfield network. Misha research helped explain how the retina process images and color by measuring delta changes caused from movement. Feedback was critical and the Hopfield network provided the answers Misha need to explain image processing. Misha help bridge the chasm between the biology of the eye and the electrical engineer skill that Mead could provide. Eventually, Mead, Feinstein, and Misha created a digital camera based on retina modeling. The Hopfield network seemed to adequately explain how the brain intreprets visual input by measuring delta changes through feedback loops. Federico Fagin brought the right products, too market, at the right time. Fagin built the first microprocessor,the Intel 4004 microprocessor, it contained 2300 transistors on a 7 mm by 7 mm silicon chip and can process 4 bits at a cycle rate of 60,000 per second. The silicon solution removed the need for metal connectors and introduced lithographic technics for etching transistors on silicon wafers. Fagin understanding of silicon fabrication and his innovations became critical for Mead. Transister. Variable length transistors simulated weighting of the Nodes on the Neural Network. The Neural networks and silicon transisters helped the Synaptics team build a MICR recognition system. The team used EEPROM, programable weights, and two chip character recognition system. The machine could see and recognize between than the robotic vision systems doing input and output comparisons. Meads team opened the potential for machines to interpret input information, at a new level of sophistication. Touch pad. The Synaptics team also went on to build a touch pad system for laptop computers taking 100% of the business away from Logitech. Patents. Lyods story of his four camera demonstrated innovative thought and intellectual protection tactics. |
 Gilder successfully chronicles an important technology advance, Monday, August 01, 2005In "The Silicon Eye" George Gilder relates another colorful story of a significant technology breakthrough, namely, a camera imaging chip that is greatly superior to everything else out there. Standard imagers work by separating the three primary colors, throwing away 2/3 of the color information at each point in the visual field, and must use software processing to interpolate the missing data. The Foveon chip is a major advancement because it can collect 100% of the color information at each point using a single-chip solution that will provide smaller and cheaper imaging that is of both higher quality and lower power consumption. The photo samples on Foveon's web site are truly astounding. But Gilder's book over-hypes the significance of the technology. It will not "Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete." Cameras, yes. And cell phones and computers will benefit greatly from the smaller, lighter, cheaper, lower power consumption, and higher image quality aspects of the Foveon chip. But the Foveon chip is not a "Silicon Eye" as Gilder suggests. The chip does not "see" the way a biological eye does - it merely records images as all cameras do. The story of Foveon's initial forays into AI and producing silicon chips that mimic brain functions is fascinating, but as Gilder describes, Foveon finally had to abandon such speculative research in favor of a viable commercial product. |
| An Entrepreneurial Empire, Sunday, May 22, 2005 Although I've been at George's side for much of the Synaptics/Foveon saga, when I recently read his latest book, The Silicon Eye, I found that I really didn't know the story. Fast paced and full of both personality and technology, George maps the fascinating and diverse paths of people and ideas that over a period of 40 years converge to yield a breakthrough invention. The teen-age camera buff from El Paso; the experimental carpenter from Vermont; the tragically brilliant female artist from Minnesota; and the two silicon seers who, as much as any two people, laid the foundations of today's global semiconductor industry. But for all their power and influence, they prefer to remain on the rocky road of the entrepreneur, refusing to enjoy the comfort they have earned but instead taking on one of the most established and insular industries in the world. Though the fate of Foveon is still uncertain, George shows that Carver Mead and Federico Faggin have embarked on a promising path of disruption, where the camera breaks apart and Foveon pixels diffuse throughout the world. Stretching now from imagers to speech recognition, from hearing aides to RFID, from iPod haptics to next-gen floating gates, The Silicon Eye tells the story of just one of the many companies that comprise Carver Mead's quietly growing empire of entrepreneurship. Anyone interested in business, technology, cameras -- or that small number of people who just like a good story -- will love this book. Bret Swanson |