New export controls; EDA updates; AI training on small memory devices; cable cooling for 1,400 A battery charging

New export controls have been in the spotlight over the past few days. Other news this week include several EDA updates and some interesting academic research.

 New U.S. controls on export to China

The U.S. Government is implementing new export controls on advanced computing and semiconductor manufacturing items to the People’s Republic of China. Details of the new rules can be found here and here. According to Bloomberg, these additional restrictions will not apply to the China-based fabs owned by South Korean chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung. In fact, SK Hynix Inc has reportedly said it has received authorization from the U.S. Department of Commerce to receive chip equipment needed for its chip production facilities in China for one year, without seeking additional licensing requirements.

Cadence Certus aims to accelerate design closure

Cadence has announced the new Certus Closure Solution environment, to automate and accelerate the complete design closure cycle – from signoff optimization through routing, static timing analysis and extraction. Key to acceleration is a massively parallel and distributed architecture enabling concurrent processing. According to Cadence, the solution supports the largest chip design projects with unlimited capacity while improving productivity by up to 10X versus current methodologies and flows.

Cadence tools certified for Google Cloud

Cloud-ready tools included in the Cadence Cloud Passport have been certified for use with Google Cloud. According to Cadence, the collaboration with Google Cloud provides engineers with up to 10X improvement in design and verification throughput. Cadence tools have been tested and benchmarked on Google Cloud with performance improvements of up to 25% on Google Cloud C2D instances compared with an on-prem infrastructure.

Keysight’s PathWave System Design 2023

Keysight has announced PathWave System Design (SystemVue) 2023 software to speed the design process for 5G non-terrestrial networks and other wireless systems. According to the company, the latest improvements to PathWave System Design empower radio frequency system designers to create digital twins of their architectures and transform from a hardware-centric to a simulation-centric design flow.

Intel, Arm reportedly cutting workforce

Intel is reportedly planning to cut thousands of jobs, owing to a slowdown in the personal computer market. And Arm has reportedly laid off 20% of its UK workforce of 3,500 employees and 18% of its global workforce of 6,950 people. According to Electronics Weekly, 700 UK jobs have gone – representing 40% of the 1,730 people hired since Softbank bought the company in 2016 promising to double the UK workforce.

Edge training on MCUs with 256KB of memory

A research team from MIT and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has come up with an algorithm-system co-design framework to make on-device training possible with only 256KB of memory. Targeted, for example, at microcontrollers used in IoT applications, the solution is based on three innovations: Quantization-Aware Scaling, to calibrate the gradient scales and stabilize quantized training; Sparse Update, to skip the gradient computation of less important layers and sub-tensors; and Tiny Training Engine, which prunes the backward computation graph to support sparse updates and offload the runtime auto-differentiation to compile time.

TinyML updates: Imagimob/Syntiant, Polin

Imagimob, a provider of tinyML platforms, and Syntiant, an AI chip company, have announced a collaboration to integrate Imagimob’s tinyML platform with Syntiant’s ultra-low-power NDP120 Neural Decision Processor.

Israel-based Polyn Technology has announced the availability of NeuroVoice, a solution for on-chip voice extraction from any noisy background. NeuroVoice operates at 100 µW power and performs inference in 20 µsec. The solution is based on Neuromorphic Analog Signal Processing (NASP) technology.

New Google Cloud machines use custom IPUs co-designed with Intel

Google Cloud is previewing its new C3 machine series powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and Google’s custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), co-designed with Intel. This adds to the recently announced Hyperdisk block storage which – according to Google Cloud – offers 80% higher IOPS per vCPU for high-end DBMS workloads when compared to other hyperscalers. The company claims that C3 machine instances can deliver strong performance gains to enable high performance computing and data-intensive workloads.

New cooling systems enables EV batteries fast charging

A research team from Purdue University, sponsored by NASA, is developing a new cooling technology – “subcooled flow boiling” – that will achieve orders-of-magnitude improvement in heat transfer and enable significant reductions in size and weight of the hardware. While developed for space applications, the new technology could also be used to reduce charging time for EV batteries to just five minutes – by cooling charging cables that will provide a 1,400-ampere current. This research work seems to assume that cable overheating is the key limiting factor for fast charging. As noted by researchers, currently advanced chargers only deliver currents up to 520 amperes, and most chargers available to consumers support currents of less than 150 amperes. Charging systems providing 1,400 amperes will generate significantly more heat than current systems, and will therefore require improved methods to control temperature. Using the new cooling technology, a dielectric liquid coolant is pumped through the charging cable, where it captures the heat generated by the current-carrying conductor. This way, Purdue’s charging cable can provide 2,400 amperes.

Venture funding slowdown

According to market intelligence firm CB Insights, global venture funding reached $74.5B in Q3’22, hitting a 9-quarter low. This represented a 34% drop quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) — the largest quarterly percentage drop in a decade — and a 58% decline from the investment peak reached in Q4’21.

Acquisitions

Germany-headquartered EnOcean, a specialist in energy harvesting IoT devices, has announced the acquisition of the assets of the edge computing solutions business from Renesas. The deal includes the transition of personnel as well as hardware and software products.

Alphawave has acquired Banias Labs, an Israel-based optical DSP developer for data centers, for approximately US$240 million.

Ansys has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Thermal Desktop maker Cullimore and Ring Technologies (C&R Technologies), a provider of orbital thermal analysis. The acquisition is aimed at strengthening Ansys’ position in aerospace and defense simulation solutions.

Further reading

A paper with key takeaways from the recent AI Hardware Summit, authored by Arete Research, can be found here.

Upcoming events

IEEE ISICAS (International Symposium on Integrated Circuits) will take place in Bordeaux, France, on October 20 and 21.

Hardwear.io Security Trainings and Conference is scheduled for October 24 to 28 in The Hague, Netherlands

IEEE PAINE (Physical Assurance & Inspection of Electronics) will take place in Huntsville, AL, from October 25 to 27.

Arm DevSummit, a virtual event, will be online on October 26 and 27.

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