Welcome to our big post-campaign update! We’ve been delayed on getting this out to you, but not delayed on the important work of getting ChipWhisperer-Husky into your hands.
Lots of good updates & so far none of those dreaded supply chain delays. First, some quick highlights:
- A quantity of main boards are ready, and we've started assembling units.
- The iCE40 & SAM4S2A target board production runs occurred already.
- The CW313 interposer board build is happening now.
- A second batch of the main boards are in-process.
- A release of the ChipWhisperer software with tutorials fully updated for ChipWhisperer-Husky is imminent.
Lets dig into the details of what we’ve been up to these past months!
Main Unit Production
The ChipWhisperer-Husky includes multiple boards as part of the Starter Kit. The most critical is the ChipWhisperer-Husky itself, of course. We currently have around 80 boards from an early run, some of which are now assembled into main units:
We delayed submitting the larger production run, as we wanted to do a little more validation, and to confirm some minor PCB tweaks. We’re now moving ahead for the full run (and all of the critical parts such as FPGAs and microcontrollers are in our inventory, as previously mentioned).
The main "tweak" is that from this initial run, we needed a small "oopsie wire", as I had taken the PLL power supply from the wrong spot. I was powering the 1.8 V PLL input from 3.3 V, and amazingly, it "seemed" to work during some initial tests. At high temperatures, the USB dropped out, but otherwise worked fine. Eventually, we traced the high-temperature problems down to that error and made a minor fix on our first run boards:
Luckily, the PCB layout means that the tweaked PCB and this fly-wire fix are identical, so we don’t see any difference between the two revisions functionally.
We also just got the full run of the custom enclosures back (which looks like a larger version of a photo from our last update showing the "proto run"):
Assembling & testing each unit does take some time, so this still leaves us on schedule for delivery as planned for the full order. But we’re going to try and get the first batch off early once all the accessory boards & parts are in.
Target Boards
The ChipWhisperer-Husky ships with two target boards, one with an iCE40 FPGA, and one with an Atmel SAM4S2A microcontroller.
Again - good news here. The full production run for both of these boards is done & has returned to us without issue:
We’re still working on the runs for some of the other targets, but we concentrated first on the core targets that are part of every order. They are also the most important targets, as they are used by the labs and tutorials.
CW313 Interposer & Other Bits
The ChipWhisperer-Husky uses a newer target baseboard, the "CW313". Here we have an updated design that is in production right now:
We did get a set of boards in case we need to run some ourselves, but the production looks to be going on schedule so we’ll likely wait for the full production run.
There’s a few small changes compared to the campaign version: a few headers are moved to give you more space, and a few additional headers make it easier to select the power source for the target.
We’re still doing some production runs and ordering for "other bits" as we call it - such as the smaller target boards, cables, and so forth. These are all short lead-time items & we were waiting to check if any changes needed to be made after we spent more time working on the kits.
ChipWhisperer Software
The other big announcement is that the majority of our ChipWhisperer tutorials (available here) now support the ChipWhisperer-Husky. This means they work with both the ChipWhisperer-Husky "scope", along with the new Atmel SAM4S2A target microcontroller.
So once you get your ChipWhisperer-Husky, you’ll be able to take advantage of our previous five years of building tutorials on other platforms (such as the ChipWhisperer-Lite.) You’re also going to see several new tutorials that target the ChipWhisperer-Husky to take advantage of its many unique features, such as the streaming mode.