Ioannis Kanellakopoulos

Sipeed NanoKVM Overview: - Sipeed NanoKVM is a tiny KVM over IP solution based on the Lichee RVNano RISC-V microcontroller board, offering features similar to the Raspberry Pi 4-based PiKVM solution. - Two variants available: NanoKVM Lite and NanoKVM Full, with Full version offering additional features. NanoKVM Specifications: - Sipeed NanoKVM specifications include Sipeed RVNano SoC, 256MB DDR3, 10/100M Ethernet RJ45 port, USB Type-C port, and more. - Features integrated 256MB DDR3, USB Type-C port for connection to PC, and HDMI input up to 1080p60 via MIPI CSI to HDMI adapter board. Comparison with PiKVM: - NanoKVM Full is smaller, consumes less power, and costs less than the latest PiKVM v4. It also offers ATX power control through USB, while PiKVM uses Ethernet for the same purpose. - PiKVM supports 4G LTE connectivity, while NanoKVM does not. The NanoKVM wiki is only available in Chinese but the English version and the GitHub repo provide English documentation. NanoKVM Pricing and Availability: - NanoKVM Lite starts at $20 plus a $2 commission to PayPal and shipping, while NanoKVM Full is sold for $43 ($40 plus a $3 commission). - These will become available on Sipeed’s Aliexpress store at the end of July. Background of CNX Software: - Started in 2010 by Jean-Luc Aufranc as a part-time endeavor before becoming a full-time news and reviews platform. Community Discussion: - Discussion in the comments section includes concerns about network security and trust issues regarding closed-source firmware. - Popular browsers and VNC can be used to connect to the PiKVM, and PiKVM firmware might run on Sipeed NanoKVM hardware. Usage of Ethernet-Based KVM: - Connect the KVM to the remote PC's HDMI input and USB-A port for keyboard and mouse emulation, then access the KVM device interface to control it remotely, including BIOS access and power control. Commission Percentage: - The term 'commission' refers to a 5% plus fixed fee for PayPal according to a comment in the discussion. Controversy over Closed-Source Device: - User expresses reluctance to buy closed-source product from China, suspecting 'PCC inside.' - Hopeful for future reverse-engineering or porting solutions. Confusion over 'PCC' Term: - User puzzled by 'PCC' abbreviation, speculating it could mean 'Parti Communiste Chinois.' - Discussion on potential French spelling interpretation. Community Engagement for Open Source: - User raises request for open-sourcing firmware on GitHub project. - Sipeed considers the possibility of open-source PiKVM port alongside closed-source firmware.

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Complementary output stage with active short circuit protection: From my study note.

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Alex Ororbia doubts that neuromorphic systems will replace von Neumann architectures until energy consumption becomes an even more salient issue. They are already used in Dynamic Vision Sensors, but so far they lack a killer app. https://lnkd.in/d6Vi43m7

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'Its long use of gallium nitride for 5G power amplifiers has put Huawei ahead of Ericsson and Nokia, says a leading analyst, as China moves to cut the US off from gallium. 'As the US tries to thwart Chinese chipmakers through more punitive sanctions, and by sealing the loopholes that exist in older trade rules, China has retaliated. On December 4, its government reportedly moved to ban exports to the US of raw materials critical to certain types of semiconductors. Among them is a substance called gallium. Combining it with nitrogen produces a compound known as gallium nitride. Without it, the radios used in today's 5G networks would not be nearly so good. 'Unfortunately, most gallium is found in China, as the Biden administration recognized in a lengthy report about supply chain risks published several years ago. "The raw materials used to produce wafers – including silicon and gallium – are concentrated in China," wrote the authors. The point was emphasized later when they noted that "China is the leading global supplier for gallium, one of the base elements for gallium nitride and gallium arsenide semiconductors." 'Among other things, gallium nitride confers advantages compared with silicon as a raw material for the radiofrequency (RF) power amplifiers used in 5G products. Investment in it partly explains why Huawei, China's biggest maker of 5G equipment, has been able to produce such lightweight and energy-efficient 5G radios compared with key rivals based outside China, according to experts. 'US sanctions have clearly blocked Huawei's access to Taiwan's TSMC, the world's most advanced chip foundry, and stopped the Chinese company from obtaining 5-nanometer and even smaller chips for inclusion in smartphones and 5G basestation products. But hurting Huawei in power amplifiers looks much harder. 'Gallium nitride is made through a process called metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), and the tools for it are widely available in China, according to Earl Lum, the founder of EJL Wireless Research. "There are thousands of these machines in China that were shipped to make green LEDs and that can be converted to make RF." 'In the US, moreover, hardly anyone appears to have enjoyed success in developing highly capable gallium nitride-based RF power amplifiers. "There's no one in the US that has been able to make an amplifier other than NXP," said Lum. "Qorvo tried it but didn't get too far. Skyworks never got that far. Macom and some others have tried. No one's actually succeeded." 'A Chinese ban on gallium exports, if properly enforced, could potentially be very damaging to the strategies of the western vendors. ... But for US authorities, restricting Huawei may also prove more difficult in this area than it has been across other parts of the chip industry ... it can do little to stop any Chinese foundry that serves Huawei other than blocking future sales to it of US-made foundry equipment.'

