PROJECT A SPECIAL REPORT - The rockets, orbiters, landers, and rovers are all being built, and the habitats are being designed. Here's how ...
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PROJECT
A
SPECIAL
REPORT
The rockets, orbiters, landers, and rovers are all
being built, and the habitats are being designed.
Here’s how humanity will colonize a new world
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CONTENTS_07.19
This is the
opening act
of an epic
saga in which
humans
establish a
permanent
presence on
the moon.
PAGE 22
During the Apollo 15 mission,
astronauts David Scott
[above] and James Irwin
spent about 18 hours
exploring the lunar surface
on foot and by moon buggy.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 01
CONTENTS_07.19
THE COMING MOON RUSH
The technology to build the first lunar colony is already here. Page 22
by eliza strickland & glenn zorpette
26 THE HEAVY LIFT 38 THE VIEW FROM 48 TURN LEFT AT
Getting into space at all is tough. THE FAR SIDE TRANQUILITY BASE
This new rocket engine could You need a quiet place to see Here’s how lunar landers,
change that. the dawn of the cosmos. rovers, and drones will find
By Mark Harris By Stephen Cass their way around.
By Prachi Patel
30 THREE STEPS TO 40 HOMESTEADING
A MOON BASE THE MOON 52 PHONING HOME,
Space agencies and private Architects and engineers have WITH LASERS
companies are building drafted plans for the first lunar If lunar missions want to send
infrastructure for lunar settlement. habitats, but their work is far and receive lots of data, they’ll
By Eliza Strickland from complete. need lasers to do the job.
By Matthew Hutson By Michael Koziol
32 GATEWAY OR BUST
NASA says its orbital space station 46 SQUEEZING ROCKET FUEL 07 NEWS
is essential for a moon landing. FROM MOON ROCKS 14 RESOURCES
Critics say it’s a boondoggle One day, we’ll make propellant from 19 OPINION
in the making. icy deposits at the moon’s poles. 60 PAST FORWARD
By Jeff Foust By David Schneider
EXCLUSIVELY AT SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG/MOON-BASE
EXTRAS HISTORY
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON’S REMEMBERING THE DAWN OF THE SPACE ERA
FICTIONAL MOON BASE Members share firsthand stories from
To write his new sci-fi novel, Robinson the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.
became an expert on lunar colony tech. By Joanna Goodrich
By Sally Adee
BOUNCING RADAR SIGNALS OFF THE MOON
CAN LUNAR SETTLERS STAY HEALTHY? A 1946 demonstration called Project Diana marked
Moondust, radiation, and low gravity could the beginning of space communications.
wreak havoc on the human body. By Joanna Goodrich
By Elie Dolgin
HOW KATHERINE JOHNSON PLOTTED
FIVE BOOKS FOR LUNATICS NASA’S COURSE
If you’re mad for the moon, we have The real-life Hidden Figures mathematician calcu- On the cover
some summer reading for you. lated trajectories for Mercury and Apollo astronauts. Illustration for
By Ian McDonald By Joanna Goodrich IEEE Spectrum by
NoEmotion
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02 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD, IEEE SPECTRUM
in the 1990s, Foust researched the atmosphere of SENIOR ART DIRECTOR
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D.C., he studies something equally murky and SENIOR EDITORS
Grant Jacoby, Leah Jamieson, Mary Lou Jepsen, Deepa Kundur,
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Erico Guizzo (Digital), e.guizzo@ieee.org
“Gateway or Bust” [p. 32], Foust explains the Jean Kumagai, j.kumagai@ieee.org
Jacob Østergaard, Umit Ozguner, John Rogers,
Jonathan Rothberg, Umar Saif, Takao Someya,
criticisms of NASA’s plan to put humans back Samuel K. Moore, s.k.moore@ieee.org Maurizio Vecchione, Yu Zheng, Kun Zhou, Edward Zyszkowski
on the moon via an orbiting space station called Tekla S. Perry, t.perry@ieee.org
the Lunar Gateway. But, he notes, “if you change Philip E. Ross, p.ross@ieee.org EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD, THE INSTITUTE
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04 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG
BACK STORY_
More Science Than Fiction
W
hen clients come to the NoEmotion studio, they’re
looking for 3D illustrations and animations that don’t look
like computer graphics. “We’re known for creating super-
realistic environments,” says Peter Sanitra, who cofounded
the studio with his colleague Marek Denko. “We don’t do
cartoon characters jumping around and eating Cocoa Puffs.
That’s not our thing.”
Sanitra and Denko met in 2006 when they were both working on a fea-
ture film in Milan. When that project wrapped, they moved to Prague
to open NoEmotion. While they’re proud of their work on blockbuster
movies and video games, as well as ad campaigns for the likes of Nike,
Sanitra says they take extra enjoyment in assignments that let them geek
out about science and technology. In their prior work for IEEE Spectrum,
they’ve produced realistic renderings of the Pioneer 10 space probe in orbit
around Jupiter and a hypothetical mining robot trundling over the Mar-
tian dirt. “We really are science guys,” says Sanitra. “We love space stuff.”
