When I zoom the camera on Alex's momentarily untensed face while he's dozing by the pool, it's not because I'm a creep. When I pursue Ayo and Dija around the garden, keeping their feet and butts in shot as they belittle each other, it's not because I'm a busybody and a lech. And when I pan to the lighthouse piercing the sunset beyond the security spikes it's not out of any feeling of wonder, or even curiosity about possible escape routes. Please understand: I do not see these people, these objects at all, just the boneless, faceless traces they leave upon my own servitude to the lens.

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The Acolyte wasn’t perfect, but it did break new narrative ground in Star Wars, a franchise often haunted by Force ghosts and endlessly recurring characters. Led by Leslye Headland, the Disney+ series dared to reevaluate decades-old tropes, unpack the flaws of the Jedi Order, and play with the space sandbox setting in…

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Since the launch of World of Warcraft, players have been waiting for and longing to have housing. It still has not happened. The reasons given range from being adjacent to plausible to just feeling outright silly, but the details don’t particularly matter in context; what matters is that we’re still sitting here without housing in […]

QAnon, the mainstream wing of the Republican Party, has opened an investigation into whether Kyle Rittenhouse is a transgender secret agent after he wavered for a few hours in his undying support for Donald Trump.

Rittenhouse, who became the poster child for the GOP after he traveled from Illinois to Wisconsin when he was 17 and shot two people to death and injured a third, posted on Xitter last week, "If you cannot be completely un-compromisable on the Second Amendment, I will not vote for you. — Read the rest

The post QAnon declares Rittenhouse to be part of a "secretive transgender psy-op aimed at harming the MAGA movement" appeared first on Boing Boing.

Welp, looks like someone got a spanking today.

Last night, Kyle Rittenhouse snuck on a pair of big-boy pants and sassed his MAGA cult leader, saying in a video that he wouldn't be voting for Donald Trump, but would instead cast a write-in vote for Sen. — Read the rest

The post Oops! Crybaby Rittenhouse does instant about-face after snubbing Donald Trump appeared first on Boing Boing.

You know things aren't going well for Donald Trump when even MAGA folk hero Kyle Rittenhouse gives you the snub. But shunning the ex-president is exactly what the 21-year-old gentleman — fawned over by Trump after the punk gunned down three protestors (killing two) in Kenosha, WI — has done. — Read the rest

The post Kyle Rittenhouse snubs Donald Trump, says he's voting for Ron Paul: "We need champions" (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.

Hyper Light Drifter developer Heart Machine unveiled its next game at the Devolver Direct showcase.

Called Possessor(s), it's a side-scrolling action game with a beautiful hand-drawn aesthetic set in a devastated mega-city. It's due out in 2025.

Players control two protagonists - Luca and Rehm - with melee combat involving juggles with an array of weapons like swords, bats, and even an electric guitar.

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The news panamax has come in and all the shipping containers are spilling off the deck in an uncontrollable catastrophe of trailers. Here's another: you may remember The Crush House, the colourful 90s reality show where you film the cast by day, trying to please the audience, and creep around by night, trying to investigate the unsettling true nature of the show. No? You don't remember? Well, it has been a long year. Never mind, The Crush House now has a release date. But I'm not telling you what it is until you come watch the new trailer.

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Blumhouse Productions is entering the videogame space with six indie titles.

President Biden will raise the tariff rate on Chinese semiconductors from 25% to 50% by 2025, among other measures to protect U.S. businesses from China’s trade practices. Also, as part of President Biden’s AI Executive Order, the Administration released steps to protect workers from AI risks, including human oversight of systems and transparency about what systems are being used.

Intel is in advanced talks with Apollo Global Management for the equity firm to provide more than $11 billion to build a fab in Ireland, reported the Wall Street Journal. Also, Intel’s Foundry Services appointed Kevin O’Buckley as the senior vice president and general manager.

