Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler • Hacker News Board

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#181

Post by civilitty » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:22 AM UTC

slededit wrote: post #154

civilitty wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My appologies, I work largely on client/personal projects in the high speed digital/RF domain so my assumptions can be all over the place. Client budgets/deadlines leave little room for mistakes and my dexterity isn't what it once was so I use a PNP or make funky assembly jigs (my CV implementation/hands makes it easier to align with pins). If you can, I'd really recommend talking to dentists who are retiring in your…

I've noticed it a lot going to trade shows that the North American market has turned so much to the high end that most people assume you need all this fancy gear to make anything. Its really stifling innovation in my opinion. People think they needs tens of thousands to get an MVP prototype out the door and most of the time it kills the idea. If you are a big company and already have the resources then by all means u…

I agree on the trade show front. I feel like the worst offender is LPKF: I've come close to losing a significant fraction of my client base twice because several clients insisted that $100-200k capex/support expenses were worth slightly faster (theoretically) prototyping speeds and the vastly higher NRE of learning how to design for the damn thing. We ended up sending 90% of the boards to a third party assembler anyway - delaying the completion of the project two months past my initial estimate with twice as many revisions as I had predicted. Literally the worst project of my career was caused by inability to say no to flashy new tech. Twice (Yeah, still bitter).

On the other hand, I designed a STM32F4 based design last year and it was glorious. SnapEda for all symbols/footprints, Altium design vault for a specialized FPGA design, and github for a STM32 reference design PCB file using the same layers/copper weights as my requirements with imported fab design rules for good measure. The PCBs cost like $1500 and assembly was only $1600. 10 years ago I used to pay that much per single board in quantities of 30, for roughly the same complexity. This time, the whole thing (minus firmware) took a weekend.

Good luck with your mfg! If you have a chance, please blog about your experiences. There arent enough people spreading the art of solder.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#182

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:24 AM UTC

slededit wrote: post #84

jacquesm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reads as if you equate 'BGA' with 'SMD', a BGA is a ball grid array with up to 1,000 tiny pads that have been pre-dipped in solder. Your toaster isn't going to work.

BGA is actually easier than leaded SMD parts. The tiny leads tend to bridge easily. With BGA you can be up to half the pitch off and it will center itself. I actually only go for leadless and BGA now because anything else is more of a hassle. It is a bit rude to assume I don't know what a BGA part is.

The tweezers bit is what triggered that. Handling a large BGA with tweezers is going to scratch the PCB if you're not ultra careful.

Anyway, if you do this stuff often enough then I see no reason why you wouldn't get the proper tools, a rework station and an actual reflow oven or something with a PID controlled heating element would make your life so much easier. Working with bad tools would drive me nuts.

The reason the larger BGA center themselves is as soon as the solder goes fluid there is a lot of accumulated surface tension trying to reduce the size of the bridge and that will center the part all by itself. For that to work properly though everything has to become fluid more or less at once and stay fluid until the part has shifted to the right position.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#183

Post by garmaine » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:25 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #167

garmaine wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that apply here?

I believe the question is “does the spending result in a net benefit to society?” I’d add in a consideration of the opportunity cost.

That’s not the broken window fallacy though.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#184

Post by int0x80 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:26 AM UTC

hideo wrote: post #44

adrianmonk wrote: post #12

So it costs $500 million every time someone designs a SoC and (before now) nobody has spent $100 million trying to make that more efficient?

I read that as "nobody has spent $100 million trying to make that more efficient and open sourced it/made it available to smaller companies." Someone who is NOT in the business of SoC design may have wanted to open source something like this just to commoditize their SoCs. But if you're in that business already, then why help reduce the barrier to entry?

If you are rutinely making $500M SoCs, you can benefit yourself too of the automation/process improvement (as an established actor).

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#185

Post by ur-whale » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:44 AM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #122

detuur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't be any more dead-on. EDA feels like Scientology, where with every level closer to the core you first need to invest half your life savings + a firstborn. I have an FPGA lying on my desk I can do barely anything interesting with because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt or pretty much any interesting bus. Protocols are strongly guarded open secret…

USB 3.1 pushes data at 10Gbps. Do you have any idea how much black magic it takes to do that? Try writing an FPGA SDRAM controller that reliably operates across frequency, voltage, and temperature at 150 MHz. It is doable but a challenge with the common xilinx boards that are sold to hobbyists for $80. If you can do that, then think about designing a circuit which operates 20 times faster, and negotiates a protocol w…

I have no doubt that solving modern state-of-the-art protocol is an extremely complex endeavor.

All the more reason for sharing your solutions with the rest of the world, or at the very least parts of it.

The problem with the EDA industry is their firmly held belief that these kind of trade secrets is what they're competing with.

Think of Google, who had this exact same struggle internally.

For BigTable and MapReduce, they chose to sit on the "IP" to put it in H/W parlance. This gave the world Hadoop and its evil twin file-system whose name I forget. Yay (Hadoop is a a catastrophe).

For Tensor Flow, they chose the OpenSource route. TF is arguably the best framework for ML. There's a lesson somewhere in there.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#186

Post by ur-whale » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:47 AM UTC

st26 wrote: post #180

adrianN wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in contrast there are boatloads of free open source software that does highly nontrivial things and has thousands and thousands of PhD-man-hours poured into it.

Indeed. But what if every statement in those boatloads of open source software were race conditions, and varied with each machine, frequency, temperature, voltage, workload, etc?

You're saying the problem is harder. I'm more than willing to believe that.

Wouldn't you then want ten times the number of people eyeballing the code? And boatloads of free contributers submitting change requests to fix potential problems?

And a marketplace of users that can freely choose deciciding which "IP (I still find the term so deeply offensive, I can't help but it I have to put it in quote)?

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#187

Post by jonhendry18 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:48 AM UTC

rickycook wrote: post #97

cosmon0t wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of academic funds have military roots?

and why do they have to? in australia we have CSIRO which does some amazing research, and our military budget is basically non existent compared to the US military budget

CSIRO is funded at about $787 million AUD/year.

Australia's Defence Science and Technology Group, which does science and other research for the military, is funded at about $400 million AUD/year. It's Australia's 2nd largest research organization after CSIRO.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#188

Post by jonhendry18 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:49 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Side note: when people complain about the military budget, projects like these should be noted. Political reality in America, today, is military R&D and jobs programs are easier to fund than civilian ones; so that’s where projects go to live.

Besides, DARPA funds arguably led to Infocom and their great text adventures from the 1980s.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#189

Post by ur-whale » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:50 AM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #121

gascan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt Those are hardly that simple. There exist entire companies whose function is designing such cores (and licensing them).

Yeah I'm reading these comments and getting a good laugh.

Yup. Thanks for proving my point. This comment of yours is precisely the culture I've experienced when talking / trying to work with EDA folks. Snide comments, mockery, "you sw guys just don't get it", and a general ivory-tower attitude towards everyone who's not in the inner circle.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#190

Post by jonhendry18 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:52 AM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #8

mmiller9 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely doubt our enormously bloated defense budget is because of research...

Guns and bombs are cheap. Everyone has plenty of them. The power of our military is in force prjoection; that is, the ability to use those guns and bombs anywhere at any time. That requires massive, sustained logistics spending. To the point it may seem absurd and wasteful. But the alternative is fighting a fair fight on equal footing. I’d rather not do that.

Apparently a military logistics expert system saved the US enough money during the Gulf War period that the savings essentially paid for all the Pentagon spending on AI research to that point. (And probably more than was spent on AI.)