For the cover of Spectrum’s special report on colonizing the moon,
Sanitra created a 3D lunar landscape, built a settlement inside a crater,
and populated it with space-suited residents going about their busi-
ness. He paid particular attention to the lighting in this otherworldly
scene. “On the moon, there’s no atmosphere, no scattering of light,” he
says. “So everything is very sharp and the shadows are very deep.” The
spacecraft in the background are based on SpaceX’s design for a vehicle
called Starship, which may one day ferry people between Earth and the
moon—and someday after that, between the moon and Mars.
It will be quite a while until spacecraft like Starship enable easy access
to the moon. If it does happen, Sanitra says he’ll happily climb aboard.
But he imagines himself as a moon tourist, not a settler. “I would love to
visit, to see that blue marble with my own eyes, to do a cliché footprint in
moondust,” he says. “But that will do for me; back to Earth.” n
07.19
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Gluekit
SPECTRAL LINES_ 07.19
MOONWALK: Apollo 11
astronaut Buzz Aldrin carries
research equipment to the
deployment area in the Sea of
Tranquility.
As the Apollo 11 retrospective swirls
around us, we’ve decided to take a look
at today’s efforts to return to the moon,
and this time, to build habitable lunar
bases. What will it take? Which rockets
and landers will get us there? Our spe-
cial report begins on p. 22.
Traveling to the moon is hard enough,
but attempting to live on the lunar sur-
face presents even greater challenges.
It’s been compared with living in an
Antarctic research station or on a nuclear
submarine that remains submerged for
months on end.
The moon, for all its luminescent beauty
on sultry summer evenings or frosty win-
ter nights, is one mean rock to live on. It
has no atmosphere, little gravity, and cut-
tingly abrasive sand. The surface is blasted
by cosmic radiation and is, every lunar
day, both extremely hot and extremely
cold. There is water at its poles, but it’s
Home, Sweet Moon? frozen. Yet the engineers and architects
designing moon habitats are confident
Flying to the moon is hard, that they can overcome these and other
but living there will be even harder sobering challenges, as you’ll see in
“Homesteading the Moon,” p. 40.
T
Despite short bursts of excitement
he 50th anniversary of the first human moon landing is upon about moon landings and space-shuttle flights, antip-
us (20 July, to be exact). This roughly 772,000-kilometer athy about human space travel has coexisted with
round-trip expedition is being celebrated all year long— enthusiasm for it since the first humans escaped
books, movies, commemorative magazine issues, and special gravity’s shackles in the early 1960s. Why are we
events abound. ¶ In May, IEEE gave its President’s Award to the spending time, money, and energy to send ourselves
remarkable and indomitable Katherine Johnson, who helped into space, while there are so many problems to
calculate, by hand, the trajectory for the Apollo 11 lunar landing take care of here on Planet Earth?
mission. If you have US $9 million dollars to spare, you can drop People forget that pictures of Earth, taken from
by Christie’s in New York City on 18 July to bid in the auction of Apollo the moon, helped spur the modern environmen-
11’s Lunar Module Timeline Book, with its three-hole-punched pages tal movement. I think about what the Chinese art-
and hand-checked flight plan. Don helmet and gloves—check. Test cabin ist Ai Weiwei said, commenting on the plans of
regulator—check. ¶ In case you’ve managed to miss what all the fuss is about: Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to bring art-
On 20 July 1969, NASA’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, ists with him on SpaceX’s first trip around the moon:
while Command Module Pilot Michael Collins circled above them with their “Without knowing other celestial bodies, we cannot
ride home. It was the culmination of years of human effort, interrupted by truly understand what our own planet is about.”
delays, setbacks, and the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in —Susan Hassler
1963. The mission was carried out as the Vietnam War, the war on poverty,
NASA
and the civil rights and women’s movements were all in full swing. ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/moonlanding0719
06 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG
25: PERCENTAGE OF ALL
MARINE SPECIES THAT LIVE
IN CORAL REEFS
The Great Barrier Reef
is the world’s largest
structure made up of liv-
ing organisms. Located off
the coast of northeastern
Australia, it covers an area
roughly the size of Germany
and comprises 2,900 individ-
ual coral reefs. Its size and
magnificence have earned it
the distinction of a UNESCO
World Heritage Site. But for
scientists on the lookout
for problems, such as mass
bleaching events induced by
climate change and industrial
activity, that’s a lot of ground
(or water) to cover.
To m a k e t h i s j o b e a s -
ier, a team of researchers
from Queensland Univer-
sity of Technology (QUT), in
Brisbane, is combining both
new and proven technolo-
gies to monitor the reef for
signs of degradation, includ-
ing bleaching.
