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60 SMT Magazine • October 2016 walk about learning about the country, makes a very positive impression. When dealing multicultural team mem- bers in your country, find ways to be inclusive. At a working team level consider multicultural lunch pot lucks or if you go out to eat as a team periodically for lunch, rotate through ethnic restaurants to get a taste for each team mem- ber's home cuisine, if possible. In short, make every team member feel valued through inter- est in their culture, cuisine and traditions. The dividend of this type of relationship building is often the ability to discuss "culture clash" easily when it occurs. Working cross culturally is a continuous learning experience. Understanding the behav- ior patterns driven by the cultures of your team members, having discussions about differences and similarities, and creating an environment where people who are uncomfortable can dis- cuss their concerns can go a long way to elim- inating cultural conflict and building strong teams. SMT Susan Mucha is the president of Powell-Mucha Consulting Inc. To reach the author, click here. Researchers at North Carolina State University have de- veloped new, non- linear, chaos-based integrated circuits that enable comput- er chips to perform multiple functions with fewer transis- tors. These integrat- ed circuits can be manufactured with "off the shelf" fabrication processes and could lead to novel computer architectures that do more with less circuitry and fewer transistors. Moore's law states that the number of tran- sistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years in order to keep up with processing de- mands. Previously this goal has been addressed by shrinking the size of individual transistors so that more could be added to the chip. However, that solution is quickly becoming untenable, and the semiconductor industry is looking for new ways to create better computer chips. Behnam Kia, senior research scholar in physics at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work, and NC State colleague Wil- liam Ditto, professor of physics and dean of the College of Sci- ences, worked on the conception, design, development and fabrication of an in- tegrated circuit chip that contains work- ing nonlinear circuits to perform multiple different digital computations. In Kia's design, the transistor circuit can be pro- grammed to implement different instructions by morphing between different operations and func- tions. The heart of the design is an analog non- linear circuit, but the interface is fully digital, en- abling the circuit to operate as a fully morphable digital circuit that can be easily connected to the other digital systems. The researchers have produced an alternative approach for computing that is compatible with existing technology and utilizes the same fabrica- tion process and CAD tools as existing computer chips, which could aid commercial adoption. Reconfigurable Chaos-based Microchips Offer Possible Solution to Moore's Law BUILDING BRIDGES WITH CROSS-CULTURAL TEAMS