Protocols in Electronic Design

TalkVikram ShakerJune 5, 2025

Engineer Vikram Shaker (Qualcomm RF front-end) surveys protocols across electronic design, from hard standards like NIST's cesium-clock definition of the second and the 50-ohm coaxial impedance convention, to communication standards (USB, chiplet interconnects like UCIe and CXL), validation failures (Intel's Pentium FDIV bug and the resulting birth of formal verification), and documentation disasters (NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter unit mismatch). He frames these through Protocol Institute concepts like 'tension' versus 'trade-off' and the efficiency-thoroughness (ETO) frontier, and closes by examining unwritten cultural, ethical, and geopolitical protocols governing chip industry work.

Topics

chiplet-interconnect-protocols-ucie-cxl-bow documentation-and-tribal-protocol-failures efficiency-thoroughness-eto-frontier formal-verification-vs-brute-force-validation governance protocols research standardization-protocols-nist-50-ohm-impedance technology town-hall

Related resources

Talk

The State of Climate Protocols

Cory Levenson (Corey Levenson), an engineer and climate tech consultant previously with Regen Network, surveys the state of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) protocols, distinguishing 'closed system' pathways like direct air capture and biochar (easy MRV, high cost) from 'open system' pathways like enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement (cheaper but harder to quantify due to attribution challenges). He details emerging data protocols—including the Carbon Data Open Protocol, Cascade's ERW Data Query, and Carbon to Sea's Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Data Protocol—and argues the field should adopt community-governed standards bodies (like OBO Foundry or schema.org's science working group) rather than letting registries like Isometric capture scientific protocol development.

Cory Levenson

Talk

Psychological Safety I & II

Timber Stinson-Schroff argues that AI's workplace effects should be studied through occupational health frameworks rather than existential-risk AI safety, proposing 'cognitive ergonomics' as a better term than 'psychological safety' since it emphasizes chronic, long-term pathologies (like carpal tunnel from typewriters) over acute incidents. Drawing on the safety-one/safety-two distinction from traditional safety literature, Stinson-Schroff advocates crowdsourcing a database of AI usage hazards and pathologies—such as the 'yes man problem' from fast LLM responses and speech pattern changes—toward an eventual diagnostic manual, while cautioning against liability blind spots given the slow, second-order mechanisms by which these harms emerge.

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Talk

Trust Experience Glitches: AI Agents, Delegated Autonomy, and Legitimacy

Helena Rong (Assistant Professor at NYU Shanghai, director of the Protopolis Lab) presents a taxonomy of 'trust experience glitches'—six failure modes (agency assertion, epistemic camouflage, delegation ambiguity, opacity at scale, cascading autonomy, revocation failure) drawn from a 167-incident dataset of agentic AI failures. She argues these ruptures expose a 'consequence reception problem' where autonomous agents lack a stable body to bear accountability, and proposes that governance must shift from ex-post legal remedies toward upstream protocol primitives (capability-based permissions, provenance tracking, action-class legibility, circuit breakers, revocability) as the 'traffic lights' of the agentic web.</summary>

Helena Rong