The team, led by Felipe
Gonzalez, an associate pro-
fessor at QUT, is collaborating
with the Australian Institute
DRONES SURVEY THE
of Marine Science (AIMS), an
organization that has been
tracking the health of the reef
for many years. AIMS already
GREAT BARRIER REEF
Aided by AI, hyperspectral cameras can distinguish
employs aircraft, in-water
MARINE MISSION: A drone carries
a hyperspectral camera, which can
identify algae, coral, sand, and water
bleached from unbleached coral
QUT
by their spectral signatures.
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 07
this conventional camera is capable of
capturing light only from three spectral
channels: the red, green, and blue that
make up the 380- to 740-nanometer por-
tion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The hyperspectral camera, by contrast,
collects the reflected light of 270 spec-
tral bands, extending coverage to wave-
lengths of 300 to 1,000 nanometers.
“Hy perspec t ra l i mag i ng g reat ly
improves our ability to monitor the reef’s
condition, based on its spectral proper-
ties,” says Gonzalez. “That’s because
each component making up a reef’s envi-
ronment—water, sand, algae, et cetera—
has its own spectral signature, as do
surveys, and NASA satellite imagery to REEF WATCH: The Great Barrier Reef [top] bleached and unbleached coral.”
collect data on a particular reef’s condi- is home to 600 different types of coral. Felipe But this expanded coverage and the
Gonzalez [bottom] is among the first to use
tion. But these methods have drawbacks, drones to monitor changes in these organisms. richness of the data the team gathered
such as the relatively low resolution of presented them with a new challenge.
TOP: TANYA ANN/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: QUT
satellite images and the high cost of oper- then flies 60 meters above the reef, and Whereas AIMS divers can gather infor-
ating fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. the hyperspectral camera captures data mation from 40 distinct points on a reef
So Gonzalez is using an off-the-shelf about the reef as far as 3 meters below during an underwater survey, a single
drone modified to carry both a high- the water’s surface. This has greatly hyperspectral image contains more than
resolution digital camera and a hyper- expanded the agency’s area of coverage. 4,000 data points. Consequently, a sin-
spectral camera. His team launches it The digital camera is used to build up a gle drone flight can amass a thousand
from a boat patrolling the waters 15 to conventional 3D model of an individual gigabytes of raw data that must be pro-
70 kilometers from the coast. The drone reef under study, explains Gonzalez. But cessed and analyzed.
08 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORGWANTED: HI-RES,
At first, the team used a PC, custom soft-
ware tools, and QUT’s h igh-performance
NEWS
computer to process the data, a task
that took weeks and drew heavily on
the machine’s run time. So the team SURGERY-FREE BRAIN
INTERFACES
applied for and received a Microsoft AI
for Earth grant, which makes software
tools, cloud computing services, and
deep-learning resources available to DARPA aims to develop wearable devices that let
researchers working on global environ- soldiers communicate directly with machines
mental challenges.
“Now, we can use Microsoft’s AI tools
in the cloud to supplement our own DARPA’s Next-Generation spokesperson declined to com-
tools and quickly label the different Nonsurgical Neurotechnol- ment on the total amount of fund-
spectral signatures,” says Gonzalez. ogy (N3) program has awarded ing awarded, two of the winning
“So, where processing previous drone funding to six groups attempt- teams have reported eye-popping
sweeps used to take three or four weeks, ing to build brain-machine inter- grants of US $19.48 million and
depending on the data, it now takes two faces that match the performance $18 million.
or three days.” of implanted electrodes without Plenty of noninvasive neuro-
This speedup in data processing is requiring surgery. technologies already exist, but
critical. If it took a year or more before With such a technolog y, by not at the resolution necessary to
the team was able to tell AIMS that a simply popping on a helmet or yield high-performance wearable
certain part of the reef was degrading headset soldiers could conceiv- devices for national security appli-
rapidly, it might be too late to save it. ably command control centers cations, says N3 program manager
“By being informed early, the govern- without touching a keyboard, fly Al Emondi, of DARPA’s Biological
ment can then take quicker action to drones intuitively with a thought, Technologies Office.
protect an endangered area of the reef,” and even sense intrusions into Following a call for applications
G onzalez adds. a secure net work. A nd while in March 2018, a review panel nar-
He also notes that the use of hyper- the tech sounds futuristic, the rowed the pool to six teams across
spectral imaging is now a growing area Defense Advanced Research Proj- industry and academia, Emondi
of remote sensing in a variety of fields, ects Agency wants to get it done in told IEEE Spectrum. The teams
including agriculture, mineral sur- four years. are experimenting w ith mag-
veying, mapping, and locating water “It’s an aggressive timeline,” says netic fields, electric fields, acoustic
resources. For example, he and col- Krishnan Thyagarajan, a research fields (including ultrasound), and
leagues at QUT are also using the tech- scientist at the research company light. “You can combine all these
nology to monitor forests, wheat crops, PARC and principal investigator approaches in different, unique,
and vineyards that can be affected by of one of the N3-funded projects. and novel ways,” says Emondi.
pathogens, fungi, or aphids. “But I think the idea of any such What the program hopes to dis-
Lately, Gonzalez has been busy pro- program is to really challenge the cover, he adds, is which combina-
cessing the spectral data collected from community to push the limits and tions can record brain activity and
the reef so far, but this September, he accelerate things which
will start a second round of drone flights. are already brewing. Yes,
“We aim to return to the four reefs AIMS it’s challenging, but it’s
has already studied to monitor any not impossible.”
changes,” he says, “then extend the The N3 prog ram f its
monitoring to new reefs.” —John Boyd right into DARPA’s high-
r isk, h igh-rewa rd bio -
A version of this article appears on our medical tech portfolio,
which also includes pro-
ISTOCKPHOTO
Tech Talk blog.
grams in electric medi-
POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/reefai0719 cine, brain implants, and
electrical brain training.
