Conversation

Emmanuel Macron, President of France (in the center) listens to Jean-Marc Chery, STMicroelectronics CEO talks. Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market stands next to Macron.

CHIPS Act: Europe Moving Fast, With Intel Along for the Ride

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What’s at stake?
As shown this week when STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries revealed their joint 300mm fab project in Crolles, France, Europe is moving full-speed ahead with its CHIPS Act. At stake is the future not just of European chip companies, but its entire high-tech industry. We caught up with Jean-Christophe Eloy, CEO of Yole Group, to get his assessment of the E.U.’s ambitious strategy.

Few would have predicted that 27 disparate European states could unite to forge a strategy for resurrecting the region’s semiconductor industry.

Ayar Labs Mounts Chip-to-Chip Optical Connectivity Campaign

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Ayar Labs, a startup focused on optical chip-to-chip interconnections, is gathering investors and semiconductor industry partners, including Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Nvidia. Might its collaborators’ disparate demands for customization overstretch the startup’s engineering team?

RISC-V’s CTO on the Art of Herding Cats

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The measure of success for an open-source community such as RISC-V can be memberships, number of shipped products or revenues generated by its member companies. But just as significant is the number of specs ratified within the community. This matters because specs form the groundwork for members’ technical advancements, engagements with developers and future adoption of the technologies involved.

Internet of Things IoT connected devices Arm

Ian Drew: On IoT and Life After Arm

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
IoT devices are fundamentally different from PCs or mobile phones. They must last 20 to 30 years when deployed in industrial settings. “Imagine a critical vulnerability found in a gateway that sits on top of your oil rig,” says entrepreneur and Arm veteran Ian Drew. Software engineers and chipmakers might be clueless about their own older products that went into that gateway. At stake is the long-term viability and security of IoT devices.

encryption data security fully homomoprhic encryption

Wally Rhines Places All His Chips on a Crypto Startup

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By Bolaji Ojo

Walden “Wally” Rhines is a stalwart of the semiconductor industry and a veteran of two of the electronics industry’s most important companies. At 75, Rhines could be retired, serving as a statesman to the semiconductor industry, playing golf in the sunniest parts of the world or touring exotic places on luxury cruise ships. Instead, Rhines is CEO at homomorphic encryption startup Cornami, where he is shepherding potentially groundbreaking work on data center security.

The El-Ouazzane Leap: Intel to STMicroelectronics

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
European semiconductor companies are traditionally run by executives who have spent the better part of their careers with a single company, breathing the same familiar air for decades. But Remi El-Ouazzane, president of STMicroelectronics’ microcontrollers and digital ICs group, is a relative newcomer to ST who acknowledges that his predecessor laid the cornerstone of its strategy for its success over the next five years. If that’s the case, then what is expected of the nontraditional El-Ouazzane, a transplant to Geneva from faraway Santa Clara?

The EU Has a Chip Plan. Can it Execute?

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By George Leopold

What’s at stake?
Details of Europe’s semiconductor strategy are being debated. The keys to success are maintaining and expanding the current chip ecosystem while laying the groundwork to leverage advanced manufacturing nodes.

RISC-V Beyond Embedded: How Many Cores Will It Take?

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The momentum behind RISC-V is well-known. But the market penetration of the RISC-V cores is harder to pin down. Reportedly, there’s a RISC-V core in every earbud. But will the core ever grow up to be a full-fledged smartphone processor, on par with an Arm-based apps processor?

So, how many RISC-V cores did the semiconductor industry ship in 2021?

That’s a basic question to ask about RISC-V’s commercial success.

Valeo Sits Atop Lidar Market – So Far

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Sorting out hype from reality is critical when it comes to automotive lidars. At stake for auto OEMs is selecting the appropriate sensors for ADAS and AV applications, and determining which vendors they can count on to deliver.

In an automotive lidar market crowded with startups touting new technologies and claimed design wins, it may come as a surprise that the most dominant lidar supplier in the world is Valeo, a stodgy French Tier One behemoth with a history that spans nearly a century.

As RISC-V Catches Tailwinds, Codasip Refreshes Ambition

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By Junko Yoshida

Refreshed by new blood on its senior executive team, Codasip, touting itself as “one of the top three, credible RISC-V companies,” is reintroducing itself. Spun out of its founder’s PhD thesis and decade-long research on how best to design new and better CPUs, Codasip is today a full-fledged RISC-V company, hot on the heels of RISC-V market leaders SiFive and Andes Technology.