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In the last post I wrote about how the authors of “The RISC-V Reader” posed the BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) operations of the x86 as a mistake of the past. I countered this supposition and argued that it is a useful feature for certain applications. But I didn't want to leave the reader with the impression that I thought that there were no features that I would regard as design mistakes. That is certainly not the case. The 8051 was an early design by Intel and was copied by many other manufacturers. It has features that are truly design mistakes that should never have happened. It is an architecture which should have been left to die an early death but was perpetuated by hardware people who are deficient in their software capabilities. One of its design mistakes is its upward-growing stack. What this does is to reverse the order of the bytes so that they don't appear like they should in memory. They are useless as local variables. Advanced programming languages like C heavily use variables stored in the stack for active temporary storage. But because of the deficiency of the 8051's stack-relative address modes, it is a moot point. It is akin to a blind person finding himself without binoculars when they would be useful for identifying birds for example. The Motorola HC08 has a downward-growing stack and it has good stack relative addressing modes. But even this architecture has a minor design mistake. It uses post-decrement instead of pre-decrement for pushes and pre-increment instead of post-increment for pulls. This flaw was corrected in the HC12. But Motorola decided to keep the flaw in the HC08 to maintain software compatibility. All-in-all, the HC08 is still far superior to the 8051. The x86 got it right when it comes to push and pull stack operations. Intel just used the wrong key word for "pull". RISC-V doesn't have built-in push and pull operations. It is a raw primitive architecture like IBM's mainframes. #Intel8051 #ISA #assembly #programming #computers #microcontrollers

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ChipStory 14 - I've Got the Next Dance - FinFET As we approach nanometer devices, the invention of FinFETs resurrected Moore's law. To better understand the differences, I will use 3D models of conventional MOSFETs and FinFETs. We will get to know Dr. Digh too! --------- I am doing a new experiment in the CMOS Analog IC design class at IIT Bombay this semester. At the end of each class, I spend a few minutes talking about ChipStory - Chip History. I am trying to give the students a perspective on how we got where we are, since the beginning of the transistor. It's my way of paying gratitude to the heroes of this exponential revolution. (Based on Chip War - Chris Miller, When The Chips Are Down - Pranay Kotasthane/Abhiram Manchi, and many other online resources, personal anecdotes)

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As You in-circuit, read or write an #EEPROM, as in, without desolder that IC from the #circuitboard, power from whatever tool you're using, wakes up other #ElectronicComponents eventually colliding with, and then corrupting the data! So, #HapaUjanjaTu! While #programming, here's 👇 some nonsense done to avoid any all flaws👇 https://lnkd.in/dPT84X6Y 👆☝️👆☝️ Very Long, but not Wrong #ujanja, that any even if a newbie could #doityourself while #EEPROMwork #codingtips #programmingtips #5021tips #coding #ECUProgramming #keyprogramming #lostkeys #howitsdone #chiptuning #ecurepair #electrician #electroniccircuit #jifunze #mwenyewe #DiY

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🚀📡 Just released a new video: "Radio Frequency Adversarial Learning (RFAL)"! 🎯 Dive into the world of RF signal processing and explore how adversarial learning is revolutionizing radar and communication systems. This content is sourced from the book Deep Learning for Radar and Communications Automatic Target Recognition. Don't miss out—click the link and watch now! 🔗📚 #DeepLearning #RadarTechnology #RFAL #MachineLearning #AI #SignalProcessing #YouTube 🎥

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people pondering why we don't have 128bit systems in reality a huge number of "computers" being shipped annually, possibly a majority, isn't even 64 bits vast majority of microcontrollers are 32 bit or less and even in a number of 64 bit applications (which the computer industry went to mainly because 32bit could only address 4GB) where custom buses can be designed, address buses are often 48 or 56 bits (and even those can't be fully utilised, just that the architects over-provision) even in very large compute systems the arithmetic also rarely uses 64 bit directly (float in C is 32 bits; to get to 64 you need to use double; it is useful but relatively infrequently), so data bus width of 64 is useful because more parallel wires allow faster bandwidth for packetized data on Network-on-chip (or fabric), and as far as the data bus width is concerned, that is in fact very often larger than 64 bits ( even if the address space is less than 64 bits) in other words, vast majority of computers aren't really 64bits even today in any meaningful sense. just that people don't know about those computers https://lnkd.in/dhFrhVb2

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Great OFC coverage by LightCounting. TeraSignal’s Intelligent Re-Driver in CMOS is changing the power, reliability and performance calculus between DSP and LPO modules.

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GPU Chip MTBF 20,000-30,000 Hours – A Discussion I think the GPU (ASIC) MTBF of 20,000 to 30,000 hours typically denotes permanent device failure. All ASIC devices undergo an aging process in the fab house. Product manufacturers and hyperscalers also subject end products (servers, switches, transceivers, memory/storage devices, etc.) to aging. Consequently, the statistical distribution of failures should show significantly improved reliability. Nevertheless, there's no absolute guarantee that a faulty device (ASIC or product) won't slip through to a hyperscaler. This underscores the importance of reliability engineering and quality assurance. Soft-errors represent another concern. Unlike permanent failures, soft-errors are transient. A DRAM memory cell, for instance, can change state due to an alpha particle during the time window between refresh cycles. Another form is metastability state failure, where alpha particle disturbances at the input cause an ASIC logic cell's output to drift into an indeterminate voltage level. However, the likelihood of this type of failure is lower compared to DRAM cell failures. As long as the large language model (LLM) converges — currently trained with extensive tokens — soft-errors can be managed amidst vast data volumes. While fault-tolerant computing may seem overstated, it can indeed mitigate both types of errors mentioned above. Interconnect transmission failures primarily stem from interference, which isn't permanent. Forward Error Correction (FEC) can perform single-bit correction and multi-bit error detection, potentially extending to multi-bit correction with increased design complexity. This prompts consideration about the current state of design complexity. Note: Optical transmission is immune to alpha particles; only electrical connections are affected. Overall, I believe the industry can deploy 100,000+ GPU clusters without significant concern over the aforementioned issues. However, increasing investment in reliability engineering and quality assurance remains crucial. Here is a related excellent article. [1] "GPU Lifetimes on Titan Supercomputer - Survival Analysis and Reliability" https://lnkd.in/gPZXaQgP

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