Breakfast Bytes Blogs

It's only a couple of weeks since I've done one of my update posts, a collection of items that update previous posts on Breakfast Bytes but are not significant enough to justify a whole post on their own. Uually I only do these every few months. The last one was Update: Achronix, SolarWinds, Wikipedia, US Fabs. But a lot of stuff just seemed to come along, in one case an update to that update.

DATE

Let's start with DATE. Writing Breakfast Bytes is my day job, but I'm also the press and publicity chair for DATE. I previewed DATE in my post DATE 2021: A Virtual Event in the First Week of February. In that post, I mentioned that there was a fourth keynote but there were no details back in December. Well, now there are. The fourth keynote, which will take place on Wednesday, February 3 at 3:00pm CET is by Philippe Margarshack of ST Microelectronics. When I worked for VaST and Virtutuech, I had a few meetings with him since in those days he was CTO of Embedded Processing Solutions. But now he is MDG Group Vice President, in charge of Microcontrollers and Digital ICs Group (MDG) Strategy, Technology, and  System Architecture. His keynote will be titled Cyber-Physical Systems for Industry 4.0: An Industrial Perspective.

Achronix

In my last update, I wrote about Achronix going public. A friend who works on Wall Street (well, not geographically, hardly anyone actually works on Wall Street itself) sent me an email after reading it, asking if I knew what Intel was doing with all that Achronix technology. He sent me a clip of a footnote from their investor presentation:

Buried in the small print is that in 2020, 99% of Achronix revenue came from Intel. So Achronix has Intel as an investor, its primary customer, and its foundry (still, I think).

SolarWinds

At the start of this year, I wrote about SolarWinds in my post The Biggest Security Breach Ever. I also updated it in my recent update post linked above. More details have started to emerge as to how the exploit was done. This post, SUNSPOT: An Implant in the Build Process, on the Crowdstrike blog digs into the details.

I won't go over all the details, you can read the post for yourself if you want a deeper understanding. But the key points are:

• SUNSPOT is StellarParticle’s malware used to insert the SUNBURST backdoor into software builds of the SolarWinds Orion IT management product.
• SUNSPOT monitors running processes for those involved in the compilation of the Orion product and replaces one of the source files to include the SUNBURST backdoor code.
• Several safeguards were added to SUNSPOT to avoid the Orion builds from failing, potentially alerting developers to the adversary’s presence.

There are a lot of steps in the whole infection process like the way chess grandmasters build up their attacks many moves ahead. The target (Fortune 500 company, government department, and so on) uses SolarWinds Orion product for managing their network. Orion is automatically (or at least regularly) updated, just like the apps on your phone. In SolarWinds' engineering groups, they fix bugs and add enhancements, and then build a new version of Orion for testing and eventual deployment. The malware is inserted when a new version of Orion is built. The build process appears completely normal to SolarWinds' employees, the source code is unchanged, there are no tell-tale failures. And yet the object code is compromised.

As Bruce Schneier says in his post:

This, of course, reminds many of us of Ken Thompson’s thought experiment from his 1984 Turing Award lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust. In that talk, he suggested that a malicious C compiler might add a backdoor into programs it compiles.

As it happens, I've covered that in Breakfast Bytes before, too. See my post Why You Shouldn't Trust Ken Thompson. I think this is actually the most-read Breakfast Bytes post of all time since it got picked up in Boing-Boing (5 million unique monthly users), and tens of thousands of people read it.

Batteries

I've written about batteries before, as in my post Battery Derangement Syndrome. Of course, we'd all like the batteries in our computers and phones to last longer, but where it is really important is in electric vehicles (EVs) and some smoothing out of the intermittent power from renewables.

Batteries have not been improving at the same rate as Moore's Law over the last 50 years. Otherwise, you'd just need a hearing-aid battery to power your EV for a year. For a long time, the dominant battery technology has been lithium-ion. That's what's in your phone, your laptop, and your car (if you have an EV).

