ESP32 Forum

Hi Folks,

have a note, few important things we can read in the (Newsletter ) (新闻通讯)




Espressif CEO Letter 2020

Shanghai, China
Feb 4, 2020

2019 has been an eventful year for Espressif, we thank our supporters, commercial customers and makers. In 2020, we continue to believe in our open source approach, robust and low cost solutions that can help everyone develop applications seamlessly.



Dear all,

2019 has been an eventful year for Espressif; we went IPO and we launched the new ESP32-S series of chips that enable making secure, connected devices with high performance at affordable cost.

We also worked on improving the security of our existing systems. ESP32v3 (aka ESP32 ECO3, the updated version of ESP32) patched the hardware vulnerabilities that were uncovered by the works of our security consultants and later independently by “LimitedResults” (aka “LR”). We thank them for the work on ESP32; Espressif has been and will always be transparent about any security issues. The security of our systems is also constantly reviewed by the best security professionals of our industry, and we spare no effort to fix any issues that comes up. To our customers, we reaffirm our commitment to provide the best support for both our old and new products alike.

Espressif is about building the best user experience. For this, we have built the most comprehensive ecosystem for IoT developers, including our flagship ESP-IDF SDK, application frameworks: ESP-JUMPSTART and ESP-RAINMAKER, ESP-SKAINET for AI enabled offline voice commands engines, ESP-WHO for AI enabled face recognition solutions, development boards, and modules.

As you can see, we are not just about creating the best Wi-Fi chips, but also about providing to our customers complete and fully customizable solutions that work right out of the box. We also understand that connected product development and maintenance needs to be simplified without compromising flexibility. Try our latest ESP32-S2 based ESP-RAINMAKER development boards that enable you to build the a complete cloud connected product within a couple of hours.

In 2020, we will be launching 4 new chips, covering different segments of the market, price points and performance. Our latest chips feature our new radio architecture that has lower power consumption while maintaining the same -40°C~125°C performance. The peripherals have been upgraded with highly sensitive capacitive touch IO’s. Capacitive touch controls are now a staple of user interfaces because they are cost efficient; certain functions such as slider controls are better supported with capacitive touch than with analog implementations.

Recently there has been an unfortunate coronavirus epidemic in China. We have taken measures to work around the restrictions caused by the situation and as a result, based on our current assessment of the situation, the disruption to our operations will be minimal. We and our suppliers are expected to resume operations before the 10th of February. Our teams in Europe, India and China continue in our work to best serve our customers. Should you have any questions or requests, please do write to our business team at sales@espressif.com

Lastly, we thank our supporters, commercial customers and makers. IoT is a powerful technology that can be used to create solutions that could solve the pressing issues of our time and we continue to believe in our open source approach, robust and low cost solutions that can help everyone develop applications seamlessly.

Happy coding!

Best regards,

Teo Swee Ann

CEO, Espressif Systems

2nd February 2020


SRC (EN) letter





乐鑫科技 CEO Letter 2020


中国，上海
2020年2月5日

2019 年对乐鑫来说是不平凡的一年，我们诚挚地感谢我们长期以来的支持者、商业伙伴和开发者们。2020 年，我们相信，乐鑫技术开源的方式，功能强大且低成本的解决方案，可以帮助每个人快速、无缝开发物联网应用程序。


大家好，

2019 年对乐鑫来说是不平凡的一年：我们在科创板进行了首次公开募股 (IPO)；推出了全新的 ESP32-S 系列芯片，让客户能够以低成本生产安全、高性能的物联网设备。

乐鑫一直致力于提高现有系统的安全性。ESP32v3（又名 ESP32 ECO3，ESP32 的更新版本）修补了我们的安全顾问在工作中发现的硬件漏洞（“LimitedResults”（又名“LR”）随后也做了漏洞报告）。对此，我们十分感谢他们为 ESP32 所做的研究和努力。乐鑫在安全问题上会一如既往地对用户保持透明。我们系统的安全性也经常由行业中最好的安全专家进行审查，我们会不遗余力地解决出现的任何问题。对客户，我们重申我们的承诺：为乐鑫的新老产品提供最好的支持！

乐鑫致力于打造最佳的用户体验。为此，我们为物联网开发者们打造了最全面的生态系统，包括我们的旗舰 SDK ESP-IDF，应用框架 ESP-JUMPSTART 和 ESP-RAINMAKER，人工智能离线语音命令引擎 ESP-SKAINET，人脸识别解决方案 ESP-WHO、开发板、模组等。

