Category: Uncategorized

The Painful Art of Accepting Life’s Stalemates

/ Gary Hilson

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.”

If you are raised by well-meaning and loving parents, you are taught to believe if you work hard and do right by others you will reap a rewarding life personally and professionally. Without a doubt, this is the best and noblest way to live, but there are days when you will get beat down and hurt through no fault of your own.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Peak Performance”, Data is cornered into playing a game of Stratagema against the visiting Kolrami, grandmaster of the game. Data’s crew mates, particularly Dr. Pulaski, are convinced he will win because as an android he is faster and smarter. Instead, Data gets his ass handed to him.

Although Data has no emotions or ego, the defeat drives him to investigate what he did wrong and to over-analyze his actions to the point of removing himself from duty just before a battle simulation against Commander Riker. As near as Data can tell, he did everything right but did not succeed, so as acting first officer, he is greatly concerned he might give Picard bad advice. After failed attempts by Pulaski and Counselor Troi to convince him to not read too much into his defeat, it’s up to the captain to “handhold an Android” and basically tell Data to buck up. “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose,” Picard tells him. “That is not a weakness, that is life.”

Part of being a grownup is realizing we can make all of the right moves and still not get the desired result. We can do exceptional work for our employer and still lose our job; we can adopt the healthiest diet and lifestyle only to be plagued by chronic maladies, both mental and physical; and, we can be a true and loving person to a family member or friend but still be pushed away through no fault of our own.

When confronted by these situations, it’s easy fall into the trap of second-guessing ourselves and inventorying in our mind everything we could have done to achieve a different outcome. Some of us get back on our feet quickly, others need more time. It’s a human reaction. Data ultimately gets a second chance to take on Kolrami and by changing his strategy, incites the alien to forfeit the game: Rather than trying to win, Data decides not to lose, thereby achieving a stalemate.

In life, sometimes the best you can hope for is a draw.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors. This article was originally published on Medium, May 31, 2013.

CXL Efforts Focus on Memory Expansion [Byline]

/ Gary Hilson

An initial promise of the Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol was to put idled, orphaned memory to good use, but as the standard evolved to its third iteration, recent product offerings have been focused on memory expansion.

SMART Modular Technologies recently unveiled its new family of CXL-enabled add-in cards (AICs), which support industry standard DDR5 DIMMs with 4-DIMM and 8-DIMM options. The AICs allow up to 4TB of memory to be added to servers in the data center. The company has spent the last year putting together these products with the aim of making them plug and play.

SMART Modular’s AICs are built using CXL controllers to eliminate memory bandwidth bottlenecks and capacity constraints and aimed at enabling compute-intensive workloads like AI, machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) uses—all of which need larger amounts of high-speed memory that outpace what current servers can accommodate.

The introduction of SMART Modular’s AICs comes at a time where the company is seeing two basic needs emerging, with the near-term one being a “compute memory performance capacity gap.”

The other trend is memory disaggregation. The problem with memory disaggregation has been lack of standards. CXL helps with that, and then networking technology has improved significantly.

CXL overcomes the need to add more CPUs in a server environment, which is an expensive path to adding performance. The idea with SMART Modular’s AICs is that they can be in an off-the-shelf server.

Micron Technology is another early CXL mover, and its CXL CZ120 memory expansion module speaks to the trend toward adding more memory into a server to meet the demands of AI workloads rather than overprovision GPUs.

The company first introduced its CXL CZ120 memory expansion modules in August 2023, and now the module has hit a key qualification sample milestone. The CZ120 has undergone substantial hardware testing for reliability, quality, and performance across CPU providers and OEMs, as well software testing for compatibility and compliance with operating system and hypervisor vendors.

Read the full story on EE Times.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

Texas Chip Companies Pivot to Leverage Apprenticeships [Bylines]

/ Gary Hilson

Chip companies expanding their footprint in Texas must change how they approach talent intake as the semiconductor industry circles back to leveraging apprenticeships. They also educate the broader workforce on the opportunities available and how the industry underpins people’s daily lives.