Polar is slated to receive up to $120 million in CHIPS Act funding to establish an independent American foundry in Minnesota. The company expects to invest about $525 million in the expansion of the facility over the next two years, with a $75 million investment from the State of Minnesota.

Arm plans to develop AI chips for launch next year, reports Nikkei Asia.

South Korea is planning a support package worth more than 10 trillion won ($7.3 billion) aimed at chip materials, equipment makers, and fabless companies throughout the semiconductor supply chain, according to Reuters.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Security
Supercomputing
Education and Training
Product News
Research
Events and Further Reading

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Global

Edwards opened a new facility in Asan City, South Korea. The 15,000m² factory provides a key production site for abatement systems, and integrated vacuum and abatement systems for semiconductor manufacturing.

France’s courtship with mega-tech is paying off.  Microsoft is investing more than US $4 billion to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure, including bringing up to 25,000 advanced GPUs to the country by the end of 2025. The “Choose France” campaign also snagged US $1.3 billion from Amazon for cloud infrastructure expansion, genAI and more.

Toyota, Nissan, and Honda are teaming up on AI and chips for next-gen cars with support from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, (METI), reports Nikkei Asia.

Meanwhile, IBM and Honda are collaborating on long-term R&D of next-gen technologies for software-defined vehicles (SDV), including chiplets, brain-inspired computing, and hardware-software co-optimization.

Siemens and Foxconn plan to collaborate on global manufacturing processes in electronics, information and communications technology, and electric vehicles (EV).

TSMC confirmed a Q424 construction start date for its first European plant in Dresden, Germany.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to invest €7.8 billion (~$8.4B) in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany through 2040. The system is designed to serve public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries.

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In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Low Power-High Performance newsletter this week, featuring these stories:

• • Will Domain-Specific ICs Become Ubiquitous?
  • Running More Efficient AI/ML Code With Neuromorphic Engines
  • Power/Performance Costs In Chip Security

And this week’s Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletter featured these stories:

• Using Predictive Maintenance To Boost IC Manufacturing Efficiency
• The Future Of Fault Coverage In Chips
• Doing More At Functional Test

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Markets and Money

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded more than $1.2 million to 12 businesses in 8 states under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program to fund R&D of products relating to cybersecurity, quantum computing, health care, semiconductor manufacturing, and other critical areas.

Engineering services and consulting company Infosys completed the acquisition of InSemi Technology, a provider of semiconductor design and embedded software development services.

The quantum market, which includes quantum networking and sensors alongside computing, is predicted to grow from $838 million in 2024 to $1.8 billion in 2029, reports Yole.

Shipments of OLED monitors reached about 200,000 units in Q1 2024, a year over year growth of 121%, reports TrendForce.

Global EV sales grew 18% in Q1 2024 with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) sales seeing 46% YoY growth and battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales growing just 7%, according to Counterpoint. China leads global EV sales with 28% YoY growth, while the US grew just 2%. Tesla saw a 9% YoY drop, but topped BEV sales with a 19% market share. BYD grew 13% YoY and exported about 100,000 EVs with 152% YoY growth, mainly in Southeast Asia.

DeepX raised $80.5 million in Series C funding for its on-device NPU IP and AI SoCs tailored for applications including physical security, robotics, and mobility.

MetisX raised $44 million in Series A funding for its memory solutions built on Compute Express Link (CXL) for accelerating large-scale data processing applications.

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Security

While security experts have been warning of a growing threat in electronics for decades, there have been several recent fundamental changes that elevate the risk.

Synopsys and the Ponemon Institute released a report showing 54% of surveyed organizations suffered a software supply chain attack in the past year and 20% were not effective in their response. And 52% said their development teams use AI tools to generate code, but only 32% have processes to evaluate it for license, security, and quality risks.

Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum and TU Darmstadt presented a solution for the automated generation of fault-resistant circuits (AGEFA) and assessed the security of examples generated by AGEFA against side-channel analysis and fault injection.

TXOne reported on operational technology security and the most effective method for preventing production interruptions caused by cyber-attacks.