正如各位所看到的，我们不仅要制造最好的 Wi-Fi 芯片，我们还为客户提供完整的、可定制的、开箱即用的解决方案。我们也意识到，物联网产品的开发和维护，需要在保证其灵活性的前提下进一步简化。那不妨试试我们最新的基于 ESP32-S2 的 ESP-RAINMAKER 开发板吧，它可以让您在几个小时内构建一个完整的云连接产品。

2020 年，乐鑫将推出四颗新的芯片，覆盖不同的细分市场、价位和性能。我们最新的芯片采用了新的无线电架构，在 -40 °C~125 °C 环境中保持稳定性能的同时，还具有更低的功耗。此外，其外设也已升级为高灵敏度的电容触摸 IO。电容触摸控制凭借其成本优势，已是市面上用户界面的核心构件。在滑动控制等功能上，电容触控能比其他模拟实现方法更好地支持滑动控制用例。

最近在中国发生了一场不幸的冠状病毒疫情。乐鑫积极应对，已经采取相应措施以最大程度减弱当前限制所造成的影响。综合多方因素评估，我们运营受到的干扰将是非常有限的。我们和供应商将在 2 月 10 日恢复运营，我们在欧洲、印度和中国的团队将继续努力，为客户提供最好的服务与支持。如果您有任何问题或需求，请联系我们的商务支持团队 sales@espressif.com 。

最后，乐鑫诚挚地感谢我们长期以来的支持者、商业伙伴和开发者们。物联网是一项强大的技术，可以用来创建多元的应用方案，以解决我们这个时代棘手的难题。我们始终相信，乐鑫技术开源的方式，功能强大且低成本的解决方案，可以帮助每个人快速、无缝开发物联网应用程序。

Happy coding!

最诚挚的问候，

Teo Swee Ann 张瑞安

CEO，乐鑫信息科技

2020 年 2 月 2 日

新闻通讯 (中文 )





Find the origin (eng) Newsletter also origin (中文)新闻通讯 in the news (EN) (中文) from espressif

best wishes
rudi

4 new chips

WiFive wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 05, 2020 3:55 am

4 new chips

hi WiFive
can be right, from my knowledge, which i read from ESP32-S2(USB-OTG), ESP32-S3, ESP-S4(AI Instruction) and multi-cpu cores, ESP32-Sx (more memory, BLE ) also perhabs ESP32V3 (aka ESP32 ECO3) counts (instead one of the list)
the AI / multicore Version - i do not know so much detail, it was named in the links i posted.
it will be exciting for more details on this multi-cpu cores ESP32-S3x also the AI versions with neural network

best wishes
rudi

Dear Folks,

please have a note on this origin message by the CEO, Teo Swee Ann
...

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As Espressif is a company with their main offices in China, the recent coronavirus outbreak has affected us as well. Even though there is an obvious impact on the way we work, the blow is cushioned because we have offices outside of China. Additionally, the way our IT is structured allows most of our staff to work from home, and even for the jobs that do need people to be at the office, there are ways to work around the current issues. CEO Teo Swee Ann gives some insight the thought process behind the decisions made.

A CEO’s Experience During the nCoV Crisis — Part I: Safety First
(by Teo Swee Ann, Feb 10)

It was approaching Chinese New Year. I had just left for Okinawa on 24th Jan 2020, from Shanghai with my family — a planned vacation during the Chinese New Year celebration that we were looking forward to. In fact, it had been more than 2 years, since I last had a holiday together with my family.

However, it was to be a holiday that wasn’t meant to be. The coronavirus outbreak situation in China was developing rapidly: just a day ago, Wuhan was locked down and the news reported that there is human-human transmission of the coronavirus. Still at that point of time, most people thought that it was going to blow over soon, and it wasn’t not that bad. It was said to be no more dangerous than a common flu and to only affect the elderly, albeit highly contagious.

• Many things went through my mind on the plane en route to Okinawa. As I watch the clouds floating by, from my window seat, I wondered how the virus will spread in in China, when it would be over, would it affect our colleagues in China, how many days of delay would this be? I had optimistically thought that it would blow over within a month.

Safety First

As with all new problems, we need to first establish the facts and consider what our alternatives are. Once I landed in Okinawa and checked into the hotel, I immediately called for an online meeting with our China management team to discuss and gather what we know. First, we knew that it was infectious. Second, the mortality rate wasn’t too high. Third, the virus was only fatal to people who were aged or had pre-existing conditions. Of concern, we have some staff who fall within the susceptible age group.

