Unnerved by a pre-pandemic electronics materials shortage, STMicroelectronics took the decision to start bringing its supply chain for silicon carbide in house, from substrates to end products.

Now the chip maker says its annual revenues from the semiconductor, used in electric cars and other machines and systems, will hit ten figures within the next couple of years.

SiC, along with gallium nitride (GaN), is particularly useful in power electronics. STM introduced SiC diodes in 2004, and today sells medium and high-voltage SiC diodes and MOSFETs to automotive, industrial, and other markets. The company also took a decision a few years ago that it wanted to own its supply chain for silicon carbide.

"We do not want to be limited in innovation, in cost decrease and in wafer size increase. So that’s the reason why we have decided to set up in Europe a mega factory for raw material," said STM CEO Jean-Marc Chery, during an earnings call last week with financial analysts.

His biz is investing heavily in silicon carbide for power management and analog circuitry – as part of a roughly $3.6bn CapEx spending program – and estimates its annual revenue from these SiC products will hit $1bn by 2024.

STMicroelectronics is not only building a mega SiC substrate plant in Europe, it hopes to source 40 per cent of its SiC substrates internally by 2024. The acceleration of electrification in vehicles is creating more demand for – among other things – STM's silicon carbide power transistors and diodes, Chery said. The multinational corp supplies SiC MOSFETs to Tesla, for instance.

"We are confident that we will be capable to continue to sustain our long objective to have approximately 30 per cent of market share of this booming market of silicon carbide which is connected to the acceleration of the electrification of whole vehicles," Chery said.

STMicroelectronics took steps in 2018 to secure its silicon carbide wafer supply after shortages rattled chip makers relying on the material, noted Yole Developpement, a research firm, in a recent study.

STM in February 2019 bought a 45 per cent stake in silicon carbide wafer manufacturer Norstel AB, and then bought the company outright in December that year. In November 2019, STM expanded a silicon carbide wafer supply agreement with Cree of more than $800m.

“Expanding our long-term wafer supply agreement with Cree will increase the flexibility of our global silicon carbide substrate supply," Chery said at the time. Other companies using SiC technology include On Semiconductor and Infineon Technology.

During the earnings call, Chery noted that Mobileye, which is being spun off from Intel, was a big customer. STM currently makes SiC products on 150mm wafer lines in Italy and Singapore, with sites in China and Morocco doing assembly and test activities.

STMicroelectronics reported fourth-quarter revenues of $3.56bn, growing by 9.9 per cent compared to the same quarter last year. The net profit was $750m, growing by 28.9 per cent.

For the full 2021 to December 31, revenue was $12.76bn, growing by 24.9 per cent from 2020. Net profit was $2bn, growing by 80.8 per cent. ®

Who, Me? A reminder of the devastation a simple DROP can do and that backups truly are a DBA's best friend in this morning's "there but for the grace of..." Who, Me?

"Stephen" is the author of today's confession and was faced with what should have been a simple case of applying an update to an Estimating and Invoicing system.

The system ran on a PostgreSQL-database and was, in his words, "Software that I don't touch save when there's an issue, needs rebooting, etc."

The land of the rising sun has fallen to the United States’ supercomputing might. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) newly minted Frontier supercomputer has ousted Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for the top spot on the Top500 rankings of the world's most-powerful publicly known systems.

Frontier’s lead over Japan’s A64X-based Fujitsu machine is by no means a narrow one either. The cluster achieved peak performance of 1.1 exaflops according to the Linpack benchmark, which has been the standard by which supercomputers have been ranked since the mid-1990s.

Frontier marks the first publicly benchmarked exascale computer by quite a margin. The ORNL system is well ahead of Fugaku’s 442 petaflops of performance, which was a strong enough showing to keep Fugaku in the top spot for two years.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has backtracked on advice about how best to secure the "Aadhaar" national identity cards that enable access to a range of government and financial serivces.

UIDAI promotes the cards as "a single source offline/online identity verification" for tasks ranging from passport applications, accessing social welfare schemes, opening a bank account, dispersing pensions, filing taxes or buying insurance.

Although Bill Gates has lauded Aadhaar cards for improving access to services, the scheme has been the subject of many security-related scares as inappropriate access to personal information has sometimes been possible, UIDAI's infosec has sometimes been lax, and the biometrics captured to create citizens' records have sometimes been used for multiple individuals. Privacy concerns have also been raised over whether biometric data is properly secured stored and secured, if surveillance of individuals is made possible through Aadhaar, and and possible data mining of the schemes' massive data store.

