Summary
Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference™ and you need to be there November 6-8 in Pasadena, California! Below is just the tip of the speakers’ iceberg, but if that’s not enough to convince you to attend, well, stay tuned and we’ll reveal more speakers early next week. Speakers, workshops, food, drink, music, badge hacking, and general merriment? That’s what we do every year at our annual gathering. This year is even bigger, as we’re moving a few blocks south to the Art Center campus, so be sure to come join us. Get your tickets now. Revisit the educational journey of packing 24 motors, 96 switches, 12 RFID readers, 12 motor controllers, six ESP32s, one Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, and 24 CDs into less than 500mm for the (not so) simple joy of automatically ejecting CDs. If you’ve ever run out of IO pins in a project, come see how off the shelf electronics can be combined with 3D printing to create compact, modular components that form an expandable I2C-based distributed system. Minus is an open-source HDMI man-in-the-middle device that detects and blocks streaming advertisements in real-time using on-device machine learning. It sits between your streaming stick and your TV, captures frames from the HDMI passthrough, and runs a tiered inference pipeline entirely on a Rockchip RK3588 with a dedicated neural processing unit. When it spots an ad, it composites over the region and mutes the audio, all while maintaining sub-millisecond passthrough latency. No cloud, no subscriptions, no browser. Just bare-metal ML inference on every frame that crosses the wire using a 40 in parts. Integrated photonics is a relatively nascent field of engineering and physics. In the last several years, it has grown rapidly, mostly due to the utility of photonics within the telecom sector. However, practical aspects and tacit knowledge of the development process are still obscure and often intentionally kept secret so that labs and foundries can better preserve their competitive edge. In this talk, I will describe some of the less well-known applications of integrated photonics, give an overview of the foundry landscape for photonics, walk through the basic development cycle, and show some of the results from chips that we fabricated. Through this talk, I aim to spread awareness of what is now possible with photonic circuits, and provide the audience with some ideas as to how their optical systems might be able to scale by integrating photonics as well as the basic outline of how to begin that development process. Why don’t MCUs run Linux? The classic answer is that Linux requires the CPU to have a Memory Management Unit, or MMU, which gives every process its own virtual address space. With an MMU, two programs can both refer to the same memory address and never collide, because the MMU translates each process to different parts of physical memory. So, you can’t run Linux on an MCU… except there’s a “NOMMU” kernel config option? In this talk, I’ll describe what I learned in my attempt to port Linux to the Teensy 4.1 microcontroller platform, and how it differed from my past experiences with RTOSes. This project was the first time I’ve worked with many of these technologies, and I’ll do my best to explain each component in laypersons’ terms. This talk details how I designed and fabricated a series of open-source custom ASIC GPUs. It will cover the entire workflow: setting the specs, digital design in Verilog, FPGA testing, and fabrication via TinyTapeout. I will also explain the architectural techniques used to squeeze a complete GPU pipeline into a severely resource-constrained chip space. [If you read this far, you probably want tickets. Just sayin’.] Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)