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Recommendation for R&D Wannabe Engineering Students
From the February issue of the IEEE Spectrum (a little bit late, I was just reading the article yesterday).
Where the Jobs Are
To bring you this year’s analysis of who’s hiring and who’s firing in the technology industry, IEEE Spectrum teamed up with The New York Times to survey 752 IEEE members about the past, present, and future technological trends they are seeing.
….
Surprisingly, then, when we asked our survey participants which area they would recommend to an engineering student interested in an R&D career, Prepackaged Software and OEM ended up near the bottom of the list (Storage and Consumer Computers tied for last place, with just one vote each out of 646 respondents). Instead, practically tying for first place were Biomedical and Wireless/Mobile technologies, with 103 and 102 votes apiece; Energy came in third with 95 votes. A further 85 survey takers recommended pursuing an R&D career in academia, without specifying an area.
I envy you, my love 
. I am a firm believer, though, that in whatever area you are focusing on, when you work hard and excelled in it, and you have ideas that people will find it useful, it will be the best bet for the future of you and people who benefit from your work.
Processor vs Iron
The “power wall” problem is one of the main issues in research for next generation chip architecture. This problem is best described by the following figure.
Most (if not all) of the processors commonly used today are much hotter than the typical steam iron 
. In fact with the current growth, it is predicted that soon the power density will reach the level within the nuclear reactor 
. In the late 80’s, the shift to CMOS technologies (from bipolar) are the answer for this power density problem (notice the drop around 90’s in the figure above). For today’s problem, there have been no clear answer. The multicore/multiprocessor approach which offers more efficient performance/watt ratio is promoted to be one of the possible solutions.
The picture is taken from Lecture 2: Introduction to Cell Processor (Dr. Michael Perrone, IBM) page 8, part of the 6.189 Multicore Programming Primer course in MIT (the whole very excellent lecture materials are available online). Originally, I got the link to the course from the Multiprocessor Report blog.
