And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here?

I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.

We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal.  I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.

And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead.  And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case.  As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.

So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.

Still, it was a heady time.  There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day.   I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere.  Look at us.

The community of old

Some of those site persist.  Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going.  A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates.  Others are around, but on different mediums.  Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.

More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive.  Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.

During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter.  They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.

Brent from VirginWorlds got a card

People could afford to be picky.  You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following.  I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!)  Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games.  We argued with each other.  SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars.  I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.

It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.

Sure, new venues show up.   There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers.  And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.

XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!

But all of those got along pretty well.  I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr.  I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.

Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that.  Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.

Page view for TAGN by year

I mean look at that line.  It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.

And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from.  The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.

My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.

Highlight of my Presentation

Okay, there were a few more people than that.  But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.

And that is certainly one way to look at things.  The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.

Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.

I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.

I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim.  Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.

If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game.  That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.

Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience.  Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.

Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists.  Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.

Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words?  Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.

Should I eschew words and just do pictures?  Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?

No, that can’t be it.  I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform.  Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.

Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.

I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.

I am not sure that is 100% true.  Zero readers might be too much quiet.  But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined.  For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis.  Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.

The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one.  That one is for another day… or maybe never.”  Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.

And there is the pleasure, the having written.  The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed.  Did I soften on this expansion or that release?  Am I nostalgic for some title I panned?  Maybe?

Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online.  Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes.  Was it really that bad?  Did I miss something in it?  Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?

Probably less likely, in all honestly.  My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.

And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture.  Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.

Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.

And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust?  Look at them all!  Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.

I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.

1. 2TonWaffle Community
2. A Boy and His Computer
3. A Hobbits Journey
4. Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap
5. AI MMORPG News
6. Aistoryweavers.studio
7. Aiyna
8. Alexs Review Corner
9. Alligators And Aneurysms
10. Alvans Digital Garden
11. Amerpie
12. And So It Goes…
13. AppAddict
14. Art by Lucas da Silva
15. Avaruussuo
16. Axxuys Blog
17. Aywrens Nook
18. Beats and Skies
19. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
20. BinaryDigits Cafe
21. Bio Break
22. Cascading Space
23. Chasing Dings
24. Contains Moderate Peril
25. Cotswold Diary
26. Cubic Creativity
27. Endgame Viable
28. EVE Online Pictures
29. Exposition is Inevitable
30. Flamingo Flix
31. Funky Frogster Zone
32. Gaudete Theology
33. Geek on a Harley
34. Gendo Glow
35. Grubz Blog
36. Heartless Gamer
37. Hey Dingus
38. In An Age
39. Inconsistent Software
40. Indiecator
41. Inventory Full
42. Jeremy Cherfas
43. Jess is Typing
44. JJxSly
45. Juha-Matti Santala
46. Just Text
47. Kaushiks Blog
48. KayTalksGames
49. Kellys World
50. Kluwes
51. Lameazoid
52. Linkage
53. Living Out Loud
54. Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
55. Martins Notebook
56. Matan Abudy
57. MMO Casual
58. Monsterladys Diary
59. Mormoroi
60. Mutant Reviewers
61. Nathan Friend
62. Necoco loves stuff
63. Nejimaki Blog
64. Nerd Girl Thoughts
65. Nerdy Bookahs
66. Neville Hobson
67. Noisy Deadlines
68. Notes by JCProbably
69. OwlBlog
70. P.S Its Me
71. Peridotlines – A Place Where I Write
72. Pink Gallica
73. Point Click Repeat
74. Quintessence of Dust
75. Ramble With(out) A Cause
76. Ramblings by Joshua
77. Reality Frameworks
78. Riels Nest
79. rscottjones.com
80. rsjon.es
81. Rumors Matrix
82. SamJC
83. Sane Boat
84. Sane Boat
85. Scopique
86. Select Star Studio
87. Shadowz Abstract Gaming
88. Shaky.Sh
89. Sharon A. Hill: Strange Claims Adjuster
90. SoftThistle 2.0
91. Splendide Mendax
92. StarShadow
93. Sword of Seiros
94. TAGN
95. Tales of the Aggronaut
96. Tart Darling
97. The Chip Bag
98. The Dragon Chronicle
99. The End of My Worlds
100. The Everjournal
101. The Friendly Necromancer
102. The Last Chapter Gaming Blog
103. The Lost Outpost
104. The Naming Way
105. The Tony Burgess Blog
106. Time to Loot
107. Uncountable Thoughts
108. Unidentified Signal Source
109. Usama Insights
110. Valentines Days
111. Vicissitudes
112. Wand3r
113. WAWAWA
114. Werd I/O
115. With Love Kechi
116. Words Under My Name
117. Yordi

As always, if you can find the time, please visit some of our participants.  We all like a page view or three when we can get them.

