THE G15 INTRAPLATE
Concept introduced

This entry dated February 28th, 2015. Intraplates {{{when available}}}
are sold in the electronics section of Avenuege stores. 
{{{A few rather 'quick-typing' issues corrected and
half a dozen explanatory sentences added here and there 
March 3rd, 2015; only those which seemed to be important
for the clarity to come through. Some spelling issues
remain, but we let them be.}}}


Any modifications or additions, in case needed,
will be added towards the completion of this page,
which is at: avenuege.com/intraplates

by Aristo Tacoma
Contact info: completion of this paper

THE INTRAPLATE
A novel electronics concept, part of the pathway from the
G15 software package at norskesites.org/fic3 to the
realisation of a computer running the G15 directly as O.S.
design, suitable for a range of also research oriented
first-hand electronics work

  

Illustrations composed via GEM in G15; note that the
notion of 'modifiable' refers to a computer made of
such units

Location of this whitepaper: 
http://www.avenuege.com/intraplates

This paper concerns hardware which is oriented towards
educational electronics, and also for production of 
the computer which runs the G15 Yoga6dorg instruction
set directly. For free download of the G15 Practical
Virtual Implementation for Linux and DOS pls consult:
norskesites.org/fic3



Slogan: the intraplate is a golden middle-way between
the traditional transistor and the microchip concept,
allowing human first-hand electronics also when
complex electronics requiring some compression is
required, without relaying on eg nanoscale chip wafer
foundries at all

Keyword: "intraplate" is hereby defined as an extremely
compact way of making available to the human electronics
person human-maintainable massive bundles of transistors
(or transistor-like components), capacitors, resistors 
and such elementary electronics components available by 
something scaled between the traditional transistor concept, 
and that of the microchip; and with wires, rather than 
pins; and so that whole computers can be designed from 
scratch without reliance on extremely costly microchip 
foundries; there are also numerous educational electronics
applications of our new concept of intraplates in 
electronics.