CrowdStrike and NVIDIA are collaborating to accelerate the use of analytics and AI in cybersecurity to help security teams combat modern cyberattacks, including AI-powered threats.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its guidelines for protecting sensitive data, known as controlled unclassified information, aimed at organizations that do business with the federal government.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded BAE Systems a $12 million contract to solve thermal challenges limiting electronic warfare systems, particularly in GaN transistors.

Sigma Defense won a $4.7 million contract from the U.S. Army for an AI-powered virtual training environment, partnering with Brightline Interactive on a system that uses spatial computing and augmented intelligence workflows.

SkyWater’s advanced packaging operation in Florida has been accredited as a Category 1A Trusted Supplier by the Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Videos of two CWE-focused sessions from CVE/FIRST VulnCon 2024 were made available on the CWE YouTube Channel.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.

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Supercomputing

Supercomputers are battling for top dog.

The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) retained the top spot on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest systems with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The as-yet incomplete Aurora system at Argonne took second place, becoming the world’s second exascale system at 1.012 EFlop/s. The Green500 list, which tracks energy efficiency of compute, saw three new entrants take the top places.

Cerebras Systems, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory used Cerebras’ second generation Wafer Scale Engine to perform atomic scale molecular dynamics simulations at the millisecond scale, which they claim is 179X faster than the Frontier supercomputer.

UT Austin‘s Stampede3 Supercomputer is now in full production, serving the open science community through 2029.

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Education and Training

SEMI announced the SEMI University Semiconductor Certification Programs to help alleviate the workforce skills gap. Its first two online courses are designed for new talent seeking careers in the industry, and experienced workers looking to keep their skills current.  Also, SEMI and other partners launched a European Chip Skills Academy Summer School in Italy.

Siemens created an industry credential program for engineering students that supplements a formal degree by validating industry knowledge and skills. Nonprofit agency ABET will provide accreditation. The first two courses are live at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and a series is planned with Pennsylvania State University (Penn State).

Syracuse University launched a $20 million Center for Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing, with co-funding from Onondaga County.

Starting young is a good thing.  An Arizona school district, along with the University Of Arizona,  is creating a semiconductor program for high schoolers.

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Product News

Siemens and Sony partnered to enable immersive engineering via a spatial content creation system, NX Immersive Designer, which includes Sony’s XR head-mounted display. The integration of hardware and software gives designers and engineers natural ways to interact with a digital twin. Siemens also extended its Xcelerator as a Service portfolio with solutions for product engineering and lifecycle management, cloud-based high-performance simulation, and manufacturing operations management. It will be available on Microsoft Azure, as well.

Advantest announced the newest addition to its portfolio of power supplies for the V93000 EXA Scale SoC test platform. The DC Scale XHC32 power supply offers 32 channels with single-instrument total current of up to 640A.

Fig. 1: Advantest’s DC Scale XHC32. Source: Advantest

Infineon released its XENSIV TLE49SR angle sensors, which can withstand stray magnetic fields of up to 8 mT, ideal for applications of safety-critical automotive chassis systems.

Google debuted its sixth generation Cloud TPU, 4.7X faster and 67% more energy-efficient than the previous generation, with double the high-bandwidth memory.

X-Silicon uncorked a RISC-V vector CPU, coupled with a Vulkan-enabled GPU ISA and AI/ML acceleration in a single processor core, aimed at embedded and IoT applications.

IBM expanded its Qiskit quantum software stack, including the stable release of its SDK for building, optimizing, and visualizing quantum circuits.

Northeastern University announced the general availability of testing and integration solutions for Open RAN through the Open6G Open Testing and Integration Center (Open 6G OTIC).

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Research

The University of Glasgow received £3 million (~$3.8M) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)’s Strategic Equipment Grant scheme to help establish “Analogue,” an Automated Nano Analysing, Characterisation and Additive Packaging Suite to research silicon chip integration and packaging.