Based on these information, we formulated our base case and decided to push back the start date of the company to the 3rd of Feb instead of the 30th of Jan (which was later pushed back to the 17th). With this established, we then considered the extreme case: what if nCoV-2019 is the biological equivalent of a nuclear holocaust; with a couple of mutations, it acquires a mortality rate like that of MERS (70%) and is highly infectious?

• Could we move our staff out of harm’s way, such as to another country?

The discussion was long and no one was sure how serious it is. Should we wait for the government to make an announcement? Should we panic? We finally decided that we should err on the side of caution, and pro-actively mitigate our risks. For the case of our expat staff, working in Shanghai, we would move them overseas, because many of the group do not speak Chinese and are relatively older. In the case of an emergency, the language barrier may severely disadvantage them.

• We also knew that when we move our colleagues from Shanghai to another country, we could possibly exacerbate the situation, by spreading it to other countries. How do we square this risk with the considerations about the safety of our colleagues? I made the decision that we should look at the facts as they were: was Shanghai being quarantined? No. Do I think that our staff were infected or exposed? I don’t know everything but I think no — our colleagues were not in Wuhan, or had contact with people from Wuhan. Do I think we should move as many people as we could as long as the laws do not bar us from doing so, our staff are symptoms free and do not have exposure to Wuhan? Yes.

On the 27th, we had most of our expat staff leave Shanghai for their home countries with instructions to self-quarantine themselves for at least 10 days thereafter. One of our directors stayed put in Shanghai because his child has flu-like symptoms.

How about our local staff in China? First of all, everyone has families in China and naturally everyone wants to be with their family. We briefly considered moving our staff to a warmer climate (within China), such as balmy Hainan (an island in southern China) — it was theorized in the previous SARS outbreak that hot climate and high humidity may have helped stemmed the outbreaks in some regions. After a long exchange, we came to a conclusion that the best course of action was to stay put. Most Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Suzhou and Wuxi, where most of our staff are located, have good medical resource; the Chinese government was also taking a vigorous response to the crisis — the plan to impose strict quarantine on entire major cities and making use of the Chinese New Year to isolate every household is unprecedented in scope and audacity.

The early intervention and coordination of the Chinese central government have played a huge role in reining in the spread of the virus to the other Chinese cities and countries, giving everyone precious time to prepare for this contagion. While there have had been criticism of the initial handling of the Chinese government of this crisis, I am of the opinion that the Chinese central government has responded decisively and swiftly once they had gathered the information.


Situational Analysis

Chip Production

Based on the feedback from our supply chain and logistics partners, our chip supply functions are unaffected. On the silicon wafer side, our associate foundries are located in Taiwan and unaffected. Our partner module factories in China will be resume operations on the 10th of February.

Our current considerations are how we could without endangering our colleagues and our partners, fulfill the needs of our customers. We note that our manufacturing partners have automated processes that require very little physical workforce. However, we will have another review of our manufacturing processes and supply chain over the next 1 week as we obtain new data from and continue to build new contingencies


New Product and Customer Support

After we moved some of our colleagues out of China, we would regroup everyone in our Czech and Indian offices to proceed with the launch of our new product, ESP32-S2. The R&D of ESP-IDF, solutions frameworks and customer support from these sites are not affected.


Chip R&D


About 40% of our staff in China are issued with laptops and can work from home without any issues.

The majority of the chip design is done in our China offices and this year, we have completed and verified major pieces of our core IPs (some of which are used in ESP32-S2) and we are just finishing up on our integration for ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C2. While there is some impact on chip R&D due to the need to access simulation servers, this can be mitigated by enabling remote access.

Based on our current estimates, more than 90% of our staff will be back and ready to get back to work within 14 days from now, either physically or via remote access. We are also preparing to have all our staff work online, in the event that the situation turns for the worse.


Contingencies and Questions


Over the past two weeks, our global management team has formed the business contingencies, created a new emergency response team (ERT) and carefully evaluated all of the functions of our groups. When formulating the contingencies, we have to make sure that they are real contingencies for the worst case scenarios, including what if I and the management team were infected and down. Although the chances of this happening is extremely small, but we still have to consider these scenarios — things can be unpredictable.

While our aims are to restore the full function of the company as soon as possible, we have to put the safety of our staff at first place. There are certain functions of the company which will require the physical presence of our staff. How do we evaluate the risk?

