EV Charging Stations Go Mobile
By Rebecca Day
What’s at stake?
Carmakers are investing big sums in EVs, but charging anxiety has many U.S. consumers hesitant to buy in. Could a charger robot be a solution.
Audition
Startup’s Automotive Radar Sees People in the Dark
What’s at stake?
Not all advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are created equal. Automatic emergency braking, particularly, is known to hit pedestrians and cyclists at night. A Texas startup thinks its new radar is the answer.
Rubber Meets Road for Tire Safety Startup
By Rebecca Day
What’s at stake:
Vehicle sensors measure multiple functions in the car, but monitoring critical tire and road conditions haven’t been part of the diagnostics picture. Startup Tactile Mobility claims it has a solution for that.
Startup Aims to Build the First ‘Unhackable’ Encryption System
By Bolaji Ojo
A breakthrough appears imminent in the search for fully homomorphic encryption, which could put an end to the data security nightmare companies and governments face. Will Cornami be the startup to deliver this important innovation?
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AON: ‘Edge AI’ Done Right
What’s at stake?
“Edge AI” is the latest trend to sweep the Internet of Things (IoT), embedded and AI markets, lending urgency to the need to examine how one edge AI approach differs from another. A startup called AONDevices is taking a pragmatic path with an ASIC that excels in power consumption, processing power and recognition accuracy.
PreAct Going Close-Up to Cut Lidar Cost
What’s at stake?
Elon Musk once famously called lidars a “fool’s errand,” a claim that has yet to be entirely disproven. Despite their high-precision performance advantages, lidars remain too costly to become an indispensable sensing modality in ADAS. Against the odds, a startup called PreAct sees a volume opportunity for “dirt-cheap” near-field lidars, not the long- or medium-range lidars most other players are pursuing.
MEMS Microspeakers Target ‘Smart’ Hearables
By Rebecca Day
What’s at stake?
The nascent “hearables” sector will require small, low-power devices along with expanded edge computing capacity. Bosch is betting emerging MEMS technology will help fit the bill.
Beyond Touch: Uniphy Looks to Light Up the User Interface
By Rebecca Day
What’s at stake?
Driver distraction only grows. New user interfaces that rely on touch and feel could help. Uniphy claims its optics-based approach for the auto interior empowers designers to build free-form interfaces that achieve the desired functionality without impinging on the vehicle aesthetics.
Laser-Cutting the Cost of Silicon Carbide Wafers
By Adele Hars
What’s at stake:
Investors are hot on the silicon carbide market, but the high cost of the wafers is an impediment to high volumes. Halo Industries, a startup just coming out of stealth mode, claims it has a solution that saves on the time, cost, and energy required to slice the SiC boules (ingots) into wafers. It’s got a big client and strong funding, but it has an unusual business strategy and is up against some much bigger players. Will Halo be able to scale to high volume fast enough to beat the competition?
Silicon carbide wafers are extremely expensive — anywhere from 20 to 50 times pricier than silicon. The drivers of the cost differential begin at the very beginning, with the weeks that the starting SiC boules spend in furnaces that are almost half as hot as the sun. The inefficiencies mount as the boules are cut with diamond wire saws, wherein up to 40% of the boule ends up as waste (or the more technical term, kerf), in the form of SiC dust lost in the sawing process. Yields are terrible, and the sawing process takes hours per wafer. Andrei Iancu, CEO and founder of Halo Industries, told the Ojo-Yoshida Report that his company’s laser systems are intended to replace saws, virtually eliminating waste and improving yield quality.
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AlphaICs: How to Stand Out in the AI Startup Crowd
What’s at stake?
The AI chip market is notoriously crowded, with many startups gunning for a share of the potentially large but highly fragmented edge AI segment. As the competitors court investors and some look down the road to an M&A exit, gaining market traction for an AI chip design will require more than a specsmanship game of “my TOPS are better than your TOPS.”
AlphaICs, an AI fabless chip startup based in Milpitas, California, is sampling an 8-TOPS edge AI inference co-processor that it says provides “the best frames-per-second (fps)/watt performance in the market for classification and detection neural networks.” The company will offer both the chip, called Gluon, and the software stack.
Read More »AlphaICs: How to Stand Out in the AI Startup Crowd