About the Internet of things and the semiconductor industry in the region where they drink camel milk. The first day

A few months ago, my colleague Timur Paltashev , a manager at the graphics department of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Sunnyvale, California, suggested that I go and arrange a seminar in Kazakhstan. He will talk about heterogeneous computing and large AMD processors for gaming consoles and virtual reality, and I will talk about small MIPS processors for embedded processors and machine vision. In addition, I was promised to try horse meat, fermented mare's milk (koumiss) and camel's fermented milk (shubat). “Will Tien Shan ate there?” I asked, and after receiving an affirmative answer, I exclaimed, “I am ready.”

“And under what sauce will this event be made?” I asked Timur and his Kazakh classmate Gulfarid Tulemissova , who did all the work of organizing at Almaty Management University . It turned out that the Kazakh people are currently interested in the subject of the Internet of things. Networks of sensors with a wireless connection are already being used to look after the miners in Kazakhstan’s mines, has anything happened to them. In addition, the country has high-quality microcontroller programmers and embedded system engineers who make seismic analyzers and telecommunication boxes (in cooperation with the Russians and Chinese).
')
“Good,” I said, the Imagination Technologies and its MIPS Business Unit , in which I work, have products in the field of the Internet of things, in particular the MIPS microAptiv core, which Samsung uses in the platform for the Internet of things Samsung Artik 1 . In addition, we also have materials on microcontrollers, as well as what Kazakhstan lacks so far - knowledge of FPGAs and microchip design, which Kazakhstanis could do in cooperation with Russians, who are now progressing well in this direction.

After this belely, I caught in the corridor our companionable analyst in the field of the Internet of things and asked him what the Internet of things actually is.

“Oh, this is very simple,” the analyst told me, “the device for the Internet of things is 1) essentially a microcontroller, 2) with integrated wireless communication, 3) and when developing this microcontroller, great attention should be paid to energy saving (the sensor should live on one battery over the years), 4) and also the problem with security should be solved so that the hacker cannot throw a coffee grinder with a cracked Linux on board into the home network and have access to financial data on the host’s host computer through it, 5) well it would be good Oh, if the device was connected to the cloud, which would process the data from the sensors and hubs.

“This is all wonderful,” I thought, “but in Alma-Ata, people probably will want to know not only what is happening on the Internet inside the chip, but what is happening outside.” Then I contacted Oleg Artamonov , the former manager at Samsung and now the general director of the Russian company Unwired Devices and asked if he had a desire to fly to Kazakhstan and talk about wireless network protocols, as well as about the use of IoT in urban planning and animal husbandry.



The workshop took five days, during which we discussed a variety of topics on the border of software and hardware, so that there was something interesting for each of the participants - both for teachers of Kazakhstani universities who want to introduce something new into the program, and for several engineers and managers from Kazakhstan companies:

• Day 1. Survey lectures on the semiconductor industry, its connection with the Internet of things, as well as the Internet of things as such from the point of view of protocols and applications. Materials of the day.
• Day 2. Introduction to the design of digital devices based on the mainstream RTL-to-GDSII design flow in the past 25 years. Exercises with FPGA / FPGA boards. Materials of the day.
• Day 3. Introduction to computer architecture and programming in assembler. Exercises with simulator MARS MIPS Simulator. Materials of the day.
• Day 4. Building on-chip systems, protocols inside and outside the chip, integrating the processor core with memory and I / O devices. Exercises with MIPSfpga. Materials of the day.
• Day 5. Introduction to the use of microcontrollers, the organization of parallelism on a single processor, the use of interrupts, timers, state machines implemented in software, and finally - an introduction to RTOS. Exercises with Microchip PIC32MZ microcontrollers, MPLAB X development environment and FreeRTOS operating system. Materials of the day.

Now what happened on the first day:

First, Oleg Artamonov from Unwired Devices arranged an exhibition of boards with sensors and hubs for the Internet of things, developed by his company :





Among the devices was the Unwired One control computer based on the MIPS 24KEc microprocessor core. This core is now experiencing a small boom, as Qualcomm / Atheros and MediaTek were seriously interested a few time ago with the MIPS 24K / 34K / interAptiv line, released several chips on it that are older and continue to develop chips on this platform now. Here is Oleg on the video during the demonstration:


After the mini-exhibition, we held an official meeting with the President of Almaty Management University Asylbek Kozhakhmetov, who spoke about the launch of the School of Engineering Management in a joint project with partners from France:



I also made a small speech, part of which was quoted in the university news:

http://almau.edu.kz/news/11538

Yuri Panchul, an engineer at Imagination Technology, when speaking about his company, remarked: “What we do comes to people after years. Our engineers develop units that are used by chip designers in a year or two, and then device manufacturers see them. And the gadget industry journalists will be discussing these new items only in a few years. ” Speaking about the practical importance of the course for Kazakhstan, the scientist stressed that right now it is unrealistic to build mini-factories owned by, for example, Intel in the republic: “This requires not only investments - 10-12 billion dollars, but several thousand people carefully trained specialized personnel who are not in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan can not do and small minifactories, which are created in Russia. But this does not mean that nothing can be done here. In your country there is a tradition from the time of the USSR - in the field of mathematics, physics, engineering - in this sense, Kazakhstan is a much more convenient place for technological development than countries in Latin America or Africa, where these traditions are not. In Kazakhstan, there are people working with embedded processors, and this base can be “expanded” into different areas. Now it is important to look ahead and train engineers who will be in demand in a few years, ”said Panchul.

