August Update: Stevies, Sales, Mars, Hacking Hotels, and More

Can you believe that it's the last Friday in August already? So, time for another monthly update where I cover recent news relating to earlier posts and also smaller stories that don't justify a whole post on their own. This month, this year's Stevie Awards, more on hacking capsule hotels, more on Mars rovers, more on Vincent van Gogh. And probably more still by the time I'm done.

Stevie Awards

Last September, I wrote about the Stevie Awards when we won three in my post Cadence Triple Gold at the Stevie Awards. Well, it's that time of year again, and Cadence won two awards this time for Palladium Z2 and Protium X2, what we call our dynamic duo.

The actual awards were:

Nomination: Cadence Dynamic Duo - Technical Innovation of the Year
Category: Technical Innovation of the Year - At Organizations With 1,000 or More Employees
Status: Gold Stevie Winner

Nomination: Cadence Dynamic Duo - Palladium Z2 / Protium X2
Category: Hardware - Semiconductor or Other Electronic Component
Status: Gold Stevie Winner

Semiconductor Sales

I'm sure I've mentioned the semiconductor shortage. This is most acute in automotive since their reliability requirements make for an even longer manufacturing, test, and sometimes burn-in cycle. I'm sure you've heard anecdotes about how you can't get a rental car in Hawaii, and if you can, it is $500/day. I read somewhere that U-Haul has had to restrict rentals to people from Hawaii since tourists were renting all its vans just to do touristy things like drive to the beach. A big part of the reason is just that demand is up.

The Semiconductor Industry Association announced that June sales increased by almost 30% year-on-year (versus June 2020) and it is continuing, with Q2 sales up 8.3% over Q1. I don't think anyone in the industry has ever seen anything like it. The graph on the right, shows semiconductor sales in blue (and percentage increase in red).

Hacking Capsule Hotels

In my post BlackHat: Hacking a Capsule Hotel—Ghost in the Bedrooms, I picked the most interesting anecdote-style presentation at the conference. There are always one or two. Well, Wired also picked that as one of the few presentations to write about in its piece Watch a Hacker Hijack a Capsule Hotel’s Lights, Fans, and Beds. Wired even included the video that Kya included in his presentation of actually making three rooms go wild, turning the lights on and off, and raising and lowering the bed.

Tesla AI Day

I first wrote about Tesla's self-driving computer (SDC) in my post Tesla Drives into Chip Design. More recently, I wrote about Tesla's decision not just to forgo lidar but radar too, in my post Tesla Goes All-In on Vision...and Supercomputers.

Tesla recently had an "AI Day" in which they gave more details of how its vision-only self-driving computer works, its training chip (and a robot). You can watch the whole thing. The video is 3 hours long but skip to 47m to where the event really starts (it's still over two hours long so get a coffee...or a pot of coffee). If you are just interested in chips and supercomputers, skip to 1' 42". The new D1 chip for training has impressive specs. Just look at the image that appears as the thumbnail for the video below.

The Chinese Mars Rover

In my post It's Mars Month in February, I discussed the three missions to Mars that were all arriving that month. I then updated the success of Perseverance in Update: Hogan, Mars, Australia, Solarwinds.

The Chinese mission, Tianwen-1, handled things differently. It first orbited Mars for some time, and then sent a lander down to the surface and actually landed. Perseverance's craft never landed: it lowered the rover onto the surface and then shot off and crashed to get out of the way. Eventually, the Chinese rover drove off the lander.

Scott Manley's video gives a great overview:

By the way, the most popular post ever on Breakfast Bytes was my post about the rocket equation "If You Can Get Your Ship into Orbit, You're Halfway to Anywhere". I guess space is more interesting than EDA!

Starry Night

In my post Offtopic: Immersive Vincent van Gogh I mentioned that the most famous of his paintings in the US is Starry Night since it is in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. As it happened, I was in MOMA in New York recently, and so I took a picture. It was the first time I've been to MOMA for about 20 years, and it has had a big remodel since then. As always, it is one of the great museums to visit and is less overwhelming than the Met.

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