January Update

I realize that it is February, but I was sick late January and so I never wrote this update post.

Intel and RISC-V

Intel just announced a $1B plan to fund RISC-V-based startups and to attract new foundry customers. I covered Intel's foundry plans in my post The New Intel Foundry Services. Intel also joined the RISC-V consortium at the top level. To quote Forbes Magazine:

Consequently, Intel must become a preferred manufacturing partner for chips that will directly compete with Intel's own products. RISC-V designers are knocking on the door to find more fab capacity, and Intel decided to answer with a big welcome sign with a B on it.

And in fact, Esperanto Technologies announced it would be one of those new customers in their press release Esperanto Technologies Partners with Intel to Advance Massively Parallel RISC-V-based AI Acceleration Solutions. I covered Esperanto late last year in my post HOT CHIPS: Esperanto's Dave Ditzel and 1000 Minions. RISC-V companies SiFive and Andes Technology also announced they would be customers of Intel foundry.

I think that this is a really big deal, although it will take several years to play out fully. Intel can manufacture x86, Arm, and RISC-V designs. Or will be able to. The amount of CAPEX that the foundries are investing is immense. There is a lot of money sloshing around in semiconductors right now!

NVIDIA and Arm

In my December update I reported on the regulatory issues that were being encountered with NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm from Softbank.I ended up saying:

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that I don't think this deal is going to happen.

Well, that turned out to be correct. In a Reuters report a couple of days ago, the headline was:

SoftBank dumps sale of Arm over regulatory hurdles, to IPO instead

Britain's Arm, which named a new CEO [Renee Haas] on Tuesday, [Simon Segars apparently resigned] said it would go public before March 2023 and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son indicated that would be in the United States, most likely the Nasdaq.

Cadence Honored on the Forbes America's Best Employers 2022 List

We have been honored on the Forbes list of America’s Best Employers 2022. This award is presented by Forbes and Statista Inc., the world-leading statistics portal and industry ranking provider. The awards list was announced on February 9, 2022 and can currently be viewed on the Forbes website.

Forbes and Statista selected the America’s Best Employers 2022 through an independent survey applied to a vast sample of approximately 60,000 American employees working for companies with more than 1,000 employees in America. Across 25 industry sectors, the evaluation was based on direct and indirect recommendations from employees that were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their own employers to friends and family. Employee evaluations also included other employers in their respective industries that stood out either positively or negatively.

Cadence Agreement with Clemson

Clemson is a public land-grant university in...well, Clemson...South Carolina. It is the second-largest university in the state by student numbers.

As the agreement says:

Clemson University announced an agreement with Cadence Design Systems, Inc., offering students, faculty and staff access to a vast array of computational software products. The agreement between Cadence and Clemson is intended to empower students to pursue fields of study in advanced electronics using new methods of innovation, allowing them to enter the job market with unique skills.
...
Not only does Clemson plan to incorporate Cadence software into curricula to equip students with the skills they need to be competitive in the workforce upon graduation, but the educational resources offered by Cadence also make additional training widely available to students. Cadence offers a robust online learning platform that allows students to take software courses at their own pace and independently earn as many certifications as interest them. Students’ ability to self-certify strengthens their abilities in the classroom and in research while making them much more competitive in the job market.

There is more on the Clemson website.

Starlink

I wrote about Starlink in my post What If It's Not 5G, But Satellites?

There was another launch this week of 49 more satellites. But due to a geomagnetic storm, it looks like at least 40 of them are going to be lost. I assumed that this was due to some intense electromagnetic effect. But it turns out it is more prosaic. The atmosphere expands during solar activity so the satellites were caught in the atmospheric drag, could not rotate to open their solar panels, or point their boosters in the right direction. So they are going to reenter the atmosphere and burn up (probably).

From the SpaceX blog:

Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday. These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase. In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches. The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm”—and continued to work closely with the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron and LeoLabs to provide updates on the satellites based on ground radars.

Preliminary analysis show the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe-mode to begin orbit raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric reentry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground. This unique situation demonstrates the great lengths the Starlink team has gone to ensure the system is on the leading edge of on-orbit debris mitigation.

AI Farming

In my post Agricultural Electronics I wrote about a lot of the advanced technology used in farming today. Well, recently John Deere announced a fully autonomous tractor. Here's a paragraph on it from the article in Wired:

John Deere’s new 8R tractor uses six pairs of stereo cameras and advanced artificial intelligence to perceive its environment and navigate. It can find its way to a field on its own when given a route and coordinates, then plow the soil or sow seeds without instructions, avoiding obstacles as it goes. A farmer can give the machine new orders using a smartphone app.

Minimum Viable Computer

And to wrap up for this month, how about a Linux computer for $15. I don't just mean a card like Raspberry Pi. This has a (small) screen, keyboard, USB, and more. Full details.

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