Photos from the university site :



Then the president of AlmaU Asylbek Kozhakhmetov gave an interview to a journalist:



After the official part, Timur Paltashev read the introductory speech , after which he spoke about the educational programs of the Advanced Micro Devices graphics department (AMD) , which include materials on heterogeneous computing — when something is calculated, for example, by a combination of a conventional processor and a graphics processor, which is distinguished by high parallelism and can speed up the execution of certain algorithms:





Timur represents the AMD division (Radeon Technology Group) which grew out of AMD's acquired ATI Technologies company, which has been developing graphics chips for 30 years, which are inserted into personal computers for high-performance graphics. In this market, Radeon competes with NVidia.

The participants listened with great interest:





After that, I spoke. Since the seminar was attended by people of different specializations (software, hardware, business), I first said a few words about the electronic industry and how digital circuits are generally developed in the past 25 years .



For those who want to learn more, I made a preliminary announcement of the future seminars of Nanometer ASIC, Charles Danchek, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz Extension in Silicon Valley. These seminars are being prepared in Russia and Ukraine. Seminars have not yet been announced, but if you sign up for the https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/silicon-russia newsletter, you will receive information as soon as the announcements about the seminars begin to be sent.

I showed the audience of a seminar in Alma-Ata a small squeeze from Charles Danchek's slides , which show all the main stages of the design and production of microcircuits:



I also said a few words about our company Imagination Technologies and its educational programs .

The business model of Imagination Technologies is different than that of AMD. While AMD designs whole chips, Imagination Technologies develops blocks (essentially semi-finished products) from which other companies (Apple, Samsung, MediaTek, etc.) build circuits inside their chips, complementing blocks from Imagination with blocks from other manufacturers. The most famous of these devices is the Apple iPhone, inside of which is a PowerVR graphics processor designed by Imagination Technologies.

At the same time, I work not in the Imagination graphics group in the UK (which designs graphics processors for smartphones), but in the US branch of the MIPS Business Unit, which grew out of the MIPS Technologies company acquired by Imagination, which has developed MIPS cores for 30 years with roots in the MIPS project at Stanford. These processor cores are now used in chips for wireless Internet and automotive electronics (MobilEye (BMW, etc.), Tesla, etc.).

Therefore, the focus of Imagination educational programs is not the use of ready-made chips (like Timur’s with graphics), but the use of design blocks from which chips can be designed (with production in Taiwan). As far as I understand, now in Kazakhstan, the development of microcircuits is at a rather early stage, so it is important to put a base based on modern design methods (RTL-> GDSII flow) so that students can gain knowledge that will help them grow their design groups for several years.

Since the production of specialized microcircuits is associated with large (millions or tens of millions of dollars for each project) investment, and such projects are now almost not conducted in Kazakhstan, including due to lack of personnel, we offer a “bridge” to this industry through training students work with inexpensive reconfigurable FPGA / FPGA chips from third-party manufacturers (Xilinx / Digilent and Altera / Terasic) (this makes it possible both to learn the basics for developing specialized chips in the future, and to acquire skills for in industry now - FPGA / FPGA are used for small-scale projects).



After these presentations, we went to lunch. Fed in Kazakhstan is delicious:





The second part of the first day was devoted to the Internet of things. First I spoke again. The fact is that when I flew down the San Francisco – Istanbul – Alma-Ata route, I wrote an email to our team analyst asking if they could show something exclusive to the seminar participants in Alma-Ata that the media didn’t know. And (lo and behold!) The analyst allowed me to show a public presentation, which had recently been internally sociable . The presentation talks about the Oberon platform for the Internet of Things, which Imagination Technologies offers as a semi-finished product (reference platform) for customers to develop their own chips for the Internet of Things:



In addition to the presentation about Oberon, the analyst allowed me to show a couple of pages about platform variations for an intelligent sensor and for an intelligent hub .

Then came Oleg Artamonov, who ate the dog on the Internet of things. Oleg told about the protocols and applications:



Oleg was also listened with great interest, arranging discussions during the break:







Before the seminar, I made a questionnaire to find out what technologies students have and accordingly adjust the program for the following days:








And after the first day I did a short test to verify that the audience memorized at least from a lecture about the electronic industry. One of the variants of the questionnaire looks like this:




»I posted the workshop materials here .
»Download one file from here .

On this the first day ended and Scheherazade finished her permitted speeches .

To be continued.