German consumers spent €4.28 billion in the first six months of 2024, a dip of 6% compared to the same period last year.The news comes from a report by German trade association Game, based on data from GfK and the Sensor Tower-owned Data.ai. It marks the market's first decline after several years of growth.The sharpest drop in revenue was from hardware sales, which were down 18% year-on-year to €1.2 billion. This is due to slowing sales of PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles, as well as
German consumers spent €4.28 billion in the first six months of 2024, a dip of 6% compared to the same period last year.
The news comes from a report by German trade association Game, based on data from GfK and the Sensor Tower-owned Data.ai. It marks the market's first decline after several years of growth.
The sharpest drop in revenue was from hardware sales, which were down 18% year-on-year to €1.2 billion. This is due to slowing sales of PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles, as well as Switch entering the eighth year of its lifecycle.
Enlarge / RFA's first stage during a four-engine test-firing in May. (credit: Rocket Factory Augsburg)
The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, the company said.
The German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also develo
The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, the company said.
The German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit.
Within the last few months, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) delivered all three stages of its first rocket, named RFA One, to its launch site at SaxaVord Spaceport, located on Unst, one of the Shetland Islands and the northernmost inhabited island in the United Kingdom. The company is based in Augsburg, Germany.
BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development.
Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the Czech Republic. The site would produce smart power semiconductors for electric vehicles, renewable energy
BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development.
Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the Czech Republic. The site would produce smart power semiconductors for electric vehicles, renewable energy technology, and data centers.
The global chip manufacturing industry is projected to boost capacity by 6% in 2024 and 7% in 2025, reaching 33.7 million 8-inch (200mm) wafers per month, according to SEMI‘s latest World Fab Forecast report. Leading-edge capacity for 5nm nodes and below is expected to grow by 13% in 2024, driven by AI demand for data center applications. Additionally, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC will begin producing 2nm chips using gate-all-around (GAA) FETs next year, boosting leading-edge capacity by 17% in 2025.
At the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, imec introduced:
Functional CMOS-based CFETs with stacked bottom and top source/drain contacts.
CMOS-based 56Gb/s zero-IF D-band beamforming transmitters to support next-gen short-range, high-speed wireless services at frequencies above 100GHz.
ADCs for base stations and handsets, a key step toward scalable, high-performance beyond-5G solutions, such as cloud-based AI and extended reality apps.
Wolfspeedpostponed plans to construct a $3 billion chip plant in Germany, underscoring the EU‘s challenges in boosting semiconductor production, reports Reuters. The North Carolina-based company cited reduced capital spending due to a weakened EV market, saying it now aims to start construction in mid-2025, two years later than 0riginally planned.
Micron is building a pilot production line for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in the U.S., and considering HBM production in Malaysia to meet growing AI demand, according to a Nikkei report. The company is expanding HBM R&D facilities in Boise, Idaho, and eyeing production capacity in Malaysia, while also enhancing its largest HBM facility in Taichung, Taiwan.
Kioxiarestored its Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants in Japan to full capacity, ending production cuts as the memory market recovers, according to Nikkei. The company, which is focusing on NAND flash production, has secured new bank credit support, including refinancing a ¥540 billion loan and establishing a ¥210 billion credit line. Kioxia had reduced output by more than 30% in October 2022 due to weak smartphone demand.
Europe’s NATO Innovation Fund announced its first direct investments, which includes semiconductor materials. Twenty-three NATO allies co-invested in this over $1B fund devoted to address critical defense and security challenges.
The second meeting of the U.S.–India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) was held in New Delhi, with various funding and initiatives announced to support semiconductor technology, next-gen telecommunications, connected and autonomous vehicles, ML, and more.
Amazon announced investments of €10 billion in Germany to drive innovation and support the expansion of its logistics network and cloud infrastructure.
Quantum Machinesopened the Israeli Quantum Computing Center (IQCC) research facility, backed by the Israel Innovation Authority and located at Tel Aviv University. Also, Israel-based Classiq is collaborating with NVIDIA and BMW, using quantum computing to find the optimal automotive architecture of electrical and mechanical systems.