And the agency is throw-
ing big money at the pro-
gram: Although a DARPA
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 09transmit it back to the brain
with the greatest speed and
resolution.
to detect neural activity. The
researchers plan to use inter-
fering electrical fields to write WHERE DOES
Specifically, the program is
seeking technologies that can
read and write to brain cells
to specific neurons.
The three other teams pro-
posing noninvasive tech- GRAPHENE GO
in a 50-millisecond round trip
and also interact with at least
16 locations in the brain at a
resolution of 1 cubic millime-
niques include Johns Hopkins
University’s Applied Physics
Laboratory, Thyagarajan’s
team at PARC, and a team
FROM HERE?
Experts weigh in on whether the
ter (an area that encompasses from Teledyne Technologies,
thousands of neurons). a California-based industrial
EU’s €1 billion Graphene Flagship
T h e fo u r-ye a r N 3 p r o - company.
can get the “wonder material”
gram will consist of three The two remaining teams
past the Valley of Death
phases, says Emondi. In the are developing what DARPA
first phase, teams will have calls “minutely invasive” Six years ago, the European
one year to demonstrate the technologies, which require Union embarked on an ambi-
ability to read (record) and no incisions or surgery but tious project to create a kind
write to (stimulate) brain tis- m ay i nvolve tec h nolog y of Silicon Valley for the won-
sue through the skull. Teams that is swallowed, sniffed, der material of the last decade: graphene.
that succeed will move to injected, or absorbed into The project—called the Graphene Flagship—
phase 2. Those groups will the human body in some way. would leverage €1 billion over 10 years to
have 18 months to develop Rice University, for exam- push graphene into commercial markets
working devices and test ple, i s developi ng a sys- and make Europe an economic powerhouse
them on living animals. Any tem that requires exposing for graphene-based technologies.
group left standing will pro- neurons to a viral vector to To this day, the EU’s investment in the
ceed to phase 3—testing their deliver instructions for syn- Graphene Flagship represents the single
device on humans. thetic proteins that indicate largest project in graphene research and
Four of the teams are devel- ac t iv it y in neurons. The development (though some speculate that
oping totally noninvasive Ohio-based technology com- graphene-related projects in China may have
technologies. A team from pany Battelle is developing surpassed it). In six years, the Graphene Flag-
Carnegie Mellon University, a brain-machine interface ship has spawned nine companies and 46
for example, wants to use that relies on magnetoelec- new graphene-based products. Still, there
ultrasound waves to guide tric nanoparticles injected remains a sense among critics that the mate-
light into and out of the brain into the brain. rial has not lived up to expectations.
“This is uncharted ter- Graphene’s unique properties have
ritory for DARPA, and engendered high hopes for its use in
the next step in brain- advanced composites and new types of elec-
“This is machine interfaces,” says tronic devices. While graphene can come
Emondi. “If we’re success- in many forms, its purest form is that of a
uncharted ful in some of these tech- 1-atom-thick layer of graphite. This struc-
nologies…that’s a whole ture has provided the highest thermal con-
territory for new ecosystem that ductivity ever recorded—10 times as high
DARPA, and the doesn’t exist right now.” as in copper. Graphene also has one of the
—Megan Scudellari highest intrinsic electron mobilities (the
next step in speed at which electrons can travel through
A version of this article a material): approximately 100 times as
brain-machine appears on our Human great as that of silicon.
OS blog. The Graphene Flagship is now more than
interfaces.” halfway through its 10-year funding cycle.
POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://
—Al Emondi spectrum.ieee.org/brainresearch0719 To many observers, the project’s achieve-
10 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORGa hard-tech idea to market for one com-
pany takes tens of millions of euros.”
Another problem, according to both
Harper and Barkan, is that the Graphene
Flagship has been pursuing a “technol-
ogy push” rather than a “market pull”
strategy for commercialization. “The Gra-
phene Flagship projects seem to be in the
process of developing a solution that’s in
search of a problem,” said Barkan.
