December Update: Chenming Hu, Leap Seconds, Right to Repair, and More

Cadence will be shut down on the last Friday in December, so despite this being only 21st, this is the December update post either updating previous blog posts, or discussing items that don't justify an entire blog post on their own.

Chenming Hu on Transistors

I covered the invention of the transistor in my post 75th Anniversary of the Transistor. IEEE Spectrum invited Chenming Hu to write a piece for the anniversary, too: The Future of the Transistor Is Our Future: Nothing but better devices can tackle humanity’s growing challenges. Chenming Hu is the inventor (with his team at UC Berkeley) of the FinFET transistor. As he put it in his article:

My lab at the University of California, Berkeley, saw that point coming more than a decade earlier. We reported the invention of the FinFET, the planar transistor’s successor, in 1999. FinFET, the first 3D MOSFET, changed the flat and wide transistor structure to a tall and narrow one. The benefit is better performance in a smaller footprint, much like the benefit of multistory buildings over single-story ones in a crowded city.

Prefixes

I wrote about the prefixes used for very large and very small units in my post, Ronto and Quecto Are Not Cheeses. I wrote that post three years ago. Well, the new prefixes are now officially approved. As it says in phys.org's piece, Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in:

Joining the ranks of well-known prefixes like kilo and milli are ronna and quetta for the largest numbers—and ronto and quecto for the smallest.

The change was voted on by scientists and government representatives from across the world attending the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which governs the SI and meets roughly every four years at Versailles Palace, west of Paris.

Leap Seconds

I wrote about leap seconds in my post, Galileo Down for a Week. Well, there will not be any more leap seconds. The title of an article in Nature says it all: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks. Actually, it is possible, but unlikely, that another leap second may occur since the change doesn't come into effect until 2035.

The decision was made by representatives of governments worldwide at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November. It means that from 2035, or possibly earlier, astronomical time (known as UT1), which is determined by Earth’s rotation, will be allowed to diverge by more than one second from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks. Since 1972, whenever the two time systems have drifted apart by more than 0.9 seconds, a leap second has been added to UTC.

Right to Repair

I wrote about right to repair earlier this year in my post, The Framework Laptop and Right to Repair. Well, Apple has announced the availability of spare parts and tools...but only if you are in Europe. In their news, Apple launches Self Service Repair in Europe, it continues:

Customers in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK can purchase genuine Apple parts and tools

For people who just want to repair one thing rather than set up a full-on repair business, there is also a tool rental scheme.

Customers who wish to complete their own repairs will be able to perform many of the most common repairs for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and Mac notebooks with Apple silicon. The Self Service Repair Store provides access to more than 200 individual parts and tools, as well as repair manuals. The program enables customers who are experienced with the complexities of repairing electronic devices the opportunity to complete their own repairs, using the same manuals, parts, and tools as Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Service Providers.

Chip War

Chris Miller's book Chip War, which I wrote about in my October update, won the (London) Financial Times book of the year. Yet another sign that semiconductors, having lived in an obscure corner of the business world for decades, are now front-and-center on everyone's radar, from politicians to the CEOs of automotive companies.

Chris Miller has won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award for Chip War, his timely and important account of the global battle for semiconductor supremacy, in one of the tightest contests since the prize started in 2005. Miller received the £30,000 prize, presented to the year’s “most compelling and enjoyable” business book, at a ceremony in London on December 5.

Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT and chair of the book award judging panel, described Chip War as one of the most important books she had read this year. “The fight for semiconductors and the quest for supply chain resilience are among the biggest economic and business stories of our time and will be for much of the near future,” she said.

You should read it!

Fusion

You probably heard that the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab, just over the hill from where I sit in my office at Cadence, achieved the holy grail of nuclear fusion, producing a reaction that emitted more power than it consumed. Two million joules of laser energy produced three million joules of fusion energy, a gain of 1.5. This is both significant and, well, not.

It is significant because this is the first time a gain of more than 1, meaning more energy output than input, has been achieved.

It is not really significant since that is measuring the energy from the laser. But the laser is about 1% efficient, meaning that if you add in the electrical energy required to create the later energy, it is a factor of 100 bigger. There are probably other energy costs on the negative side too. We actually have something similar in EUV scanners in semiconductor manufacturing. The laser consumes a megawatt, produces 40 kW of laser energy, and zaps tin droplets to produce 250W of EUV energy, of which 1-5% reaches the wafer. Input is one megawatt, but delivered power to the photoresist is about 12W. My post that best describes how an EUV scanner works if you don't already know, is EUV Might Really Happen (written in 2015). Since EUV has definitely now "happened," the problems discussed in that post have been solved, but the systems still work as described. For a more up-to-date look at EUV, see What Is High-NA EUV? from earlier this year.

So, I think that this is a big deal, but also, we are not going to have nuclear fusion power stations any time soon, just as a result of this. All the mainstream media have written about this. Try WSJ Nuclear Fusion Power for the People.

Coal

Still on the subject of power generation, like everyone else, I read news reports of how big a swing towards renewables (wind and solar) is going on, costs are coming down, and the transition is accelerating. But Forbes has a more sober report in King Coal: Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (apologies to Mark Twain). As I pointed out in my post How the Electricity Grid Works, renewables need to be backed up with peaker power stations (primarily gas) and base load (gas, coal, and nuclear).

The Forbes article says:

According to the BP statistical review, global electricity demand, which grew at an average of 2.5% in the decade to 2021, expanded by 6.2% in 2021. In Asia, electricity demand grew even faster at 8.4%. Global coal power generation, the world’s biggest fuel source of electricity, set a record in 2021. While it grew at 1.2% annually over the past decade, it surged by 8.8% in 2021 over the previous year. The trends suggest that coal will be enjoying at least a few more bumper years yet.

The situation at the end of last year, according to Reuters:

The Udangudi plant is one of nearly 200 coal-fired power stations under construction in Asia, including 95 in China, 28 in India, and 23 in Indonesia, according to data from U.S. nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

Obviously, at Cadence, we can't do much about whether India builds a coal-fired plant. But we can continue to reduce the power consumption of electronics, especially in hyperscale data centers. Celsius and our Future Facilities 6SigmaDCX can have a real impact. See my post Enterprise Datacenters Only Use 56% of Their Capacity.

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