Once again, I present a random sample of new stories that I find interesting and on-topic regarding SDR, open source, or technology.
To give this some focus, I will pick exactly 10 stories of the month, not in any particular order.
Google launches “Open Silicon” developer portal
Source: Google Blog
There’s more hardware-related news coming out of Google: The announcement of a developer portal for chip designers.
Whatever business needs this provides to Google, it will force some democratization of the underlying design tools. The fact that Google will let people tape out their designs free of charge is almost less impressive than the fact that they are publishing a full open source Process Design Kit (PDK) to develop the chips.
It’s unlikely that these fully open-source toolchains able to compete with the big silicon design tools currently out there, but decades ago, something like Kicad would also have been unheard of, and this will surely accelerate the development of such toolchains. Google actually prominently features some of these toolchains, such as OpenROAD.
K-9 is now Thunderbird
Source: golem.de, k9mail.app
Thunderbird wants to expand onto Android. How do they do that? Write an Android client from scratch? No, because that would be incredibly wasteful. Instead, they hired people from the K-9 team, and are doing a soft, friendly takeover (at least, that’s what it looks like). This seems like the best way to do something like this: Fewer forks, better usage of funds, etc. This interview with a K-9 dev corroborates this.
Of course, as a Thunderbird and K-9 user, I’m very happy about this.
State of Voyager
The Voyager space probes are simply amazing. NASA says they can run some instruments on Voyager until 2030, 53 years after launch! To do that, they’re shutting down some systems so others can remain active. The two probes are powered by nuclear batteries, which will deplete within the next decade.
Capstone Launches
Source: golem.de, YouTube (launch video), Wikipedia
NASA launched the Capstone lunar orbiter from New Zealand on June 28th. Capstone is a very small lunar satellite (12-unit cubesat, 25kg launch mass, of which 5 kg are fuel). It will be going into a Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) when it reaches its destination in 4-5 months. Testing the stability of said orbit is part of the mission. It also has a navigation system called CAPS, which measures its position relative to the NASA Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, which is on a polar orbit.
The purpose of Capstone is to prepare the path for the upcoming lunar gateway.
Atom
Source: heise.de, golem.de, github.blog, ghacks.net
Not surprisingly, Microsoft will discontinue Atom by the end of this year. Atom was originally published by Github, which in turn got bought by Microsoft. Given that Microsoft also produces VS Code, it would be very hard to come up with good reasons not to retire it. Of course, it’s a shame for the Atom fanbase, but there are good alternatives out there, these days. Who knows, I might eventually migrate from vim at some point.
Speaking of which…
Vim 9.0 is released
I used to get really excited about major vim releases, but this time, not so much. For a while, I’ve been thinking about migrating to neovim, which is going into a different direction.
Vim 9 added yet another scripting language (vim9 script), which is supposed to look more like other languages. So… why not use those other languages then?
Bundeswehr in Space
Source: golem.de, heise.de, sueddeutsche.de
After posting about the lacklustre performance of the Bundeswehr in space, there are some new announcements on this front: SARah-1, a SAR-based surveillance satellite with centimetre resolution. The system was built by OHB and launched by SpaceX, which is interesting as it means a German spy system was launched by an American commercial entity for pricing reasons.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst also want more spy capabilities in space and have requested funds for a system called “Georg”, also built by OHB.
VW to build Software Defined Vehicles?
Cariad, the software arm of Volkswagen, has joined the Eclipse Foundation to become part of the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) working group. This means more open source in the vehicular world, which makes a ton of sense: VW is still catching up to companies like Tesla in this respect, and this can accelerate their software stack availability.
Arduino going pro
Source: businesswire.com, golem.de
Arduino S.r.l has raised $32MM for their plans to grow towards enterprise solutions. This move makes sense: Raspberry Pis also used to be laughed at as toys, but now are in all sorts of industrial systems. Arduinos are easy to use, very popular, and achieve all of that without some obscure, proprietary tooling.
ARM announces new cores
Source: heise.de, arm.com, golem.de
The high-performance core Cortex-X3 is the successor the the Cortex-X2, and is up to 25% faster. Cortex-A715 is the successor to Cortex-A710, with increased efficiency. Both cores drop support for 32-bit (AArch32). The high-efficiency Cortex-A510 gets a 5% effiency upgrade. SoCs can now combine up to 12 cores (previously: 8).
ARM also announced more GPUs: The Immortalis-G715 (the high-end GPU) and the Mali-G715 (less powerful, geared towards mobile devices).
Other News
Other noteworthy items that didn’t make my top 10 for the month:
- The PCIe Gen7 spec was announced, taking the rate to 16 GByte/s per lane (512 GByte/s in a x16 configuration). Earliest hardware may be available around 2025/26.
- Git 2.37 was released.
- Google’s OSPO publishes some updates on their work
- China censors open-source software on gitee.
- Low-Code/No-Code platforms are gaining relevance.