What I want to achieve

I want to generate sphere planet world, seamless of course, for RTS game like Planetary Annihilation: TITANS, which means I want:

• place walking agents on sphere, move them on a sphere surface, be able to do A* pathfinding
• generate polygonal regions on sphere like Voronoi
• have world divided by chunks (possibly reduced to 1D array) to effectively perform calculations like local avoidance.
• generate seamless surface heightmap based on noise functions AND not to store this height map as a texture but just store height overrides in chunks. This way I can have just uint seed and overrides instead of keeping huge heightmap texture.

How would I do it in seamless 2D world

In 2D space things are really simple even if your world one axis seamless: 2D map can be imagined as cylinder, or both axis are seamless: 2D map can be imagined as torus.

Coordinates

They are just float x, y. Moving is just adjusting coordinates. Distance between 2 points is just distance between 2D vectors. Seamlessness of moving is achieved by % operation with coordinates, like x = x % x_max.

World as 2D grid

2D world can be represented as 2D grid where each cell is a chunk with which I can effectively store and access data, because 2D grid is reduced to 1D array. 2D position can be easily converted to chunk index and back.

Heightmap noise generation

Seamless noise can be tricky, but here we have golden treasure of map noise generation from red blob games.

Presenting world and LOD

I would use simple plane mesh with rectangular connection of triangles to represent terrain of 2D world. LOD then could be implemented by recursively add vertices into mesh cells like tree. Again with 2D world it is simple because mesh / data / LOD are all grid based.

Problems of doing same with sphere world

Because claimed / x-seamless / xy-seamless 2D worlds are all not really the sphere (they are plane / cylinder / torus in terms of wrapping) there can't be 1:1 transformation between 2D and spherical 2D world.

When trying to wrap rectangular around sphere something should be disturbed. It could be that we actually run all logic in 2D but project coordinates on sphere, but we will get disturbed positions near poles.

Or we can run logic on sphere and project positions back to 2D then we will get disturbed 2D representation like what happens with earth map when it represented in 2D, which is what called Equirectangular projection.

One way or another I need some "grid" representation of chunks, because in the end I need to test what chunks of sphere camera see and effectively cull objects which are not in visible chunk.

Cubemap solution

Representing sphere as cubemap kills all problems working with sphere, because sphere now represented as 6 2D grids.

• Constructing mesh is just get cube (or six plane faces) with vertices adjusted in a way they lay on unit sphere. LOD is now also possible because we can work with faces separately.
• Store and access needed chunk now isn't a problem also because now we are back on 2D grids.

Problem with cubemap coordinate system

Many thanks again to red blob games and this article in particular. Here we can find a way to implement coordinate system for cubemap world. But moving across faces is a huge mess, not only because it require to map direction for each face but also because when both x and y have to be wrapped to another face it becomes ambiguous which face to choose. So moving on cube map becomes problematic for corner cases.

Use cubemap only for data

I think it is possible to use spherical coordinate system latitude and longitude and reimplement common operations like moving, getting distance, etc. but on sphere instead of 2D surface and use cubemap representation only for storing data in and read from chunks.

Where to live finally?

• Living on sphere means to deal with spherical calculations which are more complex to understand and expensive because require trigonometrical functions. But then coordinate system becomes natural because we actually live on sphere and just map it on cubemap when need to work with rectangular chunks.
• Living on cubemap means to deal with cubemap coordinate system which is complex core of all this approach also producing prohibited moving cases. But in return we get nice and simple 2D calculations for everything with natural storing data in rectangular chunks and only use sphere to represent our world in 3D as a planet.

What I want as an answer

Maybe I already answered my question and there is no place to answer anymore and I just need to chose one way or another comparing pros and cons. But maybe I miss something, maybe there is another smart way to do what I need without overcomplicating everything. I will appreciate any advice.

Zenless Zone Zero producer Zhenyu Li revealed in a recent interview with Eurogamer (via an interpreter) that AI generated content is used in the game "program-wise" to "better smoothen the game progress."

No specific programming examples were provided, as Li is "not a tech person," but he did stress that AI "only consists of a small part of the programming [in Zenless Zone Zero], mostly to help the programming team to smoothen the production process, to actually make our work more efficient."

