October Update: AWS, Knuth, CHIPS

31 Oct 2022 • 2 minute read

The last Friday of the month is my day for an update post, including updates to earlier posts, and stories that do not justify their own post. But Friday was a Cadence Global Recharge Day and so I pushed it out to today, the last day of the month.

AWS Silicon History

Since Amazon acquired Annapurna Labs, I've written about how AWS is building its own silicon in various areas. For example, see my posts:

I recently ran across this interesting video (20 minutes) where James Hamilton, SVP/Distinguished Engineer, talks about the history of silicon development at AWS.

Knuth Volume 4b

art of computer programming volume 4b If you studied computer science, you will already know about Donald Knuth's monumental work The Art of Computer Programming. Well, Donald just announced the publication of the next volume, 4b, covering combinatorial algorithms. As he says in his note:

The fourth volume of The Art of Computer Programming deals with Combinatorial Algorithms, the area of computer science where good techniques have the most dramatic effects. I love it the most, because one good idea can often make a program run a million times faster. It's a huge, fascinating subject, and I published Part 1 (Volume 4A, 883 pages, now in its twenty-first printing) in 2011.

When I wrote VLSI's circuit extractor, that reads in layout and identifies the transistors, connectivity, and parasitics, I was an avid reader of Volume 3 Sorting and Searching. I won't go over how a circuit extractor works here, and why sorting is so important. I covered it in my post Supernaturally Fast Sorting.

CHIPS for America Webinars

I wrote about the CHIPS act in:

NIST, the National Institute of Science and Technology, has a page with webinars about the CHIPS for America Act. You can replay past webinars. The next two coming up are on how the public can submit comments for the Manufacturing USA Semiconductor Institute RFI.

If you want to look under the hood of the CHIPS act, then this is a good place to start. Since the CHIPS act will inject $50B into the semiconductor industry in the U.S. ($30B for manufacturing and $20B for research), it is good to pay attention to it.

Chip War

chip war book Still on the subject of books, I bought a copy of Chris Miller's Chip War that I've started to read. As the opening paragraph on the inside cover of the dust jacket says:

An epic account of the decades-long battle to control the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict.

But what a sense of timing! The book was published on October 4. On October 7, the US Department of Commerce released new export rules. Of course, Chris had no idea what was coming, at least in detail. Because he has a new book out, there are several podcasts interviewing him. Here, for example, he is at the Commonwealth Club of California.

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