Bruce D. Lightner's Home Page

Bruce Who?

Although I am technically a chemist, no one seems to want to pay me for that. Instead, they pay me for something I never studied in school: computers. That's actually best, because I never liked chemistry that much, except for the computers...and the part where we melted moon rocks with a big radio transmitter and analyzed the He, Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe isotopes which leaked out.

Up until December 1998, when the semiconductor giant STMicroelectronics purchased all outstanding shares, I worked for a ~50-person company I co-founded in 1987, Metaflow Technologies, Inc. in La Jolla, California. They designed "bleeding edge" microprocessors. I helped.

Metaflow was the pioneer in the application of out-of-order, speculative instruction execution to both RISC and CISC (i.e., Intel 80x86) microprocessors. In fact we created most of the terms now used to describe this then novel, but now commonplace, microarchitecture. A paper I co-authored and published in 1991 ("The Metaflow Architecture", IEEE Micro, vol. 11, No. 3, June 1991) describing our inventions is called out as "prior art" in 295 granted U.S. patents (as of May 2003). Metaflow's (and my) first patent (US5487156), filed in 1990 was used by Intel as part of it's then famous August 1997 patent infringement counter claim against DEC [ed. make that Compaq...no, make that HP!]. (A total of 190 of Intel's U.S. microprocessor patents reference our prior work, as of May 2003...growing at a rate of about one new reference per month.)

In 2000, after a brief "retirement" (which didn't "take"), I helped co-found another company, Networkcar, Inc., a "telematics" company focused on the consumer automobile market. As luck would have it, Networkcar was located within a block of Metaflow, so I don't have to find new places to eat at lunchtime! About three years, and a half-dozen patents later, we sold the company to the "billion-dollar information services company" Reynolds & Reynolds, at the end of 2002.

A few years (and four patents) later, Hughes Telematics bought Networkcar from Reynolds & Reynolds, at the end of 2006. I'm still helping out Networkcar.

Me and the Media

• Click here to read my 1991 "tongue-in-cheek" essay on the great RISC-CISC computer debate, complete with its sordid history...and the essay's "RISC Police" cartoon from IEEE Times.

• I served on a sometimes-serious, mostly humorous panel session called "If I Were Defining Merced..." at IEEE HOT Chips IX, Stanford University, August 25, 1997. My slides poking fun at Intel got a few laughs, and the others some serious press coverage...much to all the panel members' surprise!

• My past "15 minutes of fame" press coverage can be found below:
  • April 5, 1999 BankingInfo.Com (My BofA "Customer from Hell" WWW article)
  • January 26, 1998 Computing Canada (HOT Chips IX)
  • January 19, 1998 Computer Dealer News (HOT Chips IX)
  • September 8, 1997 Info World article (HOT Chips IX)
  • September 1, 1997 Electronic News (HOT Chips IX)
  • September 1, 1997 EE Times (HOT Chips IX)
  • August 29, 1997 PC World (HOT Chips IX)
  • June 2, 1997 Electronic News article (Metaflow)
  • August 22, 1994 Electronic News (HOT Chips VI)
  • August 15, 1994 EE Times (HOT Chips VI)
  (The press seldom gets the facts straight!)

• I even used to have a video which you too could purchase for $29.95 from University Video Communications until they went out of business. I didn't get a dime of the proceeds...gotta' cut a deal for "residuals" next time! (It was even on UVC's best-seller list!) Today you can find the video free online, hosted by Microsoft at the Multi-University/Research Laboratory as a Windows Media Player video stream.

Random Stuff

• One of my character flaws involves the coveting of old VWs (I own two...plus lot's of parts). I also like to go camping in the desert. Put the two together and you can call it a hobby...and hobbies need a Web page!

• Back by popular demand the Manx Dunebuggy Club 2000 Archive is back online. This is a snaphot-in-time of the Manx Dune Buggy Club's Web site, as of September 2000, at which time most of the content went "dark" because the material was turned over to "professional" Web Weenies, Now it is back! You can find the WW's WWW site here.

• Read my (hopefully) humorous "Customer-from-Hell" short story about my dealings with Bank of America "automated tellers".

• My morning commute from home to work is about 3 miles. See what happened one of the rare days I decided to take the freeway instead of the surface streets. (I had my digital camera along for the ride.) I now stay off of the freeway...or should I say "runway"?

• I hacked someone's animated GIF showing a frustrated programmer. It's now my proposed international symbol for a Microsoft User.

Computer-Related Projects

• PicoWeb^TM - A couple of friends and I have made a tiny stand-alone Web server called PicoWeb^TM. The photo of the PicoWeb printed circuit board shows that it is smaller than a business card. We believe that in terms of stand-alone, full-function Web servers, at one time it was both the World's Smallest Web Server, as well as the World's Cheapest Web Server. We have an electronic print article about the PicoWeb server project in the Circuit Cellar Online area of the ChipCenter Web site.