BACKGROUND: HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION METHODS OF COMPUTERS
========================================================
The computer concept arose in part due to speculations
over the foundations of pure logic and number theory by
the works of Alan Turing, directly in the wake of Kurt
Goedel's famous 2nd incompleteness theorem. Goedel, as is
well known, managed to utilise the systematization over
logic and number theory brought about by Bertrand Russell
and Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica
to show that self-reference is implied by their typed
set theory -- a self-reference that can only be avoided by
assuming that their set theory is incomplete. (The
alternative would be inconsistency.)
  Alan Turing evoked the notion of a person carrying out
certain procedural rules of computation -- a so-called
"Computer" -- in order to erect a thought experiment
connected to the meta-method that Kurt Goedel employed in
his article from around 1930. For, as Turing pointed out,
it seemed as though Goedel, by what Goedel called a form
of "meta-reasoning", was able to go beyond the limitations
of the rule-based axiomatic system he was investigating.
Could then not this approach of 'going beyond' become
itself the seed of an entirely new way of reaching a
sought completeness, which is also free from self-
contradictions? While Turing didn't achieve this result,
but in fact showed that Goedel's type of incompleteness
shows up again and again at meta-levels, the immensely
fruitful concept of the computer machine was thereby born.
  It took, however, the Second World War to provide
Turing with full finances to put together, by the
electronics means at the time -- involving electron vacuum
tubes and a set of mechanical switches and such -- a
first simplistic general computer; however Turing had
conceptualised much before this, and still more after
this, and reached notions covering essentially not only
all of algorithmic programming in general, but also such
as the type of (still algorithmic) programming involved in
'pattern matching' programs many decades after his death.
A great many contributions from other people are of course
necessary to bring in, if one wants to give a full
account of the history of digital computing; there are
also interesting pieces of machinery and of thinking along
these lines by other people long before Turing's work.
One can also then bring in discussions as to whether
Turing had somewhat overheated assumptions as to how far
a computer could go, -- in other words, that he perhaps
didn't fully take in over himself how fully the "goedelian
incompleteness" (as we can call it) would still imply
that something breaking with all algorithmic approaches,
and thus also breaking with the whole digital computer
concept, would be necessary to more fully understand what
he and a number of other philosophers have tentatively
called "intuition". This is outside of the scope of
this article, however, which is concerned solely with the
physical means by which computers are made.
  The role of the electron tubes in the earliest computers
is, as is well known, vaguely akin to that of a composite
valve of electricity. A gentle flow of electricity into
a tube can set off a strong current of electricity; and
by suitable modifications of the design, it can be set up
so that at least two such mild flows of similar current
must go into the tube for one strong flow to go through
it -- or that at least one of two such flows into the
tube is adequate to start the strong current. By a little
modification of the setup of some tubes, one can get the
arrangement that only when a mild current is NOT given
to a tube, then a strong current will indeed flow through
it. We see here parallels to the boolean logic operators
of AND, OR, and NOT, and the related operator of XOR.
  It has been shown that given some means of temporary
storing a voltage value as either 'high' or 'low', --
parallel to the notion of 1 and 0, or "one bit" --
combined with not much more than a big bundle of such
AND, OR and NOTs, one can construct the addition operator
for numbers represented in the socalled binary decimal
system. While this is simple in theory, the fact is that
the quantity of such gates grow almost exponentially
for each additional bit required, and even with as many
as 16 bits, one still gets numbers not higher than about
65536, or signed numbers up to about 32767. To achieve
a more psychologically convenient range of up to about
plus minus two billion, one would need as much as twice
that many bits again, or 32 bits. And still more boolean
gates are needed for more operations, like multiplication; 
and to actually construct all the operations necessary for 
a general computer one would have to have a whole range of
additional operations, each with a more or less great
requirement of logical gates. In praxis, this means that
with a starting-point where something like three-finger-
sized electron vacuum tubes are used for the gates, even
merely an 8-bit computer would easily require hundreds
of square meters and corresponding enormous amounts of
electricity.
  As soon as germanium, and later silicium, and some
other substances with some metallic features, called
"semiconductors" (half-conductors) were found (with 
suitable microscopic additions of such as antimony, 
boron and more to highly purified semiconductors) to be 
able to act as logical gates for much smaller voltages, and
without heating required, these began to replace electron
tubes not only in radios and amplifiers and such, but
also in computers. But the semiconductors had new
challenges connected to them, and one was brittleness:
they easily overheated, in which case their fine
crystalline quantum field derived gate-like functionality
would no longer be available. And even with these much
smaller entities, something like a 'home computer' or a
'personal computer' was entirely unrealistic: for while
such a computer ought to have in an extremely minimal
sense at least 16 bit, but more preferrably a full 32 bit
range, capable of representing huge catalogues of both
books and images and also to advanced permutations within
its address range, even a relatively weak 16-bit computer
of the transistor (or transistor-like) type still took up 
considerably more size than a living-room. And then only 
with powerful fans enabled, and most rudimentary input-
output devices such as paper cards with holes and textual 
only paper-printed output, at least initially.
  The electron tube was, in the phase, effectively
replaced by the transistor, and related forms of
semiconductors, with much the same type of idea of
its functionality. Each transistor (or related concept,
such as thyristor, MOSfet and such), just as each tube,
requires a couple of very simple components to modulate
its operation -- notably the resistor (which we in our
works often call a 'modulator', for it modulates voltage),
a capacitor (which is little but two metallic plates near
one another without touching), and the coil. Incidentally,
the same components are also used in radios, and radios,
just as computers, need oscillations in order to drive
their processes.
  Still, with this type of transistor computer, a great
deal of developments took place in universities and other
research institutes in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the quest
took a leap, at least commercially, by the successful
production of microscopic-sized transistor-like components,
wired up together with equally microscopic-sized capacitors,
resistors and coils. This step, a result of contributions
by many as all the other steps, was successfully (in a
commercial sense) fulfilled first by the company Texas 
Instruments, a Texas, USA company.
  Already in the first years of the 1980s, the IBM company
launched its first Personal Computer, and established a
set of ways of doing hardware which became embedded, and
elaborated upon by many, in the following decades of "PC"
productions. Throughout all these years, the notion of
microchips was dominant, and although this meant that,
efficiently, all design of the core computer was taken
entirely away from engineers doing their own soldering and
fitting together of individual components like transistors
and capacitors and such, it became commercial viable and
technically possible to make more and more bits and more
and more computer memory compressed into less and less
space, and at a price which appealed to the many. In this
process, a number of companies, including such as Intel
and AMD, arose, which produced whole computers integrated
into chips at their 'wafer foundries'. However the
extremely stringent conditions under which such microchips
are developed meant that all essential computer
development could only happen at a few extremely costly
places on the planet. This is in contrast to transistors,
which to a fair extent can be made by means of such as
a high school chemistry lab when equipped with not too
complicated extra equipment and not too hard-to-obtain
substances. While people of course were at liberty to buy
these microchips and fit some components around them
and in that sense 'put together their own computer', the
tremendous complexity of a large part of the CPU-
oriented microchips (with the exception of those 
consciously made with a 'Reduced Instruction Set'
notion), and the complexity, then, with many of them,
also of the underlaying  'machine language',
meant that, in some sense, by the advent of microchips,
the bottom had fallen out of the enterprise of hobby
electronics. Hobby electronics became now much a matter 
of wiring up that which is predesigned to work in various
ways -- whether as full computer microchips, or more
general-purpose less complicated chips with a bundle
of microscopic components in them, and 'pins' sticking
out to which one can fasten one's wires to other such
components, as well as to traditional components. Those
who wanted to have more complex functionality coming
straight from a chip could buy kits where certain
sections of a microchip is capable of holding some
programs, so as to burn in some programs into the chip
itself -- but still, this type of so-called "ASIC" or
Application Specific Integrated Chip design relied fully
on the outputs of the industrial wafer foundries plants,
of which there could only be a few in the world, due to
the immense technical complexities involved in designing
something involving such microscopic sizes.



