August Update: DAC Keynote, CHIPS, CXL, V2V, EE Times

It's that time again, the last Friday of the month. Here are lots of items that are updates to things I've already written about or are too small to justify a post all on their own.

Anirudh's Keynote at DAC

Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's CEO, gave the Tuesday keynote at this year's Design Automation Conference (DAC). I covered some of what he said in my post DAC 2022: Day 2.

The CHIPS Act

I've written several times about the (US) CHIPS Act. See:

• China, US, Europe: Everybody's Got a CHIPS Act
• Navigating the CHIPS Act
• June Update: CHIPS, Minis, and DI Water
• July Update: ST, GF, Arm, GPUs...and just CHIPS

The story so far: the Senate passed the bill, the House of Representatives passed it, and somewhere along the way, its name became The Chips and Science Act. The next step would normally be for President Biden to sign it into law, but he had Covid. Instead, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan signed an executive directive to implement the act, with Biden attending virtually. Finally, he signed it on August 9th. Now we really start to find out what is in it.

OpenCAPI Folds into CXL

I wrote about CXL in my post Interconnect Beyond PCIe: CXL and Cache Coherent Interconnect. Both OpenCAPI and CXL are standards for cache-coherent interconnect to link up multiple processors, accelerators, and memories. OpenCAPI predated CXL by several years and was initially backed by AMD, Xilinx, and IBM. However, it only seems to have been used in anger in the IBM Power9 family. Anyway, at the recent Flash Memory Summit, OpenCAPI threw in the towel and donated its assets to the CXL Consortium. There is obviously a strong desire on the part of the whole industry to only have one standard, and that one standard is going to be CXL.

CXL also announced the new iteration of the standard, CXL 3.0, which piggybacks on PCIe 6.0. It will take the transfer rate up to 64GT/s. This also means that this version switches from NRZ to PAM4. See my posts The History of PCIe: Getting to Version 6 and Signal Integrity for 112G (which includes a detailed introduction to PAM4).

V2V Turns Out to Be V2nothing

One thing that there has been a lot of discussions about in autonomous vehicles was V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle), actually named DSRC. This was something dreamed up by the existing car companies. They persuaded the FCC to allocate spectrum for it (in 1999).

I wrote about this briefly in my post DesignCon 2019:

One automotive standard that has been around for a long time is DSRC. This stands for Dedicated Short Range Communication. Although it has been around for a long time, it has not been widely deployed. Robert was told by one car manufacturer that "We're waiting for everyone else to put it in, and then we'll put it in." In fact, it has been so narrowly deployed that now governments want the spectrum back! In fact, there is no need to duplicate 5G with DSRC, so I suspect that DSRC will fade away.

That prediction turned out to be true. As stated in The auto industry lost its spectrum fight with the FCC because V2V was always a fantasy:

Today, the DC circuit court released its decision, siding with the Federal Communications Commission, on its reallocation of part of the 5.9GHz band. It’s a big win for the FCC and a big loss for the auto industry, which has promised to use the airwaves to improve safety through a technology called “vehicle-to-vehicle” (V2V) or “vehicle-to-everything” (V2X) communication. The problem, as hilariously put by Judge Justin Walker in his opinion, is that this technology has never really existed. It was one of those “just around the corner”-type innovations that has always been promised but never actually delivered. It was a fantasy, and today, the court’s basically said as much.

EE Times 50th Anniversary

As of August 1st, EE Times has a new editor-in-chief, Brett Brune. You can listen to an interview with him (or read the transcript on the same page).

It is also the 50th Anniversary of EE Times this year. In the heyday of magazines printed on paper, it was the weekly must-read for anyone in the semiconductor and EDA industries. Every marketing person in EDA with a new product release wanted to get onto the front page of EE Times. The main gatekeeper for that for many years was Richard Goering, my predecessor here at Cadence as the main internal journalist. Richard covered EDA from when it didn't even exist until 2007. But he told me he had no more idea as to what would be on the front page of EE Times (his article or someone else's) than I did.

As part of the 50-year celebration, Malcolm Penn has written a three part series going back over those 50 years. It is well worth a read:

• The Roots of Silicon Valley, Part 1: Founders, Legend, Legacy
• The Roots of Silicon Valley, Part 2: Planar Technology, The Fairchildren
• The Roots of Silicon Valley, Part 3: Startup Fever and Venture Capital

There will be other 50th Anniversary specials during the rest of the year. I can't find an image of the first issue, nor even the original date of publication. Even Wikipedia can't do better than 1972.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.

.