EPFL researchers developed scalable photonic ICs, based on lithium tantalate.

DISCO developed a way to increase the diameter of diamond wafers that uses the KABRA process, a laser ingot slicing method.

CEA-Leti developed two complementary approaches for high performance photon detectors — a mercury cadmium telluride-based avalanche photodetector and a superconducting single photon detector.

Toshiba demonstrated storage capacities of over 30TB with two next-gen large capacity recording technologies for hard disk drives (HDDs): Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR).

Caltech neuroscientists reported that their brain-machine interface (BMI) worked successfully in a second human patient, following 2022’s first instance, proving the device is not dependent on one particular brain or one location in a brain.

Linköping University researchers developed a cheap, sustainable battery made from zinc and lignin, while ORNL researchers developed carbon-capture batteries.

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Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Event	Date	Location
European Test Symposium	May 20 – 24	The Hague, Netherlands
NI Connect Austin 2024	May 20 – 22	Austin, Texas
ITF World 2024 (imec)	May 21 – 22	Antwerp, Belgium
Embedded Vision Summit	May 21 – 23	Santa Clara, CA
ASIP Virtual Seminar 2024	May 22	Online
Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) 2024	May 28 – 31	Denver, Colorado
Hardwear.io Security Trainings and Conference USA 2024	May 28 – Jun 1	Santa Clara, CA
SW Test	Jun 3 – 5	Carlsbad, CA
IITC2024: Interconnect Technology Conference	Jun 3 – 6	San Jose, CA
VOICE Developer Conference	Jun 3 – 5	La Jolla, CA
CHIPS R&D Standardization Readiness Level Workshop	Jun 4 – 5	Online and Boulder, CO
Find All Upcoming Events Here

Upcoming webinars are here.

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Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

 

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

A cookbook featuring over 50 recipes inspired by Stardew Valley is now available.

The recipe guide – which includes step-by-step instructions for delectable delights like Strange Bun and Seafoam Pudding – is written in collaboration with Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone and features "photos, appearances from Stardew Valley’s characters, and delightful illustrations".

"Welcome to Stardew Valley, where each season brings a new crop of bountiful food to make for friends and family," teases the blurb. "From farm staples like veggies, fruit, milk, and eggs to foraged mushrooms and berries to fresh fish, there's always something delicious to put on the table.

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A sequel to Amazon’s “Road House” movie is in the works. https://t.co/LwBzdR1bq6 pic.twitter.com/KLUhlBrRjV

— Variety (@Variety) May 14, 2024

American federalism is struggling. Federal rules are an overwhelming presence in every state government, and some states, due to their size or other leverage, can impose their own policies on much or all of the country. The problem has been made clearer by an under-the-radar plan to phase out diesel locomotives in California. If the federal government provides the state with a helping hand, it would bring nationwide repercussions for a vital, overlooked industry.

Various industry and advocacy groups are lining up against California's costly measure, calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deny a waiver needed to fully implement it. In the past month, more than 30 leading conservative organizations and individuals, hundreds of state and local chambers of commerce, and the U.S. agricultural sector have pleaded with the EPA to help stop this piece of extremism from escaping one coastal state.

Railroads may not be something most Americans, whose attention is on their own cars and roads, think about often. But rail is the most basic infrastructure of interstate commerce, accounting for around 40 percent of long-distance ton-miles. It's also fairly clean, accounting for less than 1 percent of total U.S. emissions. Private companies, like Union Pacific in the West or CSX in the East, pay for their infrastructure and equipment. These facts haven't stopped the regulatory power grab.

Most importantly, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulation would have all freight trains operate in zero-emission configuration by 2035. At the end of the decade, the state is mandating the retirement of diesel locomotives 23 years or older, despite typically useful lives of over 40 years. Starting in 2030, new passenger locomotives must operate with zero emissions, with new engines for long-haul freight trains following by 2035. It limits locomotive idling and increases reporting requirements.