NEED FOR ALTERNATIVE TO THE MICROCHIP CONCEPT
=============================================
When one reads in literature connected to the research of
the microchip foundries, this research is typically
oriented towards squeezing yet more components into even
less space, or in a way that requires somewhat less
cooling or a material which involves greater reliability.
There's also research on other types of comptuters, where
the notion of the digital boolean gate is imagined to be
just one of several, and where it is sought -- but perhaps
without any single convincing result so far -- to exploit
and manipulate more elements of that which is pointed to
by quantum theory than those features already called on
by the notion of semiconductors (which is wholly a quantum
concept).
  One can imagine the commercial agendas of the few
privileged places on the planet competing with each other,
in a little club, to make microchips. However, for most
people with a technical interest, it is of great
importance to be aware that an aspect of the situation
remains untouched by the endavours of these giant, rich,
super-specialised factories, an aspect that we have
hinted at in the previous section. And that is the fact
that only up to the transistor computer, was there a
capacity for the individual technical expert, working on
a local computer installation, to have a direct contact
with the actual design of the computer and even to be
able to affect it, change it, and repair it when need be.
For only as long as the components were of a kind that
could be, at least in principle, be handled by people,
could the design of the computers be said to be in any
true electronics sense to be open and transparent --
at least relative to the hobby electronics person. Now
one might argue that the hobby electronics interested
individual can still read the design description of the
chip (insofar as it is provided in detail by one of the
chip foundries), and such an individual is still free to
get first-hand experiments e.g. by tinning together such
as a radio. What would be the need for individuals to have
more of a direct say in the underlaying computer structure
when this is so inexpensive and easy to acquire by means
of using any of the inexpensive premade chips?
  To understand why this type of response isn't
satisfactory in the long run one must take a step back
and ask for the greater evolution of the consciousness
of humanity in the technological era, and ask what type
of self-education process humanity is in, and OUGHT to be
in, relative to what directions technology ought to take.
The microchip production is eminently suited to create a
power monopoly on behalf of those very few individuals
in charge of microchip foundries. The larger currents of
self-education in humanity involves also such questions
as how does science affect the understanding humanity
has of itself and nature, and cosmos as a whole? And how
can one make science come alive during the education
process of the also very young? One can see here the
value of the much-quoted statement by the hellene
philosopher Aristotle, dating to about half a millenium
before Christ: "A small error in the beginning grows to
a large error eventually."
  And in the self-education process of humanity, we must
certainly regard the shutting away of the process to
have a first-hand connection, directly, to the design
of one of the most-used technological instruments in all
humanity, as an error which, however small it may appear
in the beginning, can become a grave error if it is
allowed to proceed in unfettered ways without any
challenge.
  To frame the question more positively, isn't there
something that can be done, in order that the core
computer Central Processing Unit, or CPU design, can
be made more transparent, open, and possible to both
maintain and change for individuals? Must there be a
complete goodbye-saying to soldering more or less 
individual transistors and related components in an
advanced age of electronics where the making and 
modification of computers and computer-related piece of
electronics are essential points? And indeed, if there
is a way which doesn't have the challenges of the early
transistor computers, nor the challenges of the microchip
foundry factory based computers of the just-mentioned
sort, we should go on this way. And, the G15 PC concept,
first made in software as a virtual CPU run on top of
existing commercially available computers, has led us
to construct a solution, a pathway, and we call this the
G15 INTRAPLATE. It is here presented for the first time
in detail. It is a novel concept not in terms of what
it achieves technically, but only in HOW it achieves it,
in its 'humane' or 'hobby electronics' radiance, so to
speak.