Something we do know is that the game's signature vibrant, urban art style that sets it apart from miHoYo's other titles, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, is not something made with AI generation. Li says the team wants to "create something from our own mind" when it comes to art related content, and in a later statement provided to Eurogamer to clarify some comments, it was added that this is "something the whole team believes in."

Read more

Zenless Zone Zero has secured itself a release date.

The upcoming free-to-play RPG from the Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail team is set to release across Android, iOS, PC and PS5 on 4th July. This date was previously suspected, when Apple's App Store on mobile said the game was "expected" on 4th July here in the UK.

"Dear Proxy, Thank you for your ongoing interest in and support of Zenless Zone Zero," the team shared on social media platform X earlier today. "We look forward to meeting you on Sixth Street when entry to New Eridu is granted."

Read more

In the vast Wuthering Waves-shaped shadow that has descended across gaming comes an announcement from HoYoverse, publishers of quite large gacha gubbins 'em up, Genshin Impact. The studio's follow-up Zenless Zone Zero is now set to release on July 4th. For anyone who hasn't yet heard of the bright cyberpunk character action game, I guess now's your chance to look at the slick anime visuals in the new trailer below and go "hmmm", with either a songful note of eye-widening interest or the suspicious rumble of a free-to-play skeptic. Your choice.

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Back in the late 90s when all of you NORMIES were playing Diablo, I was playing a little-known Konami ARPG called Azure Dreams, which has alas never escaped PlayStation prison. It's a grid-based, upwardly mobile roguelitey dungeon crawler set in a big tower, each floor a semi-randomised maze of monsters (which you can capture), traps and pick-ups, where player and creature actions happen simultaneously.

Effort Star's Enter The Chronosphere doesn't have grids or monster capturing, that I know of, but it taps into a comparable vein of diorama-sized frantic-yet-laidback challenge, with characters, foes and projectiles frozen in time till you give a command. There's a demo on Steam as part of the platform's Endless Replayability Fest, which I encourage you to try, whether you are one of the COOL KIDS who played Azure Dreams or not.

Read more

By Adam Kovac, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan.

Cadence plans to acquire BETA CAE Systems for $1.24 billion, the latest volley in a race to sell multi-physics simulation and analysis across a broad set of customers with deep pockets. Cadence said the deal opens the door to structural analysis for the automotive, aerospace, industrial, and health care sectors. Under the terms of the agreement, 60% of the purchase would be paid in cash, and the remainder in stock.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported that North Korea was targeting cyberattacks at domestic semiconductor equipment companies, using a “living off the land” approach, in which the attacker uses minimal malware to attack common applications installed on the server. That makes it more difficult to spot an attack. According to the government, “In December last year, Company A, and in February this year, Company B, had their configuration management server and security policy server hacked, respectively, and product design drawings and facility site photos were stolen.”

As the memory market goes, so goes the broader chip industry. Last quarter, and heading into early 2024, both markets began showing signs of sustainable growth. DRAM revenue jumped 29.6% in Q4 for a total of $17.46 billion. TrendForce attributed some of that to  new efforts to stockpile chips and strategic production control. NAND flash revenue was up 24.5% in Q4, with solid growth expected to continue into the first part of this year, according to TrendForce. Revenue for the sector topped $11.4 billion in Q4, and it’s expected to grow another 20% this quarter. SSD prices rebounded in Q4, as well, up 15% to $23.1 billion. Across the chip industry, sales grew 15.2% in January compared to the same period in 2023, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). This is the largest increase since May 2022, and that trend is expected to continue throughout 2024 with double-digit growth compared to 2023.

Marvell said it is working with TSMC to develop a technology platform for the rapid deployment of analog, mixed-signal, and foundational IP. The company plans to sell both custom and commercial chiplets at 2nm.

The Dutch government is concerned that ASML, the only maker of EUV/high-NA EUV lithography equipment in the world, is considering leaving the Netherlands, according to De Telegraaf.

Quick links to more news:

Design and Power
Manufacturing and Test
Automotive and Batteries
Security
Pervasive Computing and AI
Events

Design and Power

AMD appears to have hit a roadblock with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) over a new AI chip it designed for the Chinese market, as reported by Bloomberg. U.S. officials told the company the new chip is too powerful to be sold without a license.

JEDEC released its new memory standard as a free download on its website. The JESD239 Graphics Double Data Rate SGRAM can reach speeds of 192 GB/s and improve signal-to-noise ratio.