Global data center vacancy rates are at historic lows, and power availability is becoming less available, according to a Siemens report featured on Broadband Breakfast. The company called for an influx of financing to find new ways to optimize data center technology and sustainability.
Renesas completed its acquisition of Transphorm and will immediately start offering GaN-based power products and reference designs to meet the demand for wide-bandgap (WBG) chips.
Revenues for the top five wafer fab equipment (WFE) companies fell 9% YoY in Q1 2024, according to Counterpoint. This was offset partially by increased demand for NAND and DRAM, which increased 33% YoY, and strong growth in sales to China, which were up 116% YoY.
The SiC power devices industry saw robust growth in 2023, primarily driven by the BEV market, according to TrendForce. The top five suppliers, led by ST with a 32.6% market share and onsemi in second place, accounted for 91.9% of total revenue. However, the anticipated slowdown in BEV sales and weakening industrial demand are expected to significantly decelerate revenue growth in 2024.
About 30% of vehicles produced globally will have E/E architectures with zonal controllers by 2032, according to McKinsey & Co. The market for automotive micro-components and logic semiconductors is predicted to reach $60 billion in 2032, and the overall automotive semiconductor market is expected to grow from $60 billion to $140 billion in the same period, at a 10% CAGR.
The automotive processor market generated US$20 billion in revenue in 2023, according to Yole. US$7.8 billion was from APUs and FPGAs and $12.2 billion was from MCUs. The ADAS and infotainment processors market was worth US$7.8 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow to $16.4 billion by 2029 at a 13% CAGR. The market for ADAS sensing is expected to grow at a 7% CAGR.
Security
The CHERI Alliance was established to drive adoption of memory safety and scalable software compartmentalization via the security technology CHERI, or Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions. Founding members include Capabilities Limited, Codasip, the FreeBSD Foundation, lowRISC, SCI Semiconductor, and the University of Cambridge.
In security research:
Japan and China researchers explored a NAND-XOR ring oscillator structure to design an entropy source architecture for a true random number generator (TRNG).
University of Toronto and Carleton University researchers presented a survey examining how hardware is applied to achieve security and how reported attacks have exploited certain defects in hardware.
University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University researchers explored the potential of hardware security primitive Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) for mitigation of visual deepfakes.
Villanova University researchers proposed the Boolean DERIVativE attack, which generalizes Boolean domain leakage.
Post-quantum cryptography firm PQShield raised $37 million in Series B funding.
Former OpenAI executive, Ilya Sutskever, who quit over safety concerns, launchedSafe SuperintelligenceInc. (SSI).
EU industry groups warned the European Commission that its proposed cybersecurity certification scheme (EUCS) for cloud services should not discriminate against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, reported Reuters.
Cyber Europetested EU cyber preparedness in the energy sector by simulating a series of large-scale cyber incidents in an exercise organized by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.
Education and Training
New York non-profit NY CREATES and South Korea’s National Nano Fab Center partnered to develop a hub for joint research, aligned technology services, testbed support, and an engineer exchange program to bolster chips-centered R&D, workforce development, and each nation’s high-tech ecosystem.
New York and the Netherlands agreed on a partnership to promote sustainability within the semiconductor industry, enhance workforce development, and boost semiconductor R&D.
Rapidus is set to send 200 engineers to AI chip developer Tenstorrent in the U.S. for training over the next five years, reports Nikkei. This initiative, led by Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC), aims to bolster Japan’s AI chip industry.
Product News
UMCannounced its 22nm embedded high voltage (eHV) technology platform for premium smartphone and mobile device displays. The 22eHV platform reduces core device power consumption by up to 30% compared to previous 28nm processes. Die area is reduced by 10% with the industry’s smallest SRAM bit cells.
Alphawave Semi announced a new 9.2 Gbps HBM3E sub-system silicon platform capable of 1.2 terabytes per second. Based on the HBM3E IP, the sub-system is aimed at addressing the demand for ultra-high-speed connectivity in high-performance compute applications.
Movellus introduced the Aeonic Power product family for on-die voltage regulation, targeting the challenging area of power delivery.