Given the interstate nature of railway operations, California needs the EPA to grant a waiver. If the agency agrees, the policy will inevitably affect the entire continental United States.

The kicker is that no technology exists today to enable railroads to comply with California's diktat, rendering the whole exercise fanciful at best.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board explained last November that while Wabtec Corp. has introduced a pioneering advance in rail technology with the launch of the world's first battery-powered locomotive, the dream of a freight train fully powered by batteries remains elusive. The challenges of substituting diesel with batteries—primarily due to batteries' substantial weight and volume—make it an impractical solution for long-haul trains. Additionally, the risk of battery overheating and potential explosions, which can emit harmful gases, is a significant safety concern. As the editorial noted, "Even if the technology for zero-emission locomotives eventually arrives, railroads will have to test them over many years to guarantee their safety."

The cost-benefit analysis is woefully unfavorable to the forced displacement of diesel locomotives. To "help" the transition, beginning in 2026, CARB will force all railroads operating in California to deposit dollars into an escrow account managed by the state and frozen for the explicit pursuit of the green agenda. For large railroads, this figure will be a staggering $1.6 billion per year, whereas some smaller railroads will pay up to $5 million.

Many of these smaller companies have signaled that they will simply go out of business. For the large railroads, the requirement will lock up about 20 percent of annual spending, money typically used for maintenance and safety improvements.

Transportation is the largest source of U.S. emissions, yet railroads' contribution amounts to not much more than a rounding error. The industry cites its efficiency improvements over time, allowing railroads today to move a ton of freight more than 500 miles on a single gallon of diesel. Its expensive machines, which last between 30 to 50 years and are retrofitted throughout their life cycles, are about 75 percent more efficient than long-haul trucks that carry a comparative amount of freight.

As Patricia Patnode of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which signed the aforementioned letter to the EPA, recently remarked, "Rather than abolish diesel trains, CARB should stand in awe of these marvels of energy-efficient transportation."

President Joe Biden talks a lot about trains, but his actions since taking office have consistently punished the private companies we should value far more than state-supported Amtrak. In this case, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and the White House need not think too hard. They should wait for reality to catch up before imposing on the rest of us one state's demands and ambitions.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The post How California's Ban on Diesel Locomotives Could Have Major National Repercussions appeared first on Reason.com.

There is an island in the Aegean, an island of stray cats and tumbling bougainvilleas, that has an instagram account devoted exclusively to its many doors. This account is a catalogue of variations on a theme, the theme being how you get in and out of a building, the variation being - well... Where to start? Modern doors, ancient doors. Doors of wood and doors of iron. Doors that are perfectly kept up, doors that are leaning, addled, barely hanging in there. Doors set with glass and doors set with grillwork. The doors are great individually, but it's together that they truly shine. You glimpse something of us as a species, I think, in their endless twists and reconfiguring, their fitness and anti-fitness for purpose.

If you are the kind of person who likes the idea of exploring the endless variation found within doors, Summerhouse is for you. And it's not just doors. Oh, the doors are great. They're nifty! Metal doors with an industrial feel, but also wooden double doors, perfect for an old junk shop. Sliding convenience-store doors. A round Hobbit number - painted green, of course.

But there are windows, rooves, finials and oddments like signage, rattling drainpipes, posters and hoardings. Fancy a polite little noticeboard? Fancy a lone payphone set, lollipop-style, upon a stick? Fancy trees and shrubs, wild and in pots? Walls of stone, walls of wood. Keep scrolling; even before the unlocks bring you a ghost amongst long grass and a cat lounging on an air-con unit, it's all here.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft are bringing Maneater back to Game Pass. Yesterday they unveiled the next batches of Game Pass additions and two are returnees, with the delightful fighty platformer Indivisible accompanying brutal shark 'em up Maneater. What's more important is that it's adding the game with the cutest little Nurglings, grimdark retro-styled FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The rhetoric of 'purging xenos and heretics' surely doesn't apply to these darling babies. Read on for all the games coming to (and going from) Game Pass over the next few weeks.

