2018: A Year of Breakfasts

It's the start of a new year. Tomorrow, I'll pick out what I think that the big trends for 2019 are going to be. But today, let's take a look at how my predictions for 2018 fared from my post Nibbles: Breakfast Bytes Predictions for 2018. You can make your own judgment about whether I missed something, but one good measure of whether I picked the right topics, is simply how much I wrote about them in the (roughly) 250 posts that appeared during 2018.

Security

I picked security of being one of the big trends for 2018. To be honest, I cheated since my prediction post came out a couple of weeks into the year. But 2018 started with a story so big that I wrote a second Breakfast Bytes post that day, January 3, What is Meltdown? How Can It Affect Both Intel and Arm? about the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities that had been hiding in plain sight for 15 or 20 years. There was a great panel session about it later in the year, during HOT CHIPS, that I covered in three posts Spectre/Meltdown and What It Means for Future Design 1, 2, 3. Those 3 posts contain a more thoughtful perspective than the post that I wrote in the afternoon of the day I found out about the vulnerabilities. But these weren't the only security stories of the year.

The second time I wrote another Breakfast Bytes post on the same day was also security related. Bloomberg published a story about how Amazon, Apple, and others had extra chips added to their servers by the Chinese. It seemed bogus to me. Bloomberg still hasn't retracted the piece, but everyone who has written about it says that it is false. The pieces was Did the Chinese Really Attach Rogue Chips to Apple and Amazon's Motherboards?

Why You Shouldn't Trust Ken Thompson

Passwords: How Even Your Bank Doesn't Know Your PIN

Passwords: Just Add Salt

Fooling Neural Networks

Spectre with a Red Hat

A Computer Scientist Takes a Look at Mechanical Security

RSA Cryptographers' Panel

Some Real Russian Hacking

Compromising a Fortune 500 Company...Without Hacking a Thing

RSA Wrapup: Song, Darling, Thrun

Spectre/Meltdown and What It Means for Future Design 1, 2, 3.

ERI: Hardware Security Workshop

Google's Titan: How They Stop You Slipping a Bogus Server into Their Datacenter

Did the Chinese Really Attach Rogue Chips to Apple and Amazon's Motherboards?

Autonomous Cars

Automotive is the fastest growing segment of the semiconductor industry. The whole industry is in transition, driven by the move to electric traction, the move towards autonomous driving, millennials owning cars in much lower numbers, and more. Cadence held its first Automotive Summit in November.

CES Keynotes: Cars, Flying Cars, Dancers, Music, Lights...and Sustainability

In Other News, 100 People Were Killed by Cars Driven by People

CDNLive EMEA, Driving to the Future

CDNDrive: ISO 26262...Chapter 11

Legato: Smooth Reliability for Automobiles

Automobil Elektronik Kongress 2018

Trends, Technologies, and Regulations in China's Auto Market

CDNDrive Automotive Solutions: the Front Wheels

CDNDrive Automotive Solutions: the Rear Wheels

Texas Instruments on Automotive Reliability

Automotive Summit: The Road to an Autonomous Future

Automotive Sensors: Cameras, Lidar, Radar, Thermal

Artificial Intelligence

AI, deep learning, neural networks—the biggest change in how we program goes under a lot of names.

Linley: Training in the Datacenter, Inference at the Edge

Deep Blue, AlphaGo, and AlphaZero

SEMICON West: The AI Tectonic Shift

Accelerating AI: Past... ...Present and Future

Embedded Vision: Seeing 20,000X Improvement

Overcoming Bias in Computer Vision

Cadence Is MAGESTIC

HOT CHIPS Tutorial: On-Device Inference

HOT CHIPS: Some HOT Deep Learning Processors

David White and Machine Learning

The New Tensilica DNA 100 Deep Neural-network Accelerator

Inside Google's TPU and Google TPU Software

Bagels and Brains: SEMI's Artificial Intelligence Breakfast

Neural Nets Hit the Roofline—Memory for AI

5nm

With 7nm in production, 5nm is the "next" process. In some ways, I should have combined this with the next topic EUV, since 5nm requires EUV. Everyone's approach to insertion of EUV is to do a second generation of 7nm with some EUV layers for cost-reduction, to build up experience, and potentially slightly tighter pitches. Then, for 5nm, use EUV from the start.

IEDM Short Course: After 5nm

3nm Cadence and imec

TSMC Technology Symposium 2018

Samsung Foundry Forum: 10, 8, 7, EUV, 5, 4, GAA, 3...

How Low Can You Go?

TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum

EUV

By definition, most of the above posts about 5nm are also, at least partly, about EUV. But there were other times I wrote about EUV more directly.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES 7nm

If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium. My First Visit to imec

Imec on EUV. Are We There Yet?

SEMICON 5nm: 7nm Is Just a Dress-Rehearsal

China

Apart from my post about China inserting (or rather not inserting) chips on everyone's server farm motherboards (see under security above), and my pieces on automotive in China (see under Automotive above), I also covered the Chinese semiconductor industry more directly.

I also came across a great word for people who know very little about China thinking that they can explain it. So maybe I'm guilty of Hansplaining here.

SEMICON China: Me and 70,000 of My Closest Friends

SEMICON China: Is This China's Decade?

The Great Firewall of China

China Update

The Economist on Silicon Supremacy

Photonics

One area that I didn't call out as a prediction was silicon photonics, which I think was a significant omission. Cadence had its first Silicon Photonics Summit this year, and a workshop on the second day (with Lumerical and Mathworks).

Yoga is Passé, the Future Is CurvyCore

Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights...and Photonics, the Silicon Festival of Light

Breakfast Bytes Blogs