Cadence partnered with Semiwise and sureCore to develop new cryogenic CMOS circuits with possible quantum computing applications. The circuits are based on modified transistors found in the Cadence Spectre Simulation Platform and are capable of processing analog, mixed-signal, and digital circuit simulation and verification at cryogenic temperatures.
Renesas launched R-Car Open Access (RoX), an integrated development platform for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), designed for Renesas R-Car SoCs and MCUs with tools for deployment of AI applications, reducing complexity and saving time and money for car OEMs and Tier 1s.
Infineon released industry-first radiation-hardened 1 and 2 Mb parallel interface ferroelectric-RAM (F-RAM) nonvolatile memory devices, with up to 120 years of data retention at 85-degree Celsius, along with random access and full memory write at bus speeds. Plus, a CoolGaN Transistor 700 V G4 product family for efficient power conversion up to 700 V, ideal for consumer chargers and notebook adapters, data center power supplies, renewable energy inverters, and more.
Ansysadopted NVIDIA’s Omniverse application programming interfaces for its multi-die chip designers. Those APIs will be used for 5G/6G, IoT, AI/ML, cloud computing, and autonomous vehicle applications. The company also announced ConceptEV, an SaaS solution for automotive concept design for EVs.
Fig. 1: Field visualization of 3D-IC with Omniverse. Source: Ansys
QP Technologiesannounced a new dicing saw for its manufacturing line that can process a full cassette of 300mm wafers 7% faster than existing tools, improving throughput and productivity.
NXP introduced its SAF9xxx of audio DSPs to support the demand for AI-based audio in software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by using Cadence’s Tensilica HiFi 5 DSPs combined with dedicated neural-network engines and hardware-based accelerators.
Avionyx, a provider of software lifecycle engineering in the aerospace and safety-critical systems sector, partnered with Siemens and will leverage its Polarion application lifecycle management (ALM) tool. Also, Dovetail Electric AviationadoptedSiemens Xcelerator to support sustainable aviation.
Research
Researchers from imec and KU Leuvenreleased a +70 page paper “Selecting Alternative Metals for Advanced Interconnects,” addressing interconnect resistance and reliability.
A comprehensive review article — “Future of plasma etching for microelectronics: Challenges and opportunities” — was created by a team of experts from the University of Maryland, Lam Research, IBM, Intel, and many others.
Researchers from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris’s Laboratory of Condensed Matter for Physics developed an approach to investigate defects in semiconductors. The team “determined the spin-dependent electronic structure linked to defects in the arrangement of semiconductor atoms,” the first time this structure has been measured, according to a release.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory-led researchers developed a small enclosed chamber that can hold all the components of an electrochemical reaction, which can be paired with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to generate precise views of a reaction at atomic scale, and can be frozen to stop the reaction at specific time points. They used the technique to study a copper catalyst.
The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved a clinical trial to test a device with 1,024 nanoscale sensors that records brain activity during surgery, developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego).
Events and Further Reading
Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:
Event
Date
Location
Standards for Chiplet Design with 3DIC Packaging (Part 2)
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 bui
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.
Edwardsopened 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.
In-Depth
Semiconductor Engineering published its Low Power-High Performance newsletter this week, featuring these stories:
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.
DeepXraised $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.
MetisXraised $44 million in Series A funding for its memory solutions built on Compute Express Link (CXL) for accelerating large-scale data processing applications.
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.
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 Laboratoryused 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.
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 Universitylaunched 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.
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.
Googledebuted its sixth generation Cloud TPU, 4.7X faster and 67% more energy-efficient than the previous generation, with double the high-bandwidth memory.
X-Siliconuncorked 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.
IBMexpanded 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).
Research
The University of Glasgowreceived £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.
DISCO developed a way to increase the diameter of diamond wafers that uses the KABRA process, a laser ingot slicing method.
CEA-Letideveloped two complementary approaches for high performance photon detectors — a mercury cadmium telluride-based avalanche photodetector and a superconducting single photon detector.
Toshibademonstrated 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.
Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are enga
Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.
Rumors of War
"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."
Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.
Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief
"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.
"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economistnoted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."
The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."
If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.
A Game Both Sides Can Play
Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.
In June 2022, The New York Timesreported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."
American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.
And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.
The Wider War Is Here
Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider warresulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.
"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.
Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.
Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.
So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.
On May 11, 2024, a new development in the ongoing patent dispute between Lenovo, Motorola, and InterDigital hit the public. According to the court ruling, ...
The post Lenovo and Motorola phones, tablets and other devices banned in Germany appeared first on Gizchina.com.
On May 11, 2024, a new development in the ongoing patent dispute between Lenovo, Motorola, and InterDigital hit the public. According to the court ruling, ...
A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut has gotten around that law by fully automating its stores, and it gets 25–30 percent of its sales on Sunday. A union that represents shop workers filed suit to force the stores to close on Sundays, say
A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut has gotten around that law by fully automating its stores, and it gets 25–30 percent of its sales on Sunday. A union that represents shop workers filed suit to force the stores to close on Sundays, saying it fears the company's success could undermine support for the nation's blue laws.
Among the countless challenges of decarbonizing transportation, one of the most compelling involves electric motors. In laboratories all over the world, researchers are now chasing a breakthrough that could kick into high gear the transition to electric transportation: a rugged, compact, powerful electric motor that has high power density and the ability to withstand high temperatures—and that doesn’t have rare-earth permanent magnets.
It’s a huge challenge currently preoccupying some of the
Among the countless challenges of decarbonizing transportation, one of the most compelling involves electric motors. In laboratories all over the world, researchers are now chasing a breakthrough that could kick into high gear the transition to electric transportation: a rugged, compact, powerful electric motor that has high power density and the ability to withstand high temperatures—and that doesn’t have rare-earth permanent magnets.
It’s a huge challenge currently preoccupying some of the best machine designers on the planet. More than a few of them are at
ZF Friedrichshafen AG, one of the world’s largest suppliers of parts to the automotive industry. In fact, ZF astounded analysts late last year when it announced that it had built a 220-kilowatt traction motor that used no rare-earth elements. Moreover, the company announced, their new motor had characteristics comparable to the rare-earth permanent-magnet synchronous motors that now dominate in electric vehicles. Most EVs have rare-earth-magnet-based motors ranging from 150 to 300 kilowatts, and power densities between 1.1 and 3.0 kilowatts per kilogram. Meanwhile, the company says they’ve developed a rare-earth-free motor right in the middle of that range: 220 kW. (The company has not yet revealed its motor’s specific power—its kW/kg rating.)
The ZF machine is a type called a separately-excited (or doubly-excited) synchronous motor. It has electromagnets in both the stator and the rotor, so it does away with the rare-earth permanent magnets used in the rotors of nearly all EV motors on the road today. In a separately-excited synchronous motor, alternating current applied to the stator electromagnets sets up a rotating magnetic field. A separate current applied to the rotor electromagnets energizes them, producing a field that locks on to the rotating stator field, producing torque.
“As a matter of fact, 95 percent of the rare earths are mined in China. And this means that if China decides no one else will have rare earths, we can do nothing against it.”
—Otmar Scharrer, ZF Friedrichshafen AG
So far, these machines have not been used much in EVs, because they require a separate system to transfer power to the spinning rotor magnets, and there’s no ideal way to do that. Many such motors use sliders and brushes to make electrical contact to a spinning surface, but the brushes produce dust and eventually wear out. Alternatively, the power can be transferred via inductance, but in that case the apparatus is typically cumbersome, making the unit complicated and physically large and heavy.
Now, though, ZF says it has solved these problems with its experimental motor, which it calls
I2SM (for In-Rotor Inductive-Excited Synchronous Motor). Besides not using any rare earth elements, the motor offers a few other advantages in comparison with permanent-magnet synchronous motors. These are linked to the fact that this kind of motor technology offers the ability to precisely control the magnetic field in the rotor—something that’s not possible with permanent magnets. That control, in turn, permits varying the field to get much higher efficiency at high speed, for example.