In the second of two panel discussions hosted by the National Institute of Innovation and Technology (NIIT), semiconductor companies growing their footprint in Texas are transforming their culture to focus on skills over experience and allow for different types of apprenticeships.

ManpowerGroup understands the realities of the talent market, and thousands of people come into its offices daily trying to figure out their career paths. It has greatly leveraged NIIT to help people migrate from a manufacturing job to one in semiconductors through emerging apprenticeship programs.

Many companies hire full-time employees from contingent labor—it’s a massive avenue for people to get hired by corporations. A notable shift for ManpowerGroup as it supports semiconductor and advanced manufacturing companies is hiring for skills rather than just experience.

Another new challenge is that chip companies are no longer just competing with each other for talent—other sectors, such as automotive and other technology companies, want the same skillsets. Applied Materials, which collaborates with staffing companies like ManpowerGroup, must now compete with household brand names, and a registered apprentice program was part of the solution by offering more flexible pathways to improve the talent pool.

Flexibility is beneficial for other companies operating in Texas, such as NXP Semiconductors, which is upscaling its current workforce thanks to the work of schools like Austin Community College District, which takes on the group sponsorship aspect by handling monitoring and reporting on apprenticeship progress, as well as collaboration with NIIT and regional workforce development organizations.

GlobalFoundries, meanwhile has developed a unified competency model that led to a talent hub, which was a relatively new skill for the company, but it now has several hundred apprentices across its two U.S. fabs.

Read my full story for EE Times.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

AI-Driven HBM Uptake Is Power-Sensitive [Byline]

/ Gary Hilson

High-bandwidth memory (HBM) has become the artificial-intelligence memory of choice, and as HBM3 goes into volume production, more attention is being paid to power consumption in the wake of 2023’s generative AI boom.

The increasing demand for memory bandwidth from AI is directly correlated to increasing HBM bandwidth.Performance needs, memory bandwidth and memory sizes are growing exponentially, putting higher expectations and pressure on the next generation of HBM.

While bandwidth per watt as it relates to HBM is not particularly new, he said, energy consumption by data centers has been on the rise. These rapidly increasing power costs mean that bandwidth per watt is becoming a more important metric for enterprises who need to monitor operational costs—even more so with the increasing focus on sustainability initiatives.

The high costs associated with HBM and the price tag of the memory itself means the total cost of ownership becomes the deciding factor when determining if this uber-power memory is necessary for application. The process for customers to decide which memory they need starts with technical requirements like density, performance and power.

Read my full story for EE Times.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

The microLED market is still alive after Apple’s exit [Byline]

/ Gary Hilson

Had Apple opted to exit the microLED market two years earlier, it might have been the death knell of the industry, but a Yole Research analyst who has his pulse on the technology is cautiously optimistic despite the tech giant’s recent pivot.

In an interview with Fierce Electronics, Eric Virey, principal analyst covering displays at Yole, said after investing an estimated $3 billion into microLED development and convincing Osram to spend $1.3 billion of its own money to build a fab so Apple could make its smartwatch, Apple pulled the plug and cancelled the project.

Prior to Apple taking an interest in microLEDs, the technology was barely on anyone’s radar. Apple spent $450 million in 2014 to acquire a startup, which for it wasn’t a lot of money, but for everyone else it was a significant amount of money and put microLEDs on the map.

Read my full story at Fierce Electronics.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

STEM Education Scales to Strengthen Chip Sector Skills [Byline]

/ Gary Hilson

The interdisciplinary nature of the semiconductor industry requires not just one education pipeline but many: Graduates with advanced degrees across the sciences are essential, but so are people with the skills to operate equipment as new fabs go online.