THE INTRAPLATE CONCEPT AS STEPPING-STONE TO G15 HARDWARE
========================================================
This concept paper, with this and the next section, and 
the two former sections, is written while the software of 
the G15 is existing, with a virtual CPU emulation on top 
of Linux and the G15 Yoga6dorg assembly performing well 
also in a higher-level script language with some 
inspirations from Forth and many other languages, which 
we call PMN. It is written before we have done serious 
hardware work. This concept paper is to explain the work 
process, and set forth the concept -- the Intraplate 
concept. This word has some uses in geology, connected to 
subterrenian plates and their movements during earthquakes 
and such. In our use, which is entirely more peaceful and 
less dramatic, we use the word 'intra' simply in the sense 
'existing within boundaries, a connection within a domain', 
and 'plate' in the sense of an electronics element with 
some complexity, somewhat like a microchip and yet not a
microchip. The idea here of 'intra' is threefold: each
plate have some inner connections, but not so many as
to exclude further design in hobby lab usage; several
plates are normally required for any advanced design,
and so they are connected; and thirdly, while this is
admittedly a little more complicated than the making
of transistors, it is not much more complicated -- this
is, then, an INcorporating of TRAnsistors (IN-TRA) (by
which we here mean not just the classical three-pin
NPN or PNP transitor, but also related semiconductor
types), among other suitable components in a way which 
is not microscopic, merely compressed by precision work.
{In contrast to the transistors, though, intraplates
have a compression and precision factor which obviously
call on some minute precision-work most suitable for
elementary kinds of factory-like robots, with robotic
movement possibilities, robotic arms, and a simple
camera.}
  While, with the microchips, the aim is to put as much
electronics components in an as little piece as possible,
the concept of the intraplate is to put a group of
electronics components together in a way that allows
the construction of such as digital computer CPUs and
related components out of them. The aim with the
intraplate is to put enough components that the quantity
of intraplates required to make up a whole digital compute
with both CPU and RAM and such as monitor, keyboard and
mouse controllers constructed out of them isn't all that
great, while each intraplate isn't so compressed that
first-hand electronics work cannot be done with it.
  The intraplate concept overlaps with the functionality
of a certain type of general-purpose microchips, which
do not by themselves have anything like a full CPU on
them, but which, when wired up with many other similar
chips, can be used to make up a CPU somehow. For there
are, indeed, very many various microchips in commercial
existence today, in addition to dedicated full CPU
microchips. But the intraplate has a design objective
which is different: it aims to make it unnecessary
altogheter to use a CPU microchip, and it also aims to
make it as easy as possible to construct a CPU and the
rest of a computer by means of itself.
  The intraplate, then, first and foremost, is a set of
condensed transistors, capacitors, resistors and such,
with a minimum of pre-designed-ness about them, and 
made in a way that doesn't require extremely complicated
factories, and which has a format that allows hobby
electronics work in a way which is genuinely open --
not merely a question of wiring predesigned circuits. 
We are speaking of a whole different approach to
such as digital electronics construction -- and part of
an advanced level of what we elsewhere have called
"Elsketch", or learning by 'sketching' electronics. The
intraplate is in general larger than the more or less
nail-sized microchips commonly in existence. The quanity
of connectors to each intraplate is by necessity huge,
in order that it is possible to regard each intraplate
as also a first-hand hobby electronics concept where what
has been acquired is simply a set of very small
components rather than a premade wiring. One of the
distinct challenges for hobby, or more generally,
research-oriented and first-hand electronics in dealing
with nail-sized chips surrounded by myriad tiny 'pins',
many of which stand very close to one another and can
easily break, is to be able to not only design, but also
redesign connections involving them. In the standard
proposed intraplate concept for G15, each intraplate
does not only have a more robust size, but it comes
with labelled bundles of individually marked plastic-
insulated copper wires. In order to construct computer 
elements out of a group of intraplates, one doesn't need 
to engage in high-level precision board circuit design 
of a type that cannot be easily altered if the design 
isn't working all that well. Instead, one can connect, 
disconnect and reconnect wires individually by patient 
precision work with the same type of tinning instruments 
and such as used in the 1970s hobby electronics 
laboratories. But the operation will be able to proceed 
into real computer design, for the intraplates involves 
thousands and thousands of condensed transistors with 
associated components, and a similar number of wires, 
made so that it makes economical sense, and sense also 
in terms of sizes and power supplies required, for 
individuals to do electronics work with them.
  The intraplates that we propose are that of a whole
conceptual range, some more adequate to make computer CPU,
some more for its RAM memory, some more for associated
technical input/output tasks, some more for network
connectivity, some more for such as disk control, etc.