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Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Larry Pileggi, Coraluppi Head and Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and the winner of this year’s Phil Kaufman Award for Pioneering Contributions. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.

SE: When did you first get started working in semiconductors — and particularly, EDA?

Pileggi: This was 1984 at Westinghouse research. We were making ASICs — analog and digital — and with digital you had logic simulators. But for analog, there was no way to simulate them at Westinghouse. They didn’t even have SPICE loaded onto the machine. So I got a copy of SPICE from Berkeley and loaded that tape, and I was the first to use it in the research center. I saw how limited it was and thought, ‘There must be more mature things than this.’ While I was working there, I was taking a class with Andrzej Strojwas at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). He came up to me after a few weeks in that class and said, ‘I really think you should come back to school for a PhD.’ I had never considered it up until that point. But getting paid to go to school? That was cool, so I signed up.

SE: Circuit simulation in analog is largely brute force, right?

Pileggi: The tools that are out there are really good. There are many SPICEs out there, and they all have their niches that can do really great things. But it’s not something you can easily scale. That’s really been a challenge. There’s brute force in the innermost loop, but you can accelerate it with hardware.

SE: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you with regard to dealing with latency of interconnect as interconnect continued to scale?

Pileggi: There was some interest in looking at RC networks that appeared on chips as sort of a special class of problem. Paul Penfield and others at MIT did this Elmore approximation of RC lines using the first moment of the impulse response. It’s from a 1930s Elmore paper about estimating the delay of amplifiers. Mark Horowitz, a student of Penfield, tried to extend that to a few moments. What we did was more of a generalized approach, using many moments and building high-order approximations that you could apply to these RC lines. So you’re really using this to calculate that the dominant time constants, or the dominant poles, in the network. And for RC circuits, what’s really interesting is that the bigger the network gets, the more dominant the poles get. So you could have a million nodes out there — and it’s a million capacitors and a million poles — but for an RC line, three of them will model it really well. That makes things really efficient, providing you can capture those three efficiently. I was naive, not knowing that French mathematicians like [Henri] Pade already had attempted Pade approximations long before. I dove in like, ‘Oh, this should work.’ And I ran into a lot of the realities for why it doesn’t work. But then I was able to apply some of the circuit know-how to squeeze it into a place where it worked very effectively.

SE: A lot of that early work was around radio signals. But as you move that into the computing world, what else can you do with that? And if you now don’t have to put everything onto a single chip, does that change things?

Pileggi: Let’s take the power distribution for an IC, for example. That’s primarily dominated on the chip by RC phenomenon. The resistance far dominates the jωL impedance — the inductance. But as you move to a package, that’s different. If you put different chips together, whether you stack them or you put them on an interposer, inductance starts to rear its ugly head. Inductance is extraordinarily nasty to model and simulate. The problem is that when you when you look at capacitances, that’s a that’s a potential matrix where you take the nearest couplings, and say, ‘Okay, I have enough of this capacitance to say this is going to dominate the behavior.’ You’re essentially throwing away what you don’t need. With inductance, there’s a one-over relationship as compared to capacitance. Now, if you want the dominant inductance effect, that’s not so easy to get. If you have mutual couplings from everything to everything else, and if you say I’m going to throw away the couplings to faraway things, that’s a seemingly reasonable thing to do from an accuracy standpoint, but it affects the stability of the approximation. Essentially it can violate conservation of flux, such that you get positive poles. So you can actually create unstable systems by just throwing away small inductance terms. Usually when you see someone calculating inductance, it’s really just an estimate — or they’ve done some things to crunch it into a stable model.

SE: Is that simulation based on the 80/20 rule, or 90/10?

Pileggi: Even for the packages we had before we started doing the multi-chip stuff, power distribution was RC, but when you flip it into a package with many layers of metal, it’s LC. We had the same problem for the past 20 years, but what happens has been managed by good engineers. They apply very conservative methods to make sure the chips will work.

