Breakfast Bytes Blogs

My monthly update normally occurs on the last Friday of the month. But for June, that was two weeks ago. Cadence was off for an extended July 4th break, and then I was on vacation, and then DAC, so I decided to make today the honorary last Friday of June.

CHIPS

A few months ago, the $52B CHIPS act looked set to pass. See my posts China, US, Europe: Everybody's Got a CHIPS Act and Navigating the CHIPS Act. You've probably forgotten since it was months ago, but it even made an appearance in the State of the Union address:

That’s why it is so important to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act sitting in Congress that will make record investments in emerging technologies and American manufacturing.
...
So let’s not wait any longer. Send it to my desk. I’ll sign it.

I don't understand the US Government minutiae, but my understanding is that the CHIPS acts passed, but now there are delays in funding. Squirrel. I forget who it was that said it, but Congress is like a dog that just can't resist chasing after any new squirrel.

Intel, for one, is pushing back:

Intel Thursday warned that a large semiconductor factory the company had just started working on will be delayed because of delays by the U.S. Congress to pass the CHIPS Act, which was expected to be a part of the funding of the new plant.

Of course, you can say, "Well, he would say that." If I was CEO of Intel, I'd try and light a fire under Congress by threatening not to follow through.

Bloomberg has a more objective piece, Biden’s $52 Billion Chips Plan Stuck; Lawmakers Eye Election. The opening paragraph:

Long-stalled legislation to boost US semiconductor manufacturing and strengthen competitiveness against China risks collapsing in Congress, with Republicans growing skeptical of the measure as midterm elections near and Democrats focusing instead on gun violence.

I think that the reality is that $52B seems like a lot of money, even though it is not enough to build Intel's four fabs (two in Arizona, two in Ohio). With the world either in recession or close to it, demand for semiconductors has declined, so supply shortages have eased. In particular, representatives' constituents can buy cars. Much I would like to say; otherwise, there just are no votes in semiconductors when they don't affect everyone widely.

And, of course, other countries are available. The closing paragraph of the Bloomberg piece:

But there’s new urgency that didn’t exist a year ago: The same companies that want to invest in the US are being courted by Germany, South Korea, and other countries to build plants in their countries. And those governments are already offering subsidies, even with momentum fast eroding in Washington.

Anirudh's Keynote

I generally don't write blog posts about Anirudh's keynotes since I don't want to pre-empt derivative keynotes that will be given at later dates (there are a lot of CadenceLIVE events, for one). But here, to tempt you to show up the next time you get the chance is an extract introducing Optimality System Explorer. Don't know what that is? Watch the video!

The Economist on Arm

One thing that has happened this year due to the chip shortage has been the improved visibility of semiconductors by politicians and in the mainstream press. The latest is an article on Arm in The Economist. The two companies have something in common: both Arm and The Economist are headquartered in Britain but do most of their business in the US. This might require a subscription, but read Why everyone wants Arm.

Ultrapure Water

In my post about visiting imec, Imec Visit Part Two, I discussed cooling chips with DI water using a process called direct liquid jet impingement cooling. There are actually various levels of purity in water that are needed, depending on the application and, in particular, the process generation. At VLSI, we had some sort of DI water plant, but since we were at 1um (1000nm), the requirements were probably not that stringent. I doubt that they are stringent for cooling chips either. As it happens, The exact day after I visited imec, Asianometry did a fascinating video on what it takes to make ultrapure water, which can't contain too many particles, but you can't tell how many since they are too small to see!

Minis

i wrote about the minis of my life recently in my post Offtopic: The Mini. I got a few emails with people's stories about their own Minis. And just the following week, in The Spectator (the world's oldest magazine) one of the writers had to scrap her own Mini and reminisced in her piece A vroom of one’s own: how I loved my old Mini.

Danger of Motorbikes

While on the subject of road vehicles, I have mentioned before (for example, in CDNDrive: ISO 26262...Chapter 11) that there are basically no requirements for electronics in motorbikes since they are so dangerous already it makes no sense to worry about the electronics.

I happened to see this graph from The Washington Post recently, and it really brings it home just how unsafe motorcycles are.

You might think that one way to avoid this risk is to ride a bicycle instead, but in Bicyclist Safety on US Roadways: Crash Risks and Countermeasures the NTSB reckons that bicycles have a fatality rate of 79 per billion miles. That is a disturbingly large number, ten times higher than a car. Of course, many motorcycle accidents are caused by motorcyclists driving fast and having a fatal accident. I suspect that is rare for a bicycle, and that almost all bicycle fatalities are caused by cars.

But PSA: don't ride a motorcycle.

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