There are three big problems with lithium-ion batteries:

1. If they get damaged, or overcharged, or perhaps just sometimes, they can catch fire. That's why you are not allowed to put lithium-ion batteries in checked luggage on planes (remember planes?)
2. They take a long time to charge (a Tesla takes 10-12 hours on a household 220V supply, or 1.25H on a supercharger)
3. They are bulky and heavy

Well, Toyota is launching a new solid-state battery in 2021, although as a prototype, not in its 2021 model year vehicles. It fixes the first two of the three disadvantages above, and goes some way toward fixing the third. Here is an article from last month in Nikkei Asia Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut (which is one of the most read articles in the whole of last year...but I don't know what it says because I don't have a subscription and it doesn't let you read a single article for free). But there are quotes from this article all over.

Toyota claims that its newly developed batteries can also enable a maximum EV range of 500km in one full charge and a zero to 100% charging time of just 10 minutes, “all with minimal safety concerns.”

That is not much different from the range and fill-up time of a gasoline vehicle. They also offer greater energy density, meaning they are smaller. I don't know about weight.

But Toyota is not the only company working on solid-state batteries. Here is an article in Wired: Did QuantumScape Just Solve a 40-Year-Old Battery Problem?

According to QuantumScape’s data, its cell can charge to 80 percent of capacity in 15 minutes, it retains more than 80 percent of its capacity after 800 charging cycles, it’s noncombustible, and it has a volumetric energy density of more than 1,000 watt-hours per liter at the cell level, which is nearly double the energy density of top-shelf commercial lithium-ion cells.

Solid-state batteries are definitely something to keep an eye on in 2021.

On a related topic, just on Monday, Shell agrees deal to buy electric car-charging company ubitricity. Ubitricity is German-based, with 4,200 chargers across the UK, France, and Germany.

The Economist

Not surprisingly, The Economist often takes a look at the semiconductor industry. In the grand scheme of things, it is not that big of an industry at around $500B depending on just what you count and, in particular, whether or not you double-count both the foundries' revenue and the revenue of the fabless semiconductor companies that (mostly) sell the products. I wrote about some of their coverage in:

• The Economist on the End of Moore's Law
• The Economist on Silicon Supremacy
• The Economist on RISC-V and Indian Semiconductors

In the latest issue, it is back again with an article Chipmaking is being redesigned. Effects will be far-reaching (apparently it is called A new architecture in the print edition). I think you can read a few articles for free or you might need a subscription. I can't really tell since I've had a subscription for over 30 years.

The "redesign" and "new architecture" that The Economist is talking about is summarized as:

And the world economy’s foundational industry looks poised to polarise further, into ever greater effervescence in design and ever more concentrated production. This new architecture has far-reaching consequences for chipmakers and their customers—which, in this day and age, includes virtually everyone.

They go on to say:

For years, technology companies bought chips off the shelf. In its 44-year history, Apple has procured microprocessors for its desktops and laptops from mos Technology, Motorola, ibm, and finally Intel.

If you only talk about microprocessors, that is somewhat true. But having worked at VLSI Technology, you can find its logo all over Apple products of the era. However, process technology at the time could not manufacture an "embedded processor" since it took the entire die and there was no room for anything else. I don't know why The Economist says "mos Technology" since I've never seen the name of the company not written "MOS Technology" (and it is not to be confused with Mostek, which is a different company). And I know all lower-case company names are all the rage, but I've never seen "ibm" in lower-case either.

But it is a new world because:

Although designing chips is now easier than ever, making them has never been harder.

Almost any Cadence presentation will tell you that designing chips has never been harder than it is today (although much easier with Cadence tools). Manufacture is hard for the manufacturers, mostly because process development (TD) is so hard and expensive. Of course, fabs are expensive, but that doesn't automatically make it "harder" any more than manufacturing cars is harder since a car factory is in the same price range. However, for a company that wants to have a chip manufactured, it has never been easier. The fabless ecosystem works smoothly and hides most of the problems with developing process technology and building a fab. So I would flip The Economist's view and say that while designing chips has never been harder, getting them manufactured has never been easier.

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