• A Tiny (under 1024 bytes) AVR Bootstap - Larry Barello's version of Jason Kyle's avr-gcc-based boot-loader, reworked to fit in only 512 AVR instruction-words, is now available on this Web site under "ARCbootloader" at http://www.lightner.net/avr/bootstap/.

• Programming RAM-less AVR Microcontrollers with GCC - In the spirit of making the seemingly impossible possible, I've figured out how to use GNU "avr-gcc" to program really cheap (i.e., <$1) Atmel ATtiny AVR microcontrollers which do not have any internal RAM. This "mis-use" of GCC is completely unsupported by the "avr-gcc" community. You too can find out how I do it by clicking here. This technique has been used as the basis of many of my embedded projects, including one resulting in a recent article in Circuit Cellar Magazine (July 2006).

• Actiontec Dual PC Modem Development Daughterboard - This home-built printed circuit board (PCB) provides the Actiontec Dual PC Modem with an uClinux console (115,200 baud, RS-232 levels), plus a USB port for bootstrap recovery. This Web page provides complete details, including complete schematics, PCB layout (for PCB Express), photos, a DigiKey parts order form.

  

• Digital Camera Software - I bought a 25 MHz Compaq Concerto "pen-based" laptop for $200 from a friend. It appealed to me because it was cheap, needs no keyboard, and the screen can be read in full sunlight (it's a monochrome LCD). It's a perfect thing for off-roading. However, it's processor is too slow to download my Epson PhotoPC digital camera using Epson's Windows 95 TWAIN driver. So I consulted the Web and found Muscovite Eugene Crosser's digital camera software site. He has Unix-based software to control and download Epson PhotoPC digital cameras. So I converted his software to run under Windows 95/NT. The official Windows PhotoPC software release (sources and executables) can be found at www.lightner.net/lightner/bruce/photopc/. The "non-GUI" camera downloading software works perfectly with my new (old) laptop, plus it can download the camera on other PC's in a fraction of the time the official TWAIN driver takes! I've also created an MS-DOS version of the PhotoPC software after discovering that the only reasonable MS-DOS version out there was shareware...with no sources.

  I've created a HTML document describing the PhotoPC program. So far many thousands of people have downloaded the Windows/MS-DOS version of the software, which is compatible with a larger number of digital camera models from several camera makers.

• Cheap HTTP Daemon - My good friend Steve Freyder put together all the pieces for a Perl-based "Cheap" HTTP daemon for Windows 95/NT which you too can have! It consists of a HTTPD written in Perl (less than 160 lines at the present time) and an INET daemon written in Microsoft Visual C++. Also included in the distribution is a version of Perl for Windows 95/98/Me/XP/NT/2000. With this free software one can host a Web site on a Windows PC, such as the one I used to use with my Roadrunner cable modem "firewall" Windows 95 PC. (I've sinced switched to Apache under Redhat Linux.) If you don't like what the HTTP daemon does, you can fix it...it's a small matter of (Perl) programming!

  

• My Neighborhood from "Space" - I ordered a aerial photo dataset of La Jolla, California from the USGS and created some software in order view the data...the USGS gives one nothing! The resolution of the photo is about one meter per pixel. It's called an "digital orthophoto quarter quad" by the USGS, which means it has been warped back into true map coordinates. My early attempt of a "clickable aerial photo" of La Jolla, California is now ready for action.

• San Diego from "Space" - I put together a "clickable aerial photo map" of San Diego County, California. The photo map is a mosaic of USGS aerial photos "snarfed" by using some Perl scripts to submit the proper HTML forms to the USGS database...this ain't easy! (Now you can get the same thing from Microsoft at http://terraserver.microsoft.com/. They cover most of the continental U.S. with the USGS database...but I was first!)

  

• WebCD - I put my Sony 200-disc music CD changer that I got for my birthday on the 'Net with a few Perl scripts and a one-transistor PC parallel-port Sony S-Link (a.k.a., Control-A1) interface. (See www.brian-patti.com/s-link/ for relevant links.) My home-grown software gathers information from the CD-changer regarding what CD's are loaded, then queries the CDDB database using the Web to build a local database of CD artist, song titles, and (sometimes) even song lyrics. Adding a single IR LED to one of the parallel port bits gave me IR control of the changer, needed to enter text for real-time front-panel display of CD titles. A sample control Web page is there for you to play with, but you cannot control my CD player. However, I can from any of the many PC's in my house, and (via password) from anywhere on the Web. Recently, I replaced the PC parallel port connection to the Sony CD changer with one using a PicoWeb^TM.