China’s largest city, Shanghai, will this week all-but end its COVID-19 lockdowns on Wednesday, and by doing so may smooth some of the kinks in the world’s technology supply chains.

Limited lockdowns commenced in Shanghai during mid-March, before April escalations imposed city-wide restrictions that have remained in place ever since.

Shanghai is a major manufacturing hub, so the lockdowns have caused considerable pain. Cisco, for example, Cisco warned of disruption to supplies of parts it needs for power supplies. The likes of Foxconn, Tesla, and Toyota, have all ceased or slowed production. Chinese chipmaker SMIC kept production ticking over by having staff move either into its plants, or into a COVID-free zone around its plants.

Eleven significant tech-aligned industry associations from around the world have reportedly written to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to call for revision of the nation’s new infosec reporting and data retention rules, which they criticise as inconsistent, onerous, unlikely to improve security within India, and possibly harmful to the nations economy.

The rules were introduced in late April and are extraordinarily broad. For example, operators of datacenters, clouds, and VPNs, are required to register customers’ names, dates on which services were used, and even customer IP addresses, and store that data for five years.

Another requirement is to report over 20 types of infosec incident, even port scanning or attempted phishing, within six hours of detection. Among the reportable incidents are “malicious/suspicious activities” directed towards almost any type of IT infrastructure or equipment, without explanation of where to draw the line between malicious and suspicious activity.

In brief Somerset County, New Jersey, was hit by a ransomware attack this week that hobbled its ability to conduct business, and also cut off access to essential data.

"Services that depend on access to county databases are temporarily unavailable, such as land records, vital statistics, and probate records. Title searches are possible only on paper records dated before 1977," the county said in a statement.

The attack, which happened on Tuesday, took down email services for county government departments as well as leaving the county clerk's office "unable to provide most services which are reliant on internet access." Somerset County residents were asked to contact government offices via Gmail addresses set up for various departments, or via phone. 

Researchers in the Netherlands have shown they can transmit quantum information via an intermediary node, a feature necessary to make the so-called quantum internet possible.

In recent years, scientists have argued that the quantum internet presents a more desirable network for transferring secure data, in addition to being necessary when connecting multiple quantum systems. All of this has been attracting investment from the US government, among others.

Despite the promise, there are still vital elements missing for the creation of a functional quantum internet.

Chinese academics have christened an ocean research vessel that has a twist: it will sail the seas with a complement of aerial and ocean-going drones and no human crew.

The Zhu Hai Yun, or Zhuhai Cloud, launched in Guangzhou after a year of construction. The 290-foot-long mothership can hit a top speed of 18 knots (about 20 miles per hour) and will carry 50 flying, surface, and submersible drones that launch and self-recover autonomously. 

According to this blurb from the shipbuilder behind its construction, the Cloud will also be equipped with a variety of additional observational instruments "which can be deployed in batches in the target sea area, and carry out task-oriented adaptive networking to achieve three-dimensional view of specific targets." Most of the ship is an open deck where flying drones can land and be stored. The ship is also equipped with launch and recovery equipment for its aquatic craft. 

In-brief Governments around the world should pass intellectual property laws that grant rights to AI systems, two academics at the University of New South Wales in Australia argued.

Alexandra George, and Toby Walsh, professors of law and AI, respectively, believe failing to recognize machines as inventors could have long-lasting impacts on economies and societies. 

"If courts and governments decide that AI-made inventions cannot be patented, the implications could be huge," they wrote in a comment article published in Nature. "Funders and businesses would be less incentivized to pursue useful research using AI inventors when a return on their investment could be limited. Society could miss out on the development of worthwhile and life-saving inventions."

More papers describing the orders and messages the US President can issue in the event of apocalyptic crises, such as a devastating nuclear attack, have been declassified and released for all to see.

These government files are part of a larger collection of records that discuss the nature, reach, and use of secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents: these are executive orders, announcements, and statements to Congress that are all ready to sign and send out as soon as a doomsday scenario occurs. PEADs are supposed to give America's commander-in-chief immediate extraordinary powers to overcome extraordinary events.

PEADs have never been declassified or revealed before. They remain hush-hush, and their exact details are not publicly known.

Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.

According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.

"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.

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