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.
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.
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.
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.
Read More »Laser-Cutting the Cost of Silicon Carbide Wafers
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
What’s at stake?
AI processors and AI accelerators have been proliferating at an alarming speed among edge products designed for inference. What, then, can a Japanese semiconductor startup nobody has heard of bring to the table? It appears to be plenty.
By Adele Hars
What’s at stake?
The pacemaker envisioned by Celtro is both leadless and battery-free. The company sees a big market opportunity, but there are miles to go to get there. A prototype is three years away.
Every year, about a million people around the world get a pacemaker implant – and every single one of those implants is battery powered. Celtro, an early-stage startup in Dresden, Germany, aims to create a new generation of pacemakers that run on energy harvested continuously and directly from the biochemical reactions that produce energy in cardiac cells. Following Celtro’s recently announced seed-funding round, the Ojo-Yoshida Report had the opportunity to speak with the CEO, Gerd Teepe.
Read More »Straight From the Heart: Startup Celtro Eyes Self-Powered Pacemakers
Drones are coming to the farm, hot above the heels of marauding wild boars.
With the explosive growth of feral hog populations that wreak havoc on crops and fields, farmers worldwide are suffering a significant uptick in crop loss.
Stepping to the front lines in this agricultural clash is Sara Nozkova, CEO and cofounder of Flox Robotics, a drone startup based in Sweden.
Read More »Farm Drones Going Hog Wild
By Jennifer Baljko (additional reporting by Junko Yoshida)
What’s at stake?
Because EV market success hinges on the cost/performance of the battery, everybody wants in on the evolving EV battery ecosystem. Nanoramic is one of the companies trying to crack the battery supply chain while the myriad factors determining optimal battery cost/performance — chemistries, binders, production equipment — remain in flux. Nanoramic argues that the lingering uncertainty about what the optimal EV battery will look like gives its chemistry-agnostic binder technology an edge. But for now, the only sure thing is that whoever picks the winning battery formula wins the EV race.
By Junko Yoshida (additional reporting by Jenn Baljko)
What’s at stake?
Arbe Robotics, a 2015 Israeli startup that went public this month through a SPAC (special-purpose acquisition team), seemed to have a lot going for it in recent years. Today, it might be at a crossroads. Arbe’s overreliance on its very-high-performance 4D imaging radar could deter it from securing a spot in a more immediate automotive market, one where Tier 1s demand designs that rely on “good enough” solutions.
