Last month, Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at the university, titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Randy is a professor of computer science, and is the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), as well as the creator of the Alice educational program.  If you don’t know, the ETC is one of the premiere programs in the country that brings engineers and artists together and simply creates some amazing stuff – As a matter of fact the program has such a high reputation that companies have signed agreements that guarantee that they will hire students who have completed the program. On a sad note though, Randy is dying from pancreatic cancer, and this last lecture was his farewell advice on how to achieve your childhood dreams. This might not seem directly related to semiconductors and startups, but one should never forget that inspiration is one of the key factors that enables individuals to reach beyond what seems possible and come up with new ideas and approaches to difficult problems. Randy fills this lecture with priceless lessons learned and so much inspiration that regardless whether you work for a large corporation or a small startup you are bound to find some useful advice in his words. Some of my favorite quotes include: experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted; enabling the dreams of others is more rewarding than enabling your own; brick walls are there for a reason: they let people prove that they want something bad enough. So fix yourself a cup of coffee, for the lecture is about an hour and a half long, sit back and absorb all the great lessons that Randy has to offer in the video below.

There are many companies working on replacement technologies for current memories. From T-RAM Semiconductor’s Thin-Capacitivel-Coupled-Thyristor (TCCT) technology, to Innovative Silicon’s Z-RAM, and Freescale’s Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). So far these companies have delivered a lot of papers and presentations, patent filings, a few licensing agreements, and even several consumer samples. But can these technologies really replace DRAM, Flash, and SRAM? The other day designnews.com, posted a short article titled: MRAM Shows Potential to Move Beyond Flash, SRAM. The article is mostly a summary of the advantages that MRAM offers over DRAM and Flash, including MRAM’s ability to retain data even when completely turned off and its superior write performance and endurance when compared to Flash. Freescale has a very nice technical brochure that explains the MRAM technology in detail, in case you need some bedtime reading. Currently, Freescale offers three different MRAM parts all of which run at 3.3V. Personally, I think that MRAM technology has real potential to take off once Freescale figures out how to lower the voltage and embed some of the MRAM technology into its SOC products. For example, a last level cache could benefit from this technology since shutting it off to conserve power would no longer require for all the data to be evicted from the cache first to not compromise the integrity of the system. Whether or not MRAM will be utilized this way will depend on the read and write speeds of MRAM as compared to SRAM at these lower voltages, as well as on area demands and noise tolerance. Nevertheless, it is nice to see that in the near future circuit designers might have a larger choice of technologies from which they will be able to choose when designing memories.

There are many great ideas out there, but few ever make it from the concept phase into an actual product, and even fewer end up as profitable business ventures. Money, while not the magical pill as was proven by countless .com companies towards the end of the nineties, can however go a long way of at least helping you get out of the starting block. But with so many ideas, and just as many failures, it is not surprising that venture capitalists are very selective about where they choose to invest their assets. Any tips that might help score that money are therefore much appreciated. Conveniently, CNNMoney just published a short article titled 5 Tips to Score Venture Capital Funding, in which venture capital representatives from Safeguard Scientific, Beringea, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, and Kodiak Venture Partners comment on what they like to see in a startup. According to the VCs the people that are behind the business plan are more important than the plan that got them in the door in the first place, since the plan is likely to change over time and it will be up to them to make sure that it does as market conditions change. Thus, the things they look for are: passion, focus, the team that has been assembled to take on the challenge at hand, uniqueness of the approach or in other words innovations, and finally a potential product that will make enough money to make it a worthwhile investment. Generally, pretty logical things and what one would expect VCs to say, the only point that I would elaborate on is the innovation part and that statement that the product needs to be different as opposed to more and better. There has to be some innovation for sure, but what needs to be kept in mind that the innovation does not need to necessarily come on the product itself, but can be on the process for creating a similar product. The market place is littered with examples where the first company to deliver a new and unique product eventually fell by the wayside after being outdone by someone who had a better process of creating a very similar clone.