Accellera rolled out its IEEE Std. 1800‑2023 Standard for SystemVerilog—Unified Hardware Design, Specification, and Verification Language, which is now available for free download. The decision to offer it at no cost is due to Accellera’s participation in the IEEE GET Program, which was founded in 2010 with the intention of providing  open access to some standards. Accellera also announced it had approved for release the Verilog-AMS 2023 standard, which offers enhancements to analog constructs, dynamic tolerance for event control statements, and other upgrades.

Chiplets are a hot topic these days. Six industry experts discuss chiplet standards, interoperability, and the need for highly customized AI chiplets.

Optimizing EDA hardware for the cloud can shorten the time required for large and complex simulations, but not all workloads will benefit equally, and much more can be done to improve those that can.

Flex Logix is developing InferX DSP for use with existing EFLX eFPGA from 40nm to 7nm. InferX achieves about 30 times the DSP performance/mm² than eFPGA.

The number of challenges is growing in power semiconductors, just as it is in traditional chips. This tech talk looks at integrating power semiconductors with other devices, different packaging impacts, and how these devices will degrade over time.

Vultr announced it will use NVIDIA’s HGX H100 GPU clusters to expand its Seattle-based cloud data center. The company said the expansion, which will be powered by hydroelectricity, will make the facility one of the cleanest, most power efficient data centers in the country.

Amazon Web Services will expand its presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing a new $5.3 billion infrastructure region in the country that will launch in 2026. The new region will offer developers, entrepreneurs and companies access to healthcare, education and other services.

Google is teaming up with the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) to launch the XPRIZE Quantum Applications, with a $5 million in prizes for winners who can demonstrate ways to use quantum computing to solve real-world problems. Teams must submit a proposal that includes analysis of how long their algorithm would need to run before reaching a solution to a problem, such as improving drug development or designing new battery materials.

South Korea’s nepes corporation has turned to Siemens EDA for solutions in the development of advanced 3D-IC packages. The deal will see nepes incorporating several Siemens technologies, including the Calibre nmPlatform, Hyperlynx software and Xpedition Substrate Integrator software.

Siemens also formalized a partnership with Nuclei System Technology in which the pair of companies will work together on solution support for Nuclei’s RISC-V processor cores. The collaboration will allow clients to monitor CPU program execution in real-time via Nuclei’s RISC-V CPU Ips.

Keysight and ETS-Lindgren announced a breakthrough test solution for cellular devices using non-terrestrial networks. The solution is capable of measuring and validating the performance of both the transmitter and receiver of devices capable of supporting the network.

Nearly fifty companies raised $800 million for power electronics, data center interconnects, and more last month.

Manufacturing and Test

SEMI Europe issued a position statement to the European Union, warning against additional export controls or rules on foreign investment. SEMI argued that free trade partnerships are a better method for ensuring security than bans or restrictions.

Revenues for the top five wafer fab equipment manufacturers declined 1% YoY in 2023 to $93.5 billion, according to Counterpoint Research. The drop was attributed to weak spending on memory, inventory adjustments, and low demand in consumer electronics. The tide is changing, though.

Bruker closed two acquisitions. One involved Chemspeed Technologies, a Switzerland-based provider of automated laboratory R&D and QC workflow solutions. The second involved Phasefocus, an image processing company based in the UK.

A Swedish company, SCALINQ, released a commercially available large-scale packaging solution capable of controlling quantum devices with hundreds of qubits.

Solid Sands, a provider of testing and qualification technology for compilers and libraries, will partner with California-based Emprog to establish a representative presence in the U.S.

Automotive

Tesla halted production at its Brandenberg, Germany, gigafactory after an environmental activist group attacked an electricity pylon, reports the Guardian.

Stellantis will invest €5.6 billion (~$6.1B) in South America to support more than 40 new products, decarbonization technologies, and business opportunities.

The amount of data being collected, processed, and stored in vehicles is exploding, and so is the value of that data. That raises questions that are still not fully answered about how that data will be used, by whom, and how it will be secured.

While industry experts expect many benefits of V2X technology, technological and social hurdles to cross. But there is progress.

Infineon released its next-gen silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET trench technology with 650V and 1,200V options improving stored energies and charges by up to 20%, ideal for power semiconductor applications such as photovoltaics, energy storage, DC EV charging, motor drives, and industrial power supplies.

Hyundai selected Ansys to supply structural simulation solutions for vehicle body system analysis, providing end-to-end, predictively accurate capabilities for virtual performance validation.

ION Mobility used the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio for styling, mechanical engineering, and electric battery pack development for its ION M1-S electric motorbike.

