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Renesas’ Automotive Future: Go Big on Chiplets

Renesas’ Automotive Future: Go Big on Chiplets

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
While Nvidia, Qualcomm and Mobileye tend to suck the oxygen out of the next-gen automotive E/E platform discussions, other automotive semiconductor companies must pick a spot where they think they can win and hold onto their share. But by pre-announcing this week the Gen 5 R-CAR SoCs and their new chiplet options, Renesas is planning to cover a broad range of automotive architecture. Will the new strategy work?  

Renesas Electronics this week unveiled its latest automotive semiconductor strategy. Executives laid out the company’s planned product offerings ranging from high-performance SoCs to Arm-based automotive MCUs, and automotive chiplet options.

Read More »Renesas’ Automotive Future: Go Big on Chiplets
Can Chiplets Make SoC Design into Child’s Play?

Can Chiplets Make SoC Design a Child’s Play?

By Ron Wilson

What’s at stake:
Ideally, chiplets could be off-the-shelf products that snap together like building blocks — no EDA tools required. Anyone who could specify exactly what they wanted could create a system-in-package implementation, opening up silicon to a far wider range of designers, and, incidentally, undermining parts of the EDA and design-services industries. Could it ever really happen?

One early conception of chiplets — in their formative days within the US Department of Defense — was of an open market. You could buy the functions you needed off the shelf, arrange them into a multi-die assembly, and after verification and analysis have a finished hardware design. Later thinking took this idea ever further. What if you could, figuratively speaking, just snap the chiplets together like building blocks, with no complex design automation tools or analyses needed, and could be sure that the resulting assembly would work correctly?

Read More »Can Chiplets Make SoC Design a Child’s Play?
Apple is leaning hard on its suppliers to help achieve the iPhone giant’s 2030 net zero goal.

Ask Not What Apple Net Zero Can Do For You …

By Junko Yoshida and George Leopold

What’s at stake:
So far, Apple’s leadership toward net-zero emissions is a mixture of sincere advocacy, lip service and marketing deflection. Even as it prescribes remedies to suppliers and partners, it must also heal itself.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited NXP Semiconductors at its Eindhoven headquarters.

This triggered a posting outburst by NXP’s social media team, including a photo of CEO Kurt Sievers with Cook posing near a workbench in what looks like a design/engineering room. NXP’s LinkedIn post called Cook’s visit “truly historic.”

Indeed, capturing Sievers and Cook together in a single frame was a “photo op” to make any corporate PR marketing team drool and apply adjectives like “historic.”

More historic, though, is the photo’s context.

Read More »Ask Not What Apple Net Zero Can Do For You …
AV Altruism

Autonomous Altruism

AV developers are driven by goals that aren’t exactly the same as what the rest of society want. It’s time to acknowledge that difference.

AV Technology Is Not s Bowl of Cherries.

AV Technology Is Not a Bowl of Cherries

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake: 
Cruise’s playbook has helped shatter public confidence in automated vehicles. We now wonder if there is a new playbook in the works – consisting of concrete actions – for every AV company so that they won’t make the same mistakes

Two days after the California DMV ordered it to suspend its San Francisco driverless taxi service, Cruise “proactively” bit the bullet and “paused” robotaxi operation nationally. 

Now Cruise is going to “take time to examine our processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust.”

Here’s hoping the company will put its commitment where its mouth is.

Read More »AV Technology Is Not a Bowl of Cherries
Arm Up, RISC-V Down, But The Real Loser Is x86

Arm Up, RISC-V Down, But The Real Loser Is x86

By Peter Clarke

What’s at stake:
Although application-specific processing and neural-network architectures are becoming more significant with each passing year, established microprocessor architectures and their support of specific software bases remain significant. They have fostered and dominate big consumer markets such as personal computing and mobile phones. The conventional wisdom is that, just as Arm – once agile and without legacy baggage – could come to rival the original processor pioneer architecture x86, the open-source RISC-V is going to do the same to the now less agile and more encumbered Arm architecture.

Last week was one of contrasting fortunes for the microprocessor architectures Arm and RISC-V.

Read More »Arm Up, RISC-V Down, But The Real Loser Is x86