One of t he key problems i n t he
commercialization of any emerging
technology is bridging the “Valley of
Death”—the gap between a technol-
ogy that researchers have developed
ments—or lack thereof—are a barometer more problematic by promising much and the rollout of a commercial prod-
for the commercial status of graphene, more than it can likely deliver.” uct. To help graphene make it through,
which was first synthesized at the Uni- Other industry observers echo this another project, called the Graphene
versity of Manchester, in England, in sentiment. Terrance Barkan, executive & 2D Materials Eureka Cluster, is cur-
2004. When it was founded, the Flag- director of the Graphene Council, an rently seeking EU funding.
ship wrestled with a key question that association of researchers, producers, Antonio Correia, president of the
it still faces: Would the project support developers, and consumers of graphene, Phantoms Foundation, a European
“fundamental” or “applied” research in believes the Flagship has been a boon for organization that coordinates nano-
its quest to make Europe the “Graphene the academic community but hasn’t had technology innovation, is now spear-
Valley” of the world? much impact on the material’s commer- heading the Eureka project. Correia
Jari Kinaret, director of the Graphene cialization. [Editor’s note: The author believes this new effort is needed to take
Flagship, says it’s the latter: “From the has worked for the Graphene Council.] up the slack in the graphene-develop-
very beginning, our plan has been to “For the money applied and for all the ment value chain. Although he would
take graphene and related materials resources rallied, the Graphene Flagship agree that the Graphene Flagship has
from academic laboratories to society.” is underperforming from a commercial played an important role in combining
Over time, he said, the project has inten- development perspective,” Barkan said. fundamental research with industrial
tionally funded more applied research. The Flagship does claim to have helped concerns, he thinks the industry should
The consortium was originally made develop several dozen commercial prod- guide how graphene is commercialized
up of mostly academic groups, whereas ucts based on graphene, including a in the future. According to Correia, this
today about 40 percent of its members flexible wireless sensor for measuring focus on industry interests will be nec-
are companies. a wearer’s heart rate and a graphene- essary if graphene is to bridge the Val-
However, other experts are not con- coated motorcycle helmet. ley of Death.
vinced that the Graphene Flagship is in Kinaret does not see a sharp line Barkan of the Graphene Council
the best position to lead graphene into between fundamental and applied offered another take on this strategy: “At
commercial markets. research in the Flagship’s projects. the end of the day, the question should
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong Nonetheless, in the project’s next phase, be, ‘What kind of a problem are you try-
with funding fundamental research,” known as Core 3, there is a growing ing to solve where graphene unlocks new
said Tim Harper, founder and former emphasis on bringing technologies fur- solutions?’ ” he said. “Not ‘What type of
CEO of G2O Water Technologies, which ther along the development cycle. In innovation have you created that you are
uses graphene for water filtration sys- this phase, the Flagship has allocated trying to push into a product?’ ”
tems. “But when this type of project is €45 million (US $50.5 million) for proj- —Dexter Johnson
dressed up as commercialization and ects that should result in prototypes
run by people with little interest in or that function in realistic environments. A version of this article appears on our
SHUTTERSTOCK
experience with commercializing any- Harper at G20 believes this effort may Nanoclast blog.
thing—but with a major interest in secur- be counterproductive. “Forty-five mil-
POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/
ing research funding—then it becomes lion euros isn’t much,” he said. “Getting graphene0719
NEWS
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 11NEWS
ENABLING YOUR INNOVATION
FROM CONCE PT TO PE RFO RM ANCE
NEW SILICON
SOFTWARE THAT LIVES UP TO REVIVES AN OLD
THE POWER OF YOUR IDEAS
ALGORITHM
Optimo chip breaks up big
optimization problems into
bite-size bits
Engineers at Georgia “If you can accelerate [con-
Tech say they’ve come strained optimization] using
up with a programmable pro- sm a r t a rc h ite c t u re a nd
totype chip that efficiently energy-efficient design, you
solves a huge class of optimiza- will be able to accelerate a
tion problems, including those large class of signal processing
needed for neural network and machine-learning prob-
training, 5G network routing, lems,” says R aychowdhury.
and MRI image reconstruction. A 1980s-era algorithm known
The chip’s architecture as an alternating direction
embodies a particular algo- method of multipliers, or
rithm that breaks up one huge ADMM, turned out to be the
problem into many small prob- solution. The algorithm solves
lems, works on the subprob- enormous optimization prob-
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES lems, and shares the results. It lems by breaking them up and
• New! “Smart Workspace” does this over and over until it then reaching a solution over
• Search-based design simulation comes up with the best answer. several iterations.
• Program your own applications with API Compared with a GPU run- “If you want to solve a large
• Precise field calculations using our proprietary ning the algorithm, the pro- problem with a lot of data—say
BEM and FEM solvers totype chip—called Optimo—is 1 million data points with 1 mil-
• Intuitive and easy-to-use interface 4.77 times as power efficient lion variables—ADMM allows
and 4.18 times as fast. you to break it up into smaller
The training of machine- subproblems,” he says. “You
“For our purposes, ‘ELECTRO’ is actually the
learning systems and a wide can cut it down into 1,000 vari-
preferred software tool for every-day engineering.