CHALLENGES THAT CAN BE MET WITH INTRAPLATES IN COMPUTING
========================================================
We shall mention here some of the challenges involved
with engaging intraplates, also so as to show that the
component of cool realism is required -- there aren't
only advantages over microchips once we start to use
intraplates to make computers of them. There is a set of
meetable challenges, so to speak.
  One of them concerns the degree to which complexity
at the CPU level can be tolerated. The G15 PC has been
designed by means of around 250 instructions, most of
them utterly simple, although some of them presuming some
specialised electronics e.g. for mouse pointer showing
or keyboard reading and buffering, or for pixel-refresh,
as well as some loop operators. But this bundle of
instructions is so that it is after all enormously simple
compared to the level that with the microchip industry
became typical in widely available computers -- yet
without there being any clear reason in favour of this
complexity at the core level. The core level ought to be
simple in order for it to be stable.
  So this challenge has been met, and -- as any peruse of
the G15 y6 package will show, successfully.
  Another challenge is that any distance and any use of
such as copper wires when things are oscillating, as they
are, at the level of many megahertzes, means that there
are sensitivities involved connected to radio waves being
generated and transferred between the elements in the
process. This challenge increases the higher the quantity
of megahertz increases. This challenge must be met in a
twofold way, at least: one is that the G15 PC is designed
so as to accomodate a moderate, and not overly intense,
degree of megahertz, as a design component which is
inherent even in the language. (This has been achieved.)
  The other way to address this is physically, by means
of powerful radio wave insulation elements e.g. made of
gold inserted into construction at suitable points, and
with care taken that components most likely to produce
and be wired into fast and relatively strong oscillations
are positioned smartly near one another.
  The intraplates will need cooling, and presumably, while
there are certain advantages when it comes to this aspect
in the increased size of the computing machinery when
it's made of intraplates rather the microchips, the
role of active cooling is likely to be such, in most
intraplate computers, that a considerable space of the
computer must be set aside solely to ensure great cooling.
  The size of the computer, and its weight, is obviously
itself a challenge. We can only say that if it can as
easily as a fridge fit into a home, and with all the
advantages relative to self-education, home computing, and
being part of an optimistic first-hand spirit relative
to what technology can mean for the human race, then this
will be an acceptable size.
  Finally, even with all the aims going into simplifying
the design of the core components of a real 32-bit
Avenuege G15 PC with several dozens of megabytes of RAM
in it and an assortment of natural devices connected to
it, including a 1024*768 greentone monitor, a full QWERTY
Ascii 7-bit keyboard, mouse, disk, net connection to other
such PCs, and means for backups, we are talking of such
a number of intraplates and such a vast number of wires
coming from them that the whole PC, in this case, is a
daunting task for any individual to put together even
given many seasons of full-time work dedicated to just
this. What instead has be done is to say that when the
work must be oriented towards the full Avenuege PC
construction, in order to make several such with fair
ease, we need some automated robotic arms and such to
do the main bulk of the connections. This is however
compatible with the idea that it is still a product that,
even at this level of complexity, has a PRINCIPLE of
openness to first-hand electronics work maintained
throughout itself. The individual transistors, which can
be made in any relatively well-equipped laboratory given
very pure samples of the right conductors, are almost,
but not quite, products coming straight from nature.
The notion of condensing them, while requiring some
extra machinery, is not dependent on superspecialised
plants utilising electron microscopes in their design--
it is simply a more precise, and somewhat smaller
process of putting together transistors -- along a
continuum. So the principle of first-handedness, of
openness towards hobby electronics, and of a preference
to only use components that are more obvious in their
composition, and nearer that which can be made straight
from Nature, is maintained in our intraplate concept.

======================================================
======================================================



Contact info for author of the above,
Stein Henning Reusch Braten {son of professor 
Stein Braten and his wife Else Reusch Braten},
with pen names derived from family history 
names including Maria von Weber, and artist 
name includes Aristo Tacoma:

h-reusch@frisurf.no
Yoga4d von Reusch Gamemakers
Holmenv 68
N-0376 Oslo

Yoga4d von Reusch Gamemakers is
a private company registered in
Oslo, Norway, wholly owned by
Stein Henning Reusch Braten. 
It is he and his private company,
which also owns the Avenuege stores,
which has the copyright to the Intraplates
concept in electronics, the Avenuege 
G15 PC concept, and to the
range of terms associated with
the G15 Yoga6dorg PMN product,
also as informal trademarks enforced 
by use. There are however generous
licenses associated with the great
quantity of source released together
with the G15 platform, inviting 
both research and commerce, as long
as acknowledgements and such are
intact.