Publications

• Tiny AVR Serial Port Programmer, Circuit Cellar Magazine #192, p. 20, July 2006.
• AVR-Based Fuel Consumption Gauge, Circuit Cellar Magazine #183, p. 59, October 2005. (PDF file) (Winner of First Prize in 2004 AVR Design Contest)
• Look Ma, No PC! A $55 WebCam, Circuit Cellar Magazine #121, p. 20, August 2000. (PDF file)
• A $25 Web Server, Circuit Cellar Online #108, July 1999.
• If I Were Defining Merced..., B. Lightner, HOT Chips IX, 1997 IEEE Symposium on High Performance Chips, August 25, 1997.
• Metaflow's Thunder SPARC Processor, B. Lightner, HOT Chips VI, 1994 IEEE Symposium on High Performance Chips, August 16, 1994. (slides, video)
• Zen and the Struggle Between Communism and CISC, V. Popescu and B. Lightner, Electronic Engineering Times, May 6, 1991. (Humorous essay which earned a thank you letter from Gorden Moore, then CEO of Intel Corp.)
• The Metaflow Architecture, V. Popescu, G. Gibson, J. Spracklin, B. Lightner, D. Isaman, IEEE Micro, vol. 11, No. 3, June 1991, pp. 10-13,63-73. (Called out as "prior art" by almost 300 U.S. Patents as of May 2003.)
• The Metaflow Lightning Chipset, Bruce D. Lightner and Gene Hill, CompCon Spring '91, 36th IEEE Computer Society International Conference, 1991, Digest of Papers, pp. 13-17.
• The Lightning Superscalar SPARC Implementation, B. Lightner and G. Hill, Microprocessor Forum, Proceedings, October 10, 1990, San Francisco, California.
• The Metaflow Architecture, B. Lightner, HOT Chips II, 1990 IEEE Symposium on High Performance Chips, August 14, 1990.
• Designing and Programming the CHoPP Supercomputer, T. Mankovich, L. Cohn, V. Popescu, H. Sullivan, B. Lightner, T. McWilliams, T. Bashkow, Supercomputing Systems: Architectures, Design, and Performance, 1989, ISBN 0-442-25615-9, pp. 106-153.
• Lunar Trapped Xenon, B. Lightner and K. Marti, Proceedings of the Fifth Lunar Science Conference, 1974, Geochimica Acta, Suppl. 4, Vol. 1, pp. 200-210.
• Krypton and Xenon in Some Lunar Samples and the Age of North Ray Crater, K. Marti, B. Lightner and T. Osborn, Proceedings of the Fourth Lunar Science Conference, 1973, Geochimica Acta, Suppl. 3, Vol. 2, pp. 2037-2048.
• On ²⁴⁴Pu in Lunar Rocks from Fra Mauro and Implications Regarding their Origin, K. Marti, B. Lightner and G. Lugmair, The Moon, Issue 8, 1973, pp. 241-250.
• Rare Gas Record in the Largest Apollo 15 Rock, K. Marti, B. Lightner, Science, Issue 175, 1972, pp. 421-422. (Paper submitted and accepted while still an undergraduate.)

Issued Patents

	PAT. NO.		Title
1	6,988,033		Internet-based method for determining a vehicle's fuel efficiency
2	6,928,348		Internet-based emissions test for vehicles
3	6,879,894		Internet-based emissions test for vehicles
4	6,732,032		Wireless diagnostic system for characterizing a vehicle's exhaust emissions
5	6,732,031		Wireless diagnostic system for vehicles
6	6,636,790		Wireless diagnostic system and method for monitoring vehicles
7	6,611,740		Internet-based vehicle-diagnostic system
8	6,604,033		Wireless diagnostic system for characterizing a vehicle's exhaust emissions
9	6,594,579		Internet-based method for determining a vehicle's fuel efficiency
10	5,987,588		Processor architecture providing for speculative execution of instructions with multiple predictive branching and handling of trap conditions
11	5,832,293		Processor architecture providing speculative, out of order execution of instructions and trap handling
12	5,797,025		Processor architecture supporting speculative, out of order execution of instructions including multiple speculative branching
13	5,708,841		Processor architecture providing speculative, out of order execution of instructions
14	5,627,983		Processor architecture providing out-of-order execution
15	5,625,837		Processor architecture having out-of-order execution, speculative branching, and giving priority to instructions which affect a condition code
16	5,592,636		Processor architecture supporting multiple speculative branches and trap handling
17	5,561,776		Processor architecture supporting multiple speculative branching
18	5,487,156		Processor architecture having independently fetching issuing and updating operations of instructions which are sequentially assigned and stored in order fetched

• Let the U.S. Patent Office make an up-to-date list for you

My .plan file: Only [those] who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible. -- Robin Morgan

Last updated Thu Oct 25 20:48:31 PDT 2007