It is important to have software that is very quick variety of other data-intensive ables with 1,000 data points.”
and easy to learn and this product is more than work can be cast as a set of Each subproblem is solved
capable of handling the large models we require.” m at hem at ic a l problem s and the results incorporated
called constrained optimi- in a “consensus” step with the
Dr. Beriz Bakija, Siemens AG’s Energy Sector, Germany zation. In it, you’re trying to other subproblems to reach
minimize the value of a func- an interim solution. With that
ASK FOR AN ONLINE DEMONSTRATION tion under some constraints, interim solution now incor-
explains Georgia Tech pro- porated in the subproblems,
fessor Arijit R aychowdhury. the process is repeated over
For example, training a neural and over until the algorithm
net could involve seeking the arrives at the optimal solution.
lowest error rate within the In a typical CPU or GPU,
contact@integratedsoft.com / (204) 632-5636 constraints of the size of the ADMM is limited because it
integratedsoft.com neural network. requires the movement of aThe chip could be scaled up to do w a s h i s g r adu ate st ude nt s’ t i me.
its work in the cloud—adding more —Sa muel K. Moor e
cores—or shrunk down to solve prob-
lems closer to the edge of the Inter- A version of this article appears on our
net, Raychowdhury says. The main Tech Talk blog.
constraint in optimizing the number
POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/
of cores in the prototype, he jokes, optimo0719
New Version!
THINK SMALL: Optimo’s cores are interlinked
to facilitate the gather-and-scatter steps of an
optimization algorithm called ADMM.
lot of data. So instead the Georgia Tech
group developed a system with a “near
memory” architecture.
“The ADMM framework as a method
of solving optimization problems maps
nicely to a many-core architecture where
you have memory and logic in close
proximity with some communications
channels in between these cores,” says
Raychowdhury.
The test chip was made up of a grid
of 49 “optimization processing units,”
cores designed to perform ADMM and
containing their own high-bandwidth
memories. The units were connected to
one another in a way that speeds ADMM.
Portions of data were distributed to each
unit, and each one set about solving its
individual subproblems. The combined
results were then gathered, and the data Over 75 New Features & Apps in Origin 2019!
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The Georgia Tech team, which included
graduate student Muya Chang and Profes- 25+ years serving the scientific & engineering community
sor Justin Romberg, unveiled Optimo in
GEORGIA TECH
April at the IEEE Custom Integrated Cir-
cuits Conference in Austin, Texas.
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 13RESOURCES_HANDS ON
A RETRO TIMEKEEPER THAT NEVER WAS
APOLLO-ERA METERS AND GPS MERGE PAST AND PRESENT
WO YEARS AGO, ON THE 48TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE APOLLO 11 LANDING, A CLOTH BAG THAT
T Neil Armstrong used to return the first lunar samples to Earth was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for US $1.8 million. The
seller had purchased it online two years earlier for a mere $995—a fantastically good deal for what turned out to be a
•
precious artifact of the Apollo era. While I wasn’t nearly so fortunate, I, too, got a good deal online for some hardware that probably
contributed in some way to the Apollo program, though I don’t know how exactly. I obtained three vintage analog panel voltmeters
•
for $15 each from an eBay seller who had bought them from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Ala. I could tell
from their art deco–inspired faces that the three Weston voltage meters were old when I first saw them online, but I didn’t know how
old. To my delight, I discovered manufacturing dates written on the back of the faceplates. These meters, it turns out, were made be-
•
tween May and December of 1955—and presumably shipped to Huntsville shortly afterward. At the time, NASA did not yet exist.
Huntsville was, however, home to an Army installation, known as Redstone Arsenal, where missiles were being developed. In 1955,
Wernher von Braun and numerous other German rocket scientists were hard at work there building rockets as part of the United
States’ ballistic missile program. This team would build the first U.S. satellite launcher, and later, after the site had become the
Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun and others in Huntsville helped to develop the giant Saturn boosters, which eventually
•
sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Having scored three classy panel meters of some vague historical significance (I can
14 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORGimagine von Braun having peered
at their twitching needles), I
wanted to do something fun with
them. Inspired by a project I had
seen on Hackaday, I decided to
make a clock that would indicate
the hours, minutes, and seconds
by deflecting the needle on the
analog voltmeters. But I would go
a step further than the Hackaday
project and combine the modern
space age with the old. My clock
would be synchronized with the eters (“VOMs,” the predecessor to today’s
m
atomic clocks carried on GPS satellites, while digital multimeters), included mirrors behind
still looking like something that would be at the faceplate, which helped you to judge
home on a rack of instrumentation at some whether you were viewing the needle square
NASA facility during the Apollo program. on. Without that, you could easily m isread
I had in my junk box a now-outdated GPS the indicated value because of parallax. My
module, so I hooked that to an Arduino Nano, Marshall Space Flight Center m eters included
which I programmed to extract the time from such mirrors, and I didn’t want to cover them
the GPS signal. Then I opened up the meters with my new faces. An X-Acto knife worked
and replaced the current-limiting resistors passably well for this task, although if you look
inside with ones of my own choosing so as hard, you can see the flaws.