Related science programs at the university level are well-established and provide the necessary education for research and development and design. But as the CHIPS Act funds more onshore manufacturing, other streams of training will be needed to equip people with the skills to operate those facilities.

Given the global nature of the semiconductor industry, virtual training and international partnerships between chip companies and schools are seen as essential to maximizing educational efforts. Regional training matters, too, with both advanced degrees and associate programs at community colleges seen as critical to producing people locally in communities where chip companies are clustered.

Read my full story for EE Times.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

Faster Networks Push Interface Development [Byline]

/ Gary Hilson

TORONTO – As Ethernet speeds get faster, Rambus is looking to make sure memory and interfaces can keep up with the recent launch 56G SerDes PHY.

The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and (DSP) architecture of the 56G SerDes PHY is designed meet the long-reach backplane requirements for the industry transition to 400 GB Ethernet applications, said Mohit Gupta, senior director of product marketing at Rambus. This means it can support scaling to speeds as fast as 112G, which are required in the networking and enterprise segments, such as enterprise server racks that are moving from 100G to 400G.

“Ethernet is moving faster than ever,” Gupta said. “The pace has picked up substantially due to big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other trends putting high demands on communication channels. There is already a forum for 112G SerDes speed which will drive the 800G standard.”

One clear usage case, said Gupta, is data center deployment by the “big four” — Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Read my full article on EE Times.

Gary Hilson is a freelance writer with a focus on B2B technology, including information technology, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

What message should I take from Medium?

/ Gary Hilson

Because there’s not enough places for people to be published without getting paid, we now have Medium, “a better place to read and write things that matter.”

Medium has been on my radar for a while thanks to the occasional mention in my Twitter feed, but it was only recently that I visited the site to read an article written by an industry peer.

I really enjoyed what she wrote because it was personal and original, but otherwise I wonder how Medium is different or better than any other online platform. After perusing some recent Editor’s Picks, I can’t say the content is any more compelling than what I’ve read on other digital-first / digital-only media outlets or on traditional, main stream media sites. Much of it reminds me of the link bait I come across on Twitter.

Contributing content to Medium is limited right now, even if you do register. What the criteria is for being allowed to publish on the site is a mystery to me; it’s certainly not quality of writing because with rare exception, of the 10 articles I read, most were either  self-indulgent, pointless ramblings or poorly written grammatically and structurally. Overall they lacked depth.

I also encountered the same voices from elsewhere. I’m not sure why Facebook’s product design director needs another platform to post a profanity-laced and ultimately empty rant about design. I don’t want to read another blog by Jeff Jarvis. He gets enough attention already. And I definitely don’t need yet another blog post by a self-described entrepreneur giving advice about growing a startup.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy any articles because I did find one or two, but even those were on topics or concepts I’d read about plenty of times before and these just provided someone’s personal perspective, not new knowledge. One could argue that’s valuable in and of itself, but to me it represents a larger frustration I have with online content: for every one real article that delves into something in a meaningful manner there’s at least a dozen articles or blog posts that have summarized it or “curated” it. I suppose that’s better than an opinionated blog masquerading as a news article by a writer who thinks linking out to other articles is an adequate substitute for picking up the phone and interviewing a source.

What also struck me about Medium is that I’m not sure who the target audience is. “A better place to read and write things that matter” is nebulous and ultimately meaningless. When I was in journalism school we were always reminded by professors to remember who the audience was when pitching and writing stories for the student newspaper. That rule has stayed with me to this day. Who is supposed to be reading Medium? Entrepreneurs? Artists? Application developers? I have no idea and I’m unclear if I should be taking the time to browse through it.

Online content is a lot like cable TV, which I recently cancelled: there’s hundreds of channels but nothing on, and Medium strikes me as just one more place that adds to the noise I have to “channel surf” through to find the occasional gem. Unless it really defines what it is, and soon, Medium could easily find itself the flavour of the month in a sea of online soapboxes.

Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and content strategist storyteller.