SE: So now, when you pile that into advanced nodes and packages and eliminate all that margin, you’ve got serious challenges, right?

Pileggi: Yes, and that’s why it was a good time for me to switch to electric power grids.

SE: Power grids for our communities have their own set of problems, though, like localization and mixing direct and alternating current, and a bunch of inverters.

Pileggi: It’s a fascinating problem. When I first stepped into it, a student of mine started telling me about how they did simulation. I said, ‘Wow, that doesn’t make any sense.’ I naively thought it was just like a big circuit, but it’s much more than that. It’s a very cool problem to work on. We’ve developed a lot of really exciting technology for that problem. With inverters, there’s a whole control loop. There isn’t the inertia that you have with big rotating machines that are fed by coal. But you have all these components on the same grid. How the grid behaves dynamically is a daunting problem.

SE: Does that also vary by weather? You’ve got wide variations in ambient temperature and all sorts of noise to contend with.

Pileggi: Yes, absolutely. In fact, how the lines behave is very much a function of temperature. That affects how resistant the transmission lines are. Frequency is very low, but the lengths are very long, so you have similar problems, but even more so with renewables. There’s sun, then a cloud, then sun. Or the wind changes direction. How do you store energy for use later? That’s where they talk about heavy batteries in the ground and things like that. Doing this with an old grid, like the one we have, is challenging. I’d much rather be starting from scratch.

SE: When you got started in electronics, was it largely the domain of some very big companies with very big research budgets?

Pileggi: Yes, and this is where you saw where management really makes a difference. Some of those companies, like Westinghouse Research, had these incredible R&D facilities, but they didn’t utilize them effectively, like all the gallium arsenide research where I was working. It seemed that every time we would develop something to improve something, the management didn’t always know what to do with it. I worked with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and they had worked on projects like the first camera in space, but they were living in obscurity. Nobody knew anything about their work, but it was just amazing.

SE: One other math-related question. You apparently have a reputation for being a very strong poker player. How did these two worlds collide?

Pileggi: I was in Las Vegas for a DARPA meeting and I had an afternoon off and there was a Texas Hold’em poker tournament going on. I thought it would be kind of fun, so I played four or five hours, got knocked out, and it cost me 100 bucks. I was intrigued by it, though. I went back to Pittsburgh and found our local casino had started a poker room with tournaments. I started getting better, probably because I read like 30 books on the subject. The more you play, the more you realize there are lots of layers to this. I ultimately played in the World Series in Vegas, because it’s like a bucket-list thing, and that first time I made it to day two of the main event. That’s equivalent to finishing in the top 40% of the field. When I was back in Pittsburgh, there was a ‘Poker Night in America’ event at the casino. There were about 300 people and some pros. I played in that, and won first place. That was a Saturday around Thanksgiving in 2013. We played from noon until just after midnight, and then you start again on Sunday. We played until maybe 5 a.m.

SE: That must have taken a toll.

Pileggi: Yes, because I was chairing the search for new department heads. I had a Monday morning meeting scheduled that I couldn’t miss, so I e-mailed everyone to say I would be an hour late and asked if they could push back the meeting. I went home and ate something, slept for an hour, and went to campus to do the final vote. They asked, what happened? I said I was in a poker tournament. They thought I was joking. But then they saw me on TV. All the local news stations covered it like, ‘Local professor skips school.’ I got a call from someone I hadn’t talked to in 34 years. My dean said his son thought engineering was stupid. But then he found out than this engineer won this poker tournament, and now he thinks engineering is really cool.’

SE: How did that affect your engineering classes?

Pileggi: I introduced myself to a group of students here two years ago when I became the department head and asked if they had any questions. One young lady raised her hand and said, ‘Yeah, can you teach us how to play poker?’ So now I do a poker training session with students once a semester.

The post Latency, Interconnects, And Poker appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by handcrafted art, intense fighting game violence, cosy management, and heaps more attractive and interesting indie games. Check these out!

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