to make the full-scale reading on each meter The final flourish was to affix a black plastic
(originally 10 and 50 volts), to be somewhat nameplate with the words “Satellite Time” in
less than 5 V. That allowed me to control the white lettering. That cost just a few dollars to
needle position on each meter using pulse- have made and helps my clock look the part.
width modulation, which is easily output The three meters now show GPS time in
using certain dedicated pins on the Arduino. my local time zone. The five panel lights indi-
The biggest challenge was to make it cate the number of GPS satellites in the sky.
look like a period piece of equipment. For In theory, there can be as many as 16 over-
that, I first obtained a standard rack-mount head at any one time, so I display the number
“blanking” panel, one painted in a putty color, in binary using the five lights arrayed across
which contrasts nicely with the black B akelite the bottom of the clock.
housings of the meters. I also purchased five Because my living room doesn’t in-
vintage panel-lamp housings, into which I in- clude a rack for my rack-mount panel, I
serted LEDs for use as indicator lights. cut a couple of supports out of half-inch
Next came the trickiest part: changing the (1.27-centimeter) thick gray PVC, allowing
faces of the meters so that they could indi- the clock to stand upright on any horizon-
cate time. The first step in that process was tal surface. Power is supplied to the Arduino
to remove the faceplate from one meter and through a standard wall wart.
scan it. Using that as a template, I designed Despite its unconventional appearance,
new faceplates with Adobe Illustrator, ones this panel-meter-based clock is easy enough
that show hours, minutes, and seconds yet to read. And with its ear to the GPS constel-
THE SWEEP OF TIME: I mounted three
preserve the style of the original faces. voltmeters on a rack panel [top]. A GPS module lation, it always tells the correct time. More
I printed the new faces on ivory-colored [affixed to the rightmost voltmeter] receives important, I get a chuckle looking at it, know-
stock cut from a manila folder, which helped time transmissions and sends them to an ing that it’s built from components that prob-
Arduino. The Arduino converts the time to
to give them a vintage appearance. electrical signals representing hours, minutes, ably contributed in some small way to putting
DAVID SCHNEIDER (5)
A fiddly bit was cutting out arc-shaped and seconds. I added resistors to the voltmeters astronauts on the moon a half century ago.
openings for the meters’ mirrors. Younger so that they operate between 0 and a little less —DAVID SCHNEIDER
than 5 volts [second from top]. And I printed
readers might not be aware that better a nalog new faceplates [second from bottom], which
meters, especially those used in volt‑ohm I inserted into the meters [bottom]. POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/clock0719
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 15RESOURCES_GEEK LIFE
microcomputer-controlled synthesizers
CHIP HALL OF FAME: SID 6581 available, including the Super Sound board
THIS SYNTHESIZER CHIP DEFINED designed for use with the Cosmac VIP sys-
tem, the built-in sound generation tech
THE SOUND OF A GENERATION in home computers was relatively crude.
Yannes had higher ambitions. “I’d worked
with synthesizers, and I wanted a chip
that was a music synthesizer,” Yannes told
Spectrum in 1985. His big advantage was
that MOS had a manufacturing fab on-site.
This allowed for cheap and fast experimenta-
tion and testing: “The actual design only took
about four or five months,” said Yannes.
On a hardware level, what made the SID
6581 stand out was better frequency con-
trol of its internal oscillators and, critically,
an easy way for programmers to control
what’s known as the sound envelope. E arly
approaches to using computers to gen-
erate musical tones produced sound that
was either off or on at a fixed intensity, like a
buzzer. But most musical instruments don’t
work that way: Think of how a piano note
can linger before decaying into silence. The
sound envelope defines how a note’s inten-
sity rises and falls. Some systems allowed the
volume to be adjusted as the note played, but
this was awkward to program. Yannes incor-
porated data registers into the SID 6581 so a
developer could define an envelope and then
his year’s inductee into IEEE C64 has also retained its own dedicated fol- leave it to the chip to control the intensity.
T Spectrum’s Chip Hall of Fame is
the chip that filled millions of living
lowing: the SID 6581 sound chip.
The C64 was developed by MOS Technolo-
The SID chip has three sound channels
that can play simultaneously using three ba-
rooms and bedrooms in the 1980s with a gies in 1981. MOS had already had a hit in the sic waveforms, plus a fourth “noise” waveform.
sound that some modern musicians go to microcomputing world with its creation of the The chip has the ability to filter and modulate
great lengths to replicate. For an expanded 6502 CPU in 1975. That chip—and a small the channels to produce an even wider range
version of the SID 6581’s entry, and to see family of variants—was used to power popu- of sounds. Some programmers discovered
earlier inductees, visit the hall of fame online. lar home computers and game consoles such they could tease the chip into doing things
1982 was a big year for music. Not only as the Apple II and Atari 2600. As recounted it was never designed to do, such as speech
did Michael Jackson release Thriller, the in IEEE Spectrum’s March 1985 design case synthesis. But stunts like that aside, the SID
bestselling album of all time, but Madonna history of the C64 by Tekla S. Perry and Paul chip’s design meant that home computer
made her debut. And it saw the launch of the Wallich, MOS originally intended just to make games could have truly musical soundtracks.