With headquarters in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, ZF Friedrichshafen AG is known for a
rich R&D heritage and many commercially successful innovations dating back to 1915, when it began supplying gears and other parts for Zeppelins. Today, the company has some 168,000 employees in 31 countries. Among the customers for its motors and electric drive trains are Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Jaguar Land Rover. (Late last year, shortly after announcing the I2SM, the company announced the sale of its 3,000,000th motor.)
Has ZF just shown the way forward for rare-earth-free EV motors? To learn more about the I
2SM and ZF’s vision of the future of EV traction motors, Spectrum reached out to Otmar Scharrer, ZF’s Senior Vice President, R&D, of Electrified Powertrain Technology. Our interview with him has been edited for concision and clarity.
IEEE Spectrum: Why is it important to eliminate or to reduce the use of rare-earth elements in traction motors?
ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s Otmar Scharrer is leading a team discovering ways to build motors that don’t depend on permanent magnets—and China’s rare-earth monopolies. ZF Group
Otmar Scharrer: Well, there are two reasons for that. One is sustainability. We call them “rare earth” because they really are rare in the earth. You need to move a lot of soil to get to these materials. Therefore, they have a relatively high footprint because, usually, they are dug out of the earth in a mine with excavators and huge trucks. That generates some environmental pollution and, of course, a change of the landscape. That is one thing. The other is that they are relatively expensive. And of course, this is something we always address cautiously as a tier one [automotive industry supplier].
And as a matter of fact, 95 percent of the rare earths are produced in China. And this means that if China decides no one else will have rare earths, we can do nothing against it. The recycling circle [for rare earth elements] will not work because there are just not enough electric motors out there. They still have an active lifetime. When you are ramping up, when you have a steep ramp up in terms of volume, you never can satisfy your demands with recycling. Recycling will only work if you have a constant business and you’re just replacing those units which are failing. I’m sure this will come, but we see this much later when the steep ramp-up has ended.
“The power density is the same as for a permanent-magnet machine, because we produce both. And I can tell you that there is no difference.”
—Otmar Scharrer, ZF Friedrichshafen AG
You had asked a very good question: How much rare-earth metal does a typical traction motor contain? I had to ask my engineers. This is an interesting question. Most of our electric motors are in the range of 150 to 300 kilowatts. This is the main range of power for passenger cars. And those motors typically have 1.5 kilograms of magnet material. And 0.5 percent to 1 percent out of this material is pure [heavy rare-earth elements]. So this is not too much. It’s only 5 to 15 grams. But, yes, it’s a very difficult-to-get material.
This is the reason for this [permanent-] magnet-free motor. The concept itself is not new. It has been used for years and years, for decades, because usually, power generation is done with this kind of electric machine. So if you have a huge power plant, for example, a gas power plant, then you would typically find such an externally-excited machine as a generator.
We did not use them for passenger cars or for mobile applications because of their weight and size. And some of that weight-and-size problem comes directly from the need to generate a magnetic field in the rotor, to replace the [permanent] magnets. You need to set copper coils under electricity. So you need to carry electric current inside the rotor. This is usually done with sliders. And those sliders generate losses. This is the one thing because you have, typically, carbon brushes touching a metal ring so that you can conduct the electricity.
Those brushes are what make the unit longer, axially, in the direction of the axle?
Scharrer: Exactly. That’s the point. And you need an inverter which is able to excite the electric machine. Normal inverters have three phases, and then you need a fourth phase to electrify the rotor. And this is a second obstacle. Many OEMs or e-mobility companies do not have this technology ready. Surprisingly enough, the first ones who brought this into serious production were [Renault]. It was a very small car, a Renault. [Editor's note: the model was the Zoe, which was manufactured from 2013 until March of this year.]
It had a relatively weak electric motor, just 75 or 80 kilowatts. They decided to do this because in an electric vehicle, there’s a huge advantage with this kind of externally excited machine. You can switch off and switch on the magnetic field. This is a great safety advantage. Why safety? Think about it. If your bicycle has a generator [for a headlight], it works like an electric motor. If you are moving and the generator is spinning, connected to the wheel, then it is generating electricity.
