April Update: USB-C, Great Place to Work, Intel Fab Tour, DALL-E

It's the last Friday in April already, so time for one of my monthly updates where I group small pieces that don't justify an entire blog post on their own.

USB-C

One of the very first posts I wrote when we started Breakfast Bytes was One Connector to Rule Them All: USB Type-C. The date was 19th October 2015, six and a half years ago. One thing I said there was:

The intention is that these two features are used together. Your display already has power. Connecting a single USB Type-C cable between the display and your laptop (or phone) allows the laptop/phone to be charged and for it to drive the display. The display can also provide a USB hub so that other devices such as backup disks, printers, and so on can be connected. When you arrive at your desk or at your home, you just make the single connection, and your computer is powered. It has a big display, and it can access the other peripherals. The picture below shows the sort of setup that is possible with computers, displays, hubs, printers and more all networked together and powered from a single supply to the monitor.

However, for years I never saw a display that actually worked like that. Well, now that we have returned to the office, at least occasionally, I have exactly that. A big (huge) display, which I connect to my Macbook with a single USB-C connection. That connection drives the display, provides power, so I don't even need to bring my power supply to the office, and has a USB hub to connect my mouse and keyboard. It is very convenient.

Also, on the USB-C front, the EU has proposed making USB-C the universal standard for any device that is charged using a cable. It will also be mandatory to sell devices separately from chargers, on the assumption that everyone will have several already. The intention is to get rid of all the incompatible plugs and chargers. Of course, the risk is that an even better connector comes along, but it will be illegal to use it in Europe. After all, if this law was passed a few years ago (and I don't think it is passed yet anyway), we'd all be standardized on microUSB and not allowed to use USB-C.

Best Company to Work For

Earlier this month, Fortune and Great Place to Work published their list of "Best Companies to Work For." Cadence is #38. It is our eighth year in a row appearing on the list.

It is also not just in the US. Cadence has been recognized as a 2021 World’s Best Workplace and a Great Place to Work in a number of regions around the world, including Asia (overall), Brazil (Minas Gerais), Canada, Europe (overall), France, Germany, Greater China, India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

DALL·E 2

I wrote about DALL·E 2 in my post What Is a Lagrange Point in Space? And DALL·E 2. I recently ran across this article How DALL-E 2 Actually Works, 

Here's a paragraph from the article, both to give a summary of how it works and also to give you an idea of the level of detail in the article:

CLIP is trained on hundreds of millions of images and their associated captions, learning how much a given text snippet relates to an image. That is, rather than trying to predict a caption given an image, CLIP instead just learns how related any given caption is to an image. This contrastive rather than predictive objective allows CLIP to learn the link between textual and visual representations of the same abstract object. The entire DALL-E 2 model hinges on CLIP's ability to learn semantics from natural language, so let's take a look at how CLIP is trained to understand its inner workings.

Also, a video version:

Intel Fab Tour

I've been inside fabs just twice in my life, and both times were over 35 years ago. The two were the San Jose fab of VLSI Technology, where I worked, which allowed any employee to go on a fab tour on some schedule (like every other Friday). The other was Rohm's fab in Japan. They were the foundry that made all VLSI's ROMs for video games while we brought our own fab up. For more about that, see my post VLSI's Secret Business...and a Trip to Japan. Ever since then, attempts I have made to get into a modern fab have been unsuccessful.

This video is from Linus Tech Tips. He had the same experience as me asking to go on a fab tour. Until now. Intel said yes and gave him a tour of their fab 28 in Israel. The video has obviously been heavily censored with all sorts of details blurred out, but you get a much better idea of what it is like inside a fab than the usual heavily-curated videos that companies sometimes create. 22 minutes.

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