Commodore 64 microcomputer. Thanks to a new graphics chip and a new sound chip. Developers started hiring composers to
the C64, millions of homes were equipped The idea was to sell them as components to create original works for C64 games—
with a programmable electronic synthesizer, microcomputer manufacturers. But those indeed, some titles today are solely remem-
one that’s still in vogue. chips turned out to be so good that MOS bered because of a catchy soundtrack.
Like many machines from that era, the decided to make its own computer. Unlike in modern game development, in
CHRISTIAN TAUBE/WIKIPEDIA
C64 has a devoted following in the retro- Creation of the sound chip fell to a young which soundtrack creation is technically sim-
computing community, and emulators are engineer called Robert Yannes. He was the ilar to conventional music recording, these
available that let you run nearly all its soft- perfect choice for the job, motivated by a early composers had to be familiar with how
ware on modern hardware. What’s unusual long-standing interest in electronic sound. the SID chip was programmed at the hard-
is that a specific supporting chip inside the Although there were some advanced ware level, as well as its behavioral quirks.
16 | JUL 2019 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORGRESOURCES_EDUCATION
ELECTRONIC
SCHEMATICS FOR
BLIND MAKERS
LAUREN RACE
HAS REFINED
CIRCUIT SYMBOLS
FOR TACTILE
DIAGRAMS
THAT ’80S VIBE: Millions of At the time, these composers hen I was growing up, I remember read-
Commodore 64 home computers
were sold. The distinctive sound of
were generally unknown out-
side the games industry. Many of
W ing in an electronics-for-young-folk book that
good vision was a must-have if you wanted to
the computer’s SID chip is prized by
modern “chiptune” composers. them moved on to other things build or design electronics: Even color blindness was a se-
after the home computer boom rious limitation. This was a myth. In fact, there’s an active
faded and their peculiar hybrid combination of musical and program- community of people with low or no vision who are using
ming expertise was less in demand. In more recent years however, today’s maker ecosystem to solve problems in their daily
some of them have been celebrated, such as the prolific Ben Daglish, lives. And with some tweaks to the familiar symbols used
who composed the music for dozens of popular games. in circuit diagrams, that community could grow even larger.
Daglish (who created my favorite C64 soundtrack, for 1987’s “The Arduino platform is actually wonderful for accessi-
Re‑Bounder) was initially bemused that people in the 21st century bility because we can create our own tools. We can create
were still interested in music created for, and by, the SID chip, but he things that might be expensive on the market and cus-
became a popular guest at retrocomputing and so-called chiptunes tomize them to our needs,” says Chancey Fleet, the assis-
events before his untimely death in late 2018. tive technology coordinator at the Andrew Heiskell Braille
Chiptunes (also known as bitpop) is a genre of original music that and Talking Book Library in New York City. “There’s spe-
leans into the distinctive sound of 1980s computer sound chips. cific techniques that we use for soldering and for getting
Some composers use modern synthesizers programmed to replicate around the board,” says Fleet, giving the example of how
that sound, but others like to use the original hardware, especially the some people use a Braille stylus to count pins as though
SID chips (with or without the surrounding C64 system). Because the it’s “a tiny cane navigating the header.” (For more details
SID 6581 hasn’t been in production for many years, this has resulted about how to work as a visually impaired maker, Fleet rec-
in a brisk aftermarket for old chips—and one that’s big enough that ommends the Blind Arduino Project.)
crooks have made fake chips, or reconditioned dead chips, to sell However, one big obstacle to introducing blind and low-
to enthusiasts. Other people have created modern drop-in replace- vision people to electronics is circuit diagrams. Experienced
ments for the SID chip, such as the SwinSID. builders can use written descriptions of a circuit, but begin-
There are several options if you’d like to listen to a classic C64 game ners, in particular, benefit from the kind of spatial information
soundtrack or a modern chiptune without investing in hardware. You provided by a schematic. This came home to Lauren Race
KARL STAEDELE/PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES
can find many on YouTube, and projects like SOASC= are dedicated when she was a graduate student at New York University’s
to playing tunes on original SID chips and recording the output using Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), which bills
modern audio formats. But for a good balance between modern con- itself as a “center for the recently possible.”
venience and hard-core authenticity, I’d recommend using a player ITP had accepted its first blind and low-vision students,
like Sidplay, which emulates the SID chip and can play music data which prompted Tom Igoe, who teaches the i ntroductory
extracted from original software code. Even after the last SID chip physical computing class to make the course materials
finally burns out, its sound will live on. —STEPHEN CASS more accessible. The class’s labs are built around the
Arduino Uno microcontroller, but the schematics were
POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip0719 inaccessible to these students. Because of her previous
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUL 2019 | 17You can also read