“We have an efficiency of approximately 96 percent. So, very little loss.”
—Otmar Scharrer, ZF Friedrichshafen AG
The same is happening in an electric machine in the car. If you are driving on the highway at 75 miles an hour, and then suddenly your whole system breaks down, what would happen? In a permanent magnet motor, you would generate enormous voltage because the rotor magnets are still rotating in the stator field. But in a permanent-magnet-free motor, nothing happens. You are just switched off. So it is self-secure. This is a nice feature.
And the second feature is even better if you drive at high speed. High speed is something like 75, 80, 90 miles an hour. It’s not too common in most countries. But it’s a German phenomenon, very important here.
People like to drive fast. Then you need to address the area of field weakening because [at high speed], the magnetic field would be too strong. You need to weaken the field. And if you don’t have [permanent] magnets, it’s easy: you just adapt the electrically-induced magnetic field to the appropriate value, and you don’t have this field-weakening requirement. And this results in much higher efficiency at high speeds.
You called this field weakening at high speed?
Scharrer: You need to weaken the magnetic field in order to keep the operation stable. And this weakening happens by additional electricity coming from the battery. And therefore, you have a lower efficiency of the electric motor.
What are the most promising concepts for future EV motors?
Scharrer: We believe that our concept is most promising, because as you pointed out a couple of minutes ago, we are growing in actual length when we do an externally excited motor. We thought a lot what we can do to overcome this obstacle. And we came to the conclusion, let’s do it inductively, by electrical inductance. And this has been done by competitors as well, but they simply replaced the slider rings with inductance transmitters.
“We are convinced that we can build the same size, the same power level of electric motors as with the permanent magnets.”
—Otmar Scharrer, ZF Friedrichshafen AG
And this did not change the situation. What we did, we were shrinking the inductive unit to the size of the rotor shaft, and then we put it inside the shaft. And therefore, we reduced this 50-to-90-millimeter growth in axial length. And therefore, as a final result, you know the motor shrinks, the housing gets smaller, you have less weight, and you have the same performance density in comparison with a PSM [permanent-magnet synchronous motor] machine.
What is an inductive exciter exactly?
Scharrer: Inductive exciter means nothing else than that you transmit electricity without touching anything. You do it with a magnetic field. And we are doing it inside of the rotor shaft. This is where the energy is transmitted from outside to the shaft [and then to the rotor electromagnets].
So the rotor shaft, is that different from the motor shaft, the actual torque shaft?
Scharrer: It’s the same.
The thing I know with inductance is in a transformer, you have coils next to each other and you can induce a voltage from the energized coil in the other coil.
Scharrer: This is exactly what is happening in our rotor shafts.
So you use coils, specially designed, and you induce voltage from one to the other?
Scharrer: Yes. And we have a very neat, small package, which has a diameter of less than 30 millimeters. If you can shrink it to that value, then you can put it inside the rotor shaft.
So of course, if you have two coils, and they’re spaced next to each other, you have a gap. So that gap enables you to spin, right? Since they’re not touching, they can spin independently. So you had to design something where the field could be transferred. In other words, they could couple even though one of them was spinning.
Scharrer: We have a coil in the rotor shaft, which is rotating with the shaft. And then we have another one that is stationary inside the rotor shaft while the shaft rotates around it. And there is an air gap in between. Everything happens inside the rotor shaft.
What is the efficiency? How much power do you lose?
Scharrer: We have an efficiency of approximately 96 percent. So, very little loss. And for the magnetic field, you don’t need a lot of energy. You need something between 10 and 15 kilowatts for the electric field. Let’s assume a transmitted power of 10 kilowatts, we’ll have losses of about 400 watts. This [relatively low level of loss] is important because we don’t cool the unit actively and therefore it needs this kind of high efficiency.
The motor isn’t cooled with liquids?
Scharrer: The motor itself is actively cooled, with oil, but the inductive unit is passively cooled, with heat transfer to nearby cooling structures.