Ethernovia sampled a family of automotive PHY transceivers that scale from 10 Gbps to 1 Gbps over 15 meters of automotive cabling.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved Waymo’s plan to expand its driverless robotaxi services to Los Angeles and other cities near San Francisco, reports Reuters.

By 2027, next-gen battery EVs (BEVs) will on average be cheaper to produce than comparable gas-powered cars, reports Gartner. But the firm noted that average cost of EV accident repair will rise by 30%, and 15% of EV companies founded in the last decade will be acquired or bankrupt.

University of California San Diego (UCSD) researchers developed a cathode material for solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries that is electrically conductive and structurally healable.

ION Storage Systems announced its anodeless and compressionless solid-state batteries (SSBs) achieved 125 cycles with under 5% capacity degradation in performance. ION has been working with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to test its SSB before expanding into markets such as EVs, energy storage, consumer electronics, and aerospace.

Security

Advanced process nodes and higher silicon densities are heightening DRAM’s susceptibility to Rowhammer attacks, as reduced cell spacing significantly decreases the hammer count needed for bit flips. A multi-layered, system-level approach is crucial to DRAM protection.

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University and Rafael Defense Systems proposed an analytical electromagnetic model for IC shielding against hardware attacks.

Keysight acquired the IP of Firmalyzer, whose firmware security analysis technology will be integrated into the Keysight IoT Security Assessment and Automotive Security solutions, providing analysis into what is happening inside the IoT device itself.

Flex Logix joined the Intel Foundry U.S. Military Aerospace Government (USMAG) Alliance, ensuring U.S. defense industrial base and government customers have access to the latest technology, enabling successful designs for mission critical programs.

The EU Council presidency and European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on a Cyber Solidarity Act and an amendment to the Cybersecurity Act (CSA) concerning managed security services.

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and partners updated the compendium on elections cybersecurity in response to issues such as AI deep fakes, hacktivists-for-hire, the sophistication of threat actors, and the current geopolitical context.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched efforts to help secure the open source software ecosystem; updated its Public Safety Communications and Cyber Resiliency Toolkit; and issued other alerts including security advisories for VMware, Apple, and Cisco.

Pervasive Computing and AI

Johns Hopkins University engineers used natural language prompts and ChatGPT4 to produce detailed instructions to build a spiking neural network (SNN) chip. The neuromorphic accelerators could power real-time machine intelligence for next-gen embodied systems like autonomous vehicles and robots.

The global AI hardware market size was estimated at $53.71 billion in 2023, and is expected to reach about $473.53 billion by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of 24.5%, reports Precedence Research.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers and partners built compact chips capable of converting light into microwaves, which could improve navigation, communication, and radar systems.

Fig. 1: NIST researchers test a chip for converting light into microwave signals. Pictured is the chip, which is the fluorescent panel that looks like two tiny vinyl records. The gold box to the left of the chip is the semiconductor laser that emits light to the chip. Credit: K. Palubicki/NIST

The Indian government is investing 103 billion rupees ($1.25B) in AI projects, including computing infrastructure and large language models (LLMs).

Infineon is collaborating with Qt Group, bringing Qt’s graphics framework to Infineon’s graphics-enabled TRAVEO T2G cluster MCUs to optimize graphical user interface (GUI) development.

Keysight leveraged fourth-generation AMD EPYC CPUs to develop a new benchmarking methodology to test mobile and 5G private network performance. The method uses realistic traffic generation to uncover a CPU’s true power and scalability while observing bandwidth requirements.

The AI industry is pushing a nuclear power revival, reports NBC, and Amazon bought a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania from Talen Energy for $650 million, according to WNEP.

Bank of America was awarded 644 patents in 2023 for technology including information security, AI, machine learning (ML), online and mobile banking, payments, data analytics, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).

Mistral AI’s large language model, Mistral Large, became available in the Snowflake Data Cloud for customers to securely harness generative AI with their enterprise data.

China’s smartphone unit sales declined 7% year over year in the first six weeks of 2024, with Apple declining 24%, reports Counterpoint.

Shipments of LCD TV panels are expected to reach 55.8 million units in Q1 2024, a 5.3% quarter over quarter increase, reports TrendForce. And an estimated 5.8 billion LED lamps and luminaires are expected to reach the end of their lifespan in 2024, triggering a wave of secondary replacements and boosting total LED lighting demand to 13.4 billion units.

Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) researchers mined high-purity gold from electrical and electronic waste.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the University of Utah launched a National Data Platform pilot project, aimed at making access to and use of scientific data open and equitable.

Events

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Upcoming webinars are here.

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