| |
Bruce D. Lightner's Home Page
Bruce Who?
I am a seventh generation Californian born in smoggy Los Angeles,
California. My mother (who had asthma) wised up and moved us to Guam
(on a freighter, the USS Luckenbach) when I was in the second grade. I
returned to LA (North Hollywood) in 1963 to finish high school...because
Typhon Karen blew away Guam's only high school. In 1966, as soon as I
graduated from North Hollywood High School, I too wised up and moved
from LA to San Diego to study something at Revelle College at UC San
Diego. (You can't choose a major there before your third year.) In
exchange for washing dishes, they eventually taught me chemistry. I met
my wife Sherri there...we both worked in the cafeteria. I didn't know
she was going get me to marry her at the time...but to her...and my...and
her parent's...surprise, she eventually did. The Revelle College Provost
finally made me graduate in 1972...but being clever, I enrolled in
graduate school at UCSD and managed to stay even longer, learning to be
a geo/cosmo-chemist. In the Chemistry Department at UCSD I learned a
lot about moon rocks and meteorites...and computers and electronics.
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
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 |
7,174,243 |
 |
Wireless, internet-based system for transmitting and analyzing GPS data
|
| 2 |
6,988,033 |
|
Internet-based method for determining a vehicle's fuel efficiency
|
| 3 |
6,928,348 |
|
Internet-based emissions test for vehicles
|
| 4 |
6,879,894 |
|
Internet-based emissions test for vehicles
|
| 5 |
6,732,032 |
|
Wireless diagnostic system for characterizing a vehicle's exhaust emissions
|
| 6 |
6,732,031 |
|
Wireless diagnostic system for vehicles
|
| 7 |
6,636,790 |
|
Wireless diagnostic system and method for monitoring vehicles
|
| 8 |
6,611,740 |
|
Internet-based vehicle-diagnostic system
|
| 9 |
6,604,033 |
|
Wireless diagnostic system for characterizing a vehicle's exhaust emissions
|
| 10 |
6,594,579 |
|
Internet-based method for determining a vehicle's fuel efficiency
|
| 11 |
5,987,588 |
|
Processor architecture providing for speculative execution of
instructions with multiple predictive branching and handling of trap
conditions
|
| 12 |
5,832,293 |
|
Processor architecture providing speculative, out of order execution of
instructions and trap handling
|
| 13 |
5,797,025 |
|
Processor architecture supporting speculative, out of order execution of
instructions including multiple speculative branching
|
| 14 |
5,708,841 |
|
Processor architecture providing speculative, out of order execution of
instructions
|
| 15 |
5,627,983 |
|
Processor architecture providing out-of-order execution
|
| 16 |
5,625,837 |
|
Processor architecture having out-of-order execution, speculative
branching, and giving priority to instructions which affect a condition
code
|
| 17 |
5,592,636 |
|
Processor architecture supporting multiple speculative branches and trap
handling
|
| 18 |
5,561,776 |
|
Processor architecture supporting multiple speculative branching
|
| 19 |
5,487,156 |
|
Processor architecture having independently fetching issuing and
updating operations of instructions which are sequentially assigned and
stored in order fetched
|
Send mail to Bruce at lightner@lightner.net.
If you want to send me "secret stuff",
use my PGP public key.
My .plan
file: Only [those] who attempt the absurd can
achieve the impossible. — Robin Morgan
Favorate computer quote:
A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. — Joseph Campbell
Last updated
Thu Oct 25 20:48:31 PDT 2007
Lightner Family Home Page
NoPaidParking.org
Friends of Sherri Lightner
SherriLightner.org
|
|
|