“A good invention is always easy. If you look as an engineer on good IP, then you say, ‘Okay, that looks nice.’”
—Otmar Scharrer, ZF Friedrichshafen AG
What are the largest motors you’ve built or what are the largest motors you think you can build, in kilowatts?
Scharrer: We don’t think that there is a limitation with this technology. We are convinced that we can build the same size, the same power level of electric motors as with the permanent magnets.
What have you done so far? What prototypes have you built?
Scharrer: We have a prototype with 220 kilowatts. And we can easily upgrade it to 300, for example. Or we can shrink it to 150. That is always easy.
And what is your specific power of this motor?
Scharrer: You mean kilowatts per kilogram? I can’t tell you, to be quite honest. It’s hard to compare, because it always depends on where the borderline is. You never have a motor by itself. You always need a housing as well. What part of the housing are you including in the calculation? But I can tell you one thing: The power density is the same as for a permanent-magnet machine because we produce both. And I can tell you that there is no difference.
What automakers do you currently have agreements with? Are you providing electric motors for certain automakers? Who are some of your customers now?
Scharrer: We are providing our dedicated hybrid transmissions to BMW, to Jaguar Land Rover, and our electric-axle drives to Mercedes-Benz and Geely Lotus, for example. And we are, of course, in development with a lot of other applications. And I think you understand that I cannot talk about that.
So for BMW, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, you’re providing electric motors and drivetrain components?
Scharrer: BMW and Land Rover. We provide dedicated hybrid transmissions. We provide an eight-speed automatic transmission with a hybrid electric motor up to 160 kilowatts. It’s one of the best hybrid transmissions because you can drive fully electrically with 160 kilowatts, which is quite something.
“We achieved the same values, for power density and other characteristics, for as for a [permanent] magnet motor. And this is really a breakthrough because according to our best knowledge, this never happened before.”
—Otmar Scharrer, ZF Friedrichshafen AG
What were the major challenges you had to overcome, to transmit the power inside the rotor shaft?
Scharrer: The major challenge is, always, it needs to be very small. At the same time, it needs to be super reliable, and it needs to be easy.
A good invention is always easy. When you see it, if you look as an engineer on good IP [intellectual property], then you say, “Okay, that looks nice”—it’s quite obvious that it’s a good idea. If the idea is complex and it needs to be explained and you don’t understand it, then usually this is not a good idea to be implemented. And this one is very easy. Straightforward. It’s a good idea: Shrink it, put it into the rotor shaft.
So you mean very easy to explain?
Scharrer: Yes. Easy to explain because it’s obviously an interesting idea. You just say, “Let’s use part of the rotor shaft for the transmission of the electricity into the rotor shaft, and then we can cut the additional length out of the magnet-free motor.” Okay. That’s a good answer.
We have a lot of IP here. This is important because if you have the idea, I mean, the idea is the main thing.
What were the specific savings in weight and rotor shaft and so on?
Scharrer: Well, again, I would just answer in a very general way. We achieved the same values, for power density and other characteristics, as for a [permanent] magnet motor. And this is really a breakthrough because according to our best knowledge, this never happened before.
Do you think the motor will be available before the end of this year or perhaps next year?
Scharrer: You mean available for a serious application?
Yes. If Volkswagen came to you and said, “Look, we want to use this in our next car,” could you do that before the end of this year, or would it have to be 2025?
Scharrer: It would have to be 2025. I mean, technically, the electric motor is very far along. It is already in an A-sample status, which means we are...
What kind of status?
Scharrer: A-sample. In the automotive industry, you have A, B, or C. For A-sample, you have all the functions, and you have all the features of the product, and those are secured. And then B- is, you are not producing any longer in the prototype shop, but you are producing close to a possibly serious production line. C-sample means you are producing on serious fixtures and tools, but not on a [mass-production] line. And so this is an A-sample, meaning it is about one and a half years away from a conventional SOP ["Start of Production"] with our customer. So we could be very fast.
This article was updated on 15 April 2024. An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect figure for the efficiency of the inductive exciter used in the motor. This efficiency is 96 percent, not 98 or 99 percent.
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