First, the risk of spreading an infection is described by the following equation:

probability[spread at least 1 new infection] = 1 — (1 — 𝜹) ^ ( N[interactions] ⨉ N[infected] )

where 𝜹 is the probability of spreading the virus with each interaction, N[interaction] is the number of direct interactions each infected person has with other non-infected people in one epoch (we define as 5 days), and N[infected] is the number of infected people in the group. (95% of the population develop symptoms when infected, within 5 days.)

If any of the values: 𝜹, N[interactions] or N[infected] is equal to zero, there would be no chance of spreading the infection. Hence, to minimize the risks of spreading any infection within the company, we then have to do these 3 groups of actions:

• 1. Reduce 𝜹 through precautionary measures: face masks, hand sanitizers, not touching the face, avoiding physical contact of contaminated surfaces, increase ventilation, use air purifiers, etc.

• 2. Reduce direct interactions N[interaction] to a minimal level: work from home, discourage socialization to minimal level, etc.

• 3. Reduce the number of infected personnel N[infected] to zero: implement rigorous screening of new returnees to our respective China offices and quarantine measures; measure the temperature of every colleague before he enters the offices; anyone with symptoms will quarantine.

More on Reducing Infectivity (or 𝜹)

Here’s our list of recommendations:

• 1. Get ready face masks, disinfectants, thermometers and blood oxygen monitor

• 2. Daily measurements of body temperature. Anyone with a fever (now defined as >37.3°C) is to be quarantined.

• 3. Lifts are banned. Doors remain open.

• 4. Wash hands and use disinfectant on hands before entering office.

• 5. Central air-conditioning has been halted.

• 6. At all times, wear a face mask.

• 7. Everyone is encouraged to bring their own food. Or admin staff will help order from deliveries. Group gathering for lunch or dinner is discouraged.

• 8. Anything that goes into the fridge must be clingwrapped. Food will be cleared from fridge at the of the day.

• 9. Personnels from 1 office are discouraged from visiting other offices. If needed, inform the admin staff.

• 10. All mail parcels are to be received and distributed by our admin staff.

• 11. No travels for customer support within China. Everything will be done online.

• 12. Discourage customers from visiting us. If necessary, additional precautionary measures are to be taken.

• 13. Office to be disinfected 3 times daily.

• 14. Operate with bare minimum number of people in the office. Those who can work from home, will do so.

Practical Questions

• 1. Given a population of 25 million and 500 confirmed cases of infection and 10 new cases of infection per day, what is the estimated number of infected people in the population? [Some worst case statistics]

• 2. Given a population of 25 million, and x free roaming infected persons within the population. What is the chance of getting into a taxi, whose driver is infected, assuming that symptoms will show within 7 days?

• 3. What is the estimated probability of getting infected with the coronavirus if you wear or do not wear an N95 mask while being in close proximity of an infected person?

• 4. What are the chances of getting struck by a car, if you were to bicycle to work instead?

The Situation in Wuhan

As we have learnt, the situation in Wuhan is critical. Medical staff are getting infected and falling sick. The frontline medical workers are putting their lives at stake to battle the disease. There are even some who have died not of the disease but of exhaustion. The central government is sending thousands of medical workers to Wuhan to relieve the crisis. As of today (10 Feb 2020), the number of new infections in Wuhan are on a downward trend.


What Next

In this epidemic, we are currently in unknown territory; we do not know how the situation will develop or the outcome. Experts have commented that with a R0 that is greater than 2.5, it would probably become a pandemic. But these may not be taking into account the drastic quarantine measures in China. These quarantine measures could also possibly keep the infection rates low enough to buy some time, till warmer weather eliminates the virus.

• Based on the current statistics, the mortality rates outside of Wuhan is 0.2%. This could be no worse than a bad influenza, which has a mortality rate of 0.1%?

We have taken measures to keep Espressif going and to keep everyone within Espressif healthy to fight another day. Espressif Czech and Espressif India are unaffected and continue to support our customers directly and develop our latest solutions. In case the situation deteriorates, we will have our entire China workforce to work from home.

We are also ready to contribute to the fight against the virus with IOT technology, such with our low cost AI enabled voice recognition (hands free) solution ESP-SKAÏNET and soon to be announced ESP-RAINMAKER. @Makers, please share your ideas! We will help support any IOT solutions that help control the epidemic.

Teo Swee Ann, CEO Espressif Systems

10 Feb 2020



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..also you can find this origin message by the CEO, Teo Swee Ann, in The ESP Journal

best wishes
rudi