Podcast: What’s Next for Microchip’s Steve Sanghi?
Steve Sanghi, Microchip and the semiconductor market have intertwined stories going back decades. That saga is not ending yet. The chip world can count on seeing more of Sanghi beyond Microchip.
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From ‘Smart’ to ‘Useful’ Sensors
What’s at stake?
Talk of edge AI, particularly machine learning, has captivated the IoT market. Yet, actual consumer products with local machine learning capabilities, are rare. Who’s ready to pull that off? Will it be a traditional MCU supplier or an upstart — like Useful Sensors?
Tech jargons like “smart home” and “smart sensor” have been overused to the point where real value that might be delivered by the related technologies reaches most non-techie consumers largely as fog.
Why, for instance, would any sensible person fiddle with apps, options and swipes on a smartphone to turn off the light when there’s a simple switch within reach?
Read More »From ‘Smart’ to ‘Useful’ Sensors
Qualcomm Envy Sparks Nvidia-MediaTek Deal
What’s at stake?
The partnership between MediaTek and Nvidia clarifies a gap in the automotive SoC platform. Missing are a unified software development environment and a hardware solution that can scale both up and down. Who has an argument and actual solutions good enough to convince undecided carmakers to adopt their platform?
The recent Nvidia-MediaTek deal to partner on automotive SoCs reveals the intensity of the rivalry among Qualcomm and other automotive chip companies. Nvidia’s move is a clear effort to catch up with Qualcomm.
It also indicates that many mainstream car OEMs haven’t picked sides on the next-generation automotive platform, opening an opportunity that MediaTek can’t afford to miss.
Read More »Qualcomm Envy Sparks Nvidia-MediaTek Deal
Advanced Packaging Holds Key to Chiplet Surge
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
Advanced semiconductor packaging are neither routine nor affordable. But if they were, the industry could experience the triggering of an avalanche of chiplets, allowing IP vendors to sell silicon, erase many of the advantages of rich design teams and disaggregate the IC supply chain.
Many dies in one package. This is getting to be the topic of the month in the industry. But there are several subjects interdigitated in this area, and they are rapidly getting tangled together. This article combs them out by examining three different but related topics: multiple dies in a package; advanced packaging and; chiplets.
Read More »Advanced Packaging Holds Key to Chiplet Surge
DeepX Founder Aspires to Be ‘Morris Chang of Korea’
What’s at stake?
Specsmanship – power efficiency, performance efficiency and support for a variety of algorithms – absolutely matters in assessing AI hardware. But what about accuracy loss that occurs when system companies port AI models, developed on GPU, to other types of hardware? This is DeepX’s niche.
Last week, Lokwon Kim, a founder of AI chip startup DeepX, entered a conference in Santa Clara, Calif. with swagger and audacity, fittingly — because DeepX was rolling out a family of AI accelerator chips that, Kim claimed, will deliver “AI everywhere, AI for everyone.”
Kim chose the Embedded Vision Summit for his coming-out party. DeepX grabbed the role of lead sponsor and secured a premium spot on the show floor — a marketing coup usually too expensive for startups.
Read More »DeepX Founder Aspires to Be ‘Morris Chang of Korea’
Obsolescence at BMW: Planned or Just Short-Sighted?
What’s at stake?
Running updated software properly in an existing vehicle sometimes demands a hardware upgrade — replacing, for example, a 3G modem with a 4G cellular modem. Are carmakers ready for this sort of mass retrofit?
Robert Hollingsworth is not happy with BMW. The German automaker declined to upgrade a 3G cellular modem in Hollingsworth’s BMW X5 after all major US cellular operators shut down the legacy network support in 2022.
Yet, the software-defined vehicles is the thing today, among many car OEMs.
Read More »Obsolescence at BMW: Planned or Just Short-Sighted?
What’s Sam Altman’s Game?
Enough with the handwringing, it’s time to shut down public access to AI
Inventory Quagmire: From JIT to JIC and now Just-too-Much
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Companies in the electronics supply chain piled on record inventory-related risks during the last semiconductor shortages. Even normally cautious component distributors joined in a race to meet clients’ needs. But inventories have since ballooned. And now, having tried just-in-time and just-in-case parts management systems, the industry must decide which of the two is optimal now that it has too much inventory.
It was time for bold supply chain actions. Huge profits and market share gains were at stake, so Arrow Electronics Inc., the world’s largest distributor, tossed out its conservative inventory acquisition rule book and racked up billions of dollars in non-cancellable components orders.
It was the new normal for an industry hard pressed to meet surging demand for components. But was it the most efficient solution?
Read More »Inventory Quagmire: From JIT to JIC and now Just-too-Much
Regressive AI
By David Benjamin
“Sgt. Schulz: How do you expect to win the war with an army of clowns?
“Lt. Dunbar: We sort of hope you’d laugh yourselves to death.”
—Sig Ruman and Don Taylor in Stalag 17
I can’t help but sympathize with the writers’ strike in Hollywood. The news is that the script writers and screenplay authors in the movie biz, as well as those who write copy and compose jingles for commercials, are spooked about the adoption — by the film, television and streaming industries — of “generative artificial intelligence (AI),” the clever technology that powers ChatGPT and its brethren.
AI apps that mimic human speech and writing and devise deceptively realistic photos and video are, by their nature and function, an affront to those of us who have put in years of miserably remunerative labor over notebooks and keyboards as we evolve into good writers.
On the other hand, we’re talking Hollywood, where the vast bulk of the writing, by order of the powers that be, is only sporadically — often accidentally — “good,” and might not even be anthropomorphically “generative.” How many sincere and gifted “content providers” are allowed, in the risk-averse, copycat culture of film and TV production, to be actually and palpably inventive?
Read More »Regressive AI
Podcast: Let’s Talk About AV Liability
William Widen, a professor of law, and Phil Koopman, an engineering professor, are proposing a new legal framework that rescues automated-vehicle (AV) accidents from the Black Hole of Liability.