All the stories below – which cover Apple, Raspberry Pi, supercapacitors, Intel, RISC-V and more – were written in 2023, to keep things focused. Can you guess what is at Number One?
Let’s take it in reverse order and start with Number Ten…
10. US Chips Act roll-out extended to smaller supply chain projects
The United States Chips Act was extended last week to projects with a capital investment below $300 million involving the construction, expansion, or modernisation of commercial facilities in the US for semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment. The projects will produce the equipment, chemicals, gases, and other materials that are needed in the semiconductor supply chain. The application process is designed to be accessible for smaller businesses and projects. It includes two phases.
9. Denying China RISC-V [Mannerisms]
The huffing and puffing in US Congressional corridors about stopping China having access to RISC-V begs the question: How can you actually do this? It’s all very well, stopping Intel or Nvidia, selling their chips to China, or stopping foundries making chips made on particular process nodes to China, or to stop equipment companies selling defined equipment types to China, because there are not so many such companies and they all have managements, or come under governments, which are friendly to the US. It is certainly possible to stop a company under the control of the US sanctions mechanism from assisting a Chinese company in designing a chip using a RISC-V core but…
8. Silencing a ‘Chinese diesel heater’ [Engineer In Wonderland]
I got given a 5kW heater for the workshop, powered by diesel fuel and colloquially known as a ‘Chinese diesel heater’ (right) – they seem to be based on designs from German companies Webasto and Eberspacher. I finally got around to installing over the cold snap before Christmas, putting the heater unit inside the workshop (right) and the exhaust, air intake, fuel tank, pump and fuel filter outside. Disclaimer and safety note: What you do to your diesel heater is your affair. If you don’t know what you are doing, get an expert to fit and set-up such heaters.
7. 12% decline for semis in 2023 forecast by SI
The 2022 semiconductor market was worth $573.5 billion, according to WSTS. 2022 was up 3.2% from 2021, a significant slowdown from 26.2% growth in 2021. According to Semiconductor Intelligence, the most accurate forecaster was Objective Analysis with a 6% growth forecast released in December 2021. IDC was closer with a 4% forecast in September 2021, but this was outside of the contest time range.
6. That long-awaited Raspberry Pi Pico CNC control board has emerged [Engineer In Wonderland]
PicoCNC, the Raspberry Pi Pico based CNC control board, has finally emerged from development by Phil Barrett of Brookwood Design, which has a web store on Tindie. PicoCNC, the Raspbrerry Pi Pico based CNC control board, has finally emerged from development by Phil Barrett of Brookwood Design, which has a web store on Tindie. First mooted by publicly by him in April 2021, all went quiet in the grblHAL GitHub discussion that August, until now, two years later. And the result looks very nice (and they seem to be flying off the shelves and the latest batch has sold out since last night….).
5. National Instruments up for sale
National Instruments is up for sale and is carrying out a strategic review of its options. The company says it has retained advisers Bank of America Corp. and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz to review a range of alternatives, “including solicitation of interest from potential acquirers and other transaction partners, some of whom have already approached the company.” The NI chairman Michael McGrath said: “Over the last five years, we have been executing an exciting strategic transformation, increasing our focus on complete solutions for high-growth vertical markets.”
4. Supercapacitor banks for energy storage
Kyocera AVX has announced a range of high-capacity supercapcitor banks with low leakage. “SCM Series supercapacitor modules are rated for operating temperatures from -40°C to +65°C and lifetimes that extend to millions of cycles,” according to the company. “They are also lead-free compatible, RoHS compliant, and compliant with the UL 810A standard for electrochemical capacitors.” Initially there are five versions.
3. Apple’s Employee No. 0 [Mannerisms]
Robert X Cringely, in his wonderful book Accidental Empires, tells a rib-tickling yarn about the early days of Apple. It happened in the late 1970’s when Apple had grown beyond the point that all the employees knew each other on sight. So it was decided that, like grown-up companies, they should all have name badges. As is the corporate way, it was deemed that these badges should be numbered and, as corporate lore decrees, the number assigned would be based on the order in which employees had joined the company. “Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1,” writes Cringely, “Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on. Jobs didn’t want to be number 2.
2. Top Ten Richest States In The USA [Mannerisms]
The ten richest states in the US Union, measured by GDP, are…
1. Arduino takes final step to industrial automation
While the Arduino organisation has been making industrial single-board computers for a while, it has finally taken the plunge and produced a complete industrial product – and industrial controller called Opta, created in partnership with industrial controller maker Finder. Built around an STM32H747XI microcontroller, internal processing comes from two cores: a 480MHz Arm Cortex-M7 and a 240MHx Cortex-M4. It is essentially DIN-rail relay output and sensor input module, with four 10A 250V (400Vmax) relays for load switching (4 x 2.3kW), and eight input that can be configured as digital or 0-10V analogue.
