Deep Learning, As You Know It, Will Never Be Good Enough to Trust
We’re running into a brick wall.
Featured
Microchip: Riding RISC-V All the Way to New FPGA Platform
By Junko Yoshida
What’s at stake:
RISC-V’s open-standard instruction set architecture has already proven an effective underlying technology for designers seeking differentiated microcontrollers/microprocessors. Will RISC-V find a new home in FPGAs? Microchip believes it has the answer.
Microchip is enjoying a market resurgence for its FPGA products.
Originally developed by Actel Corp., later acquired by Microsemi (October 2010), and now owned by Microchip (May 2018), the peripatetic FPGA is known for its immunity to single event upsets and for military-grade reliability. Those attributes have opened opportunities for Microchip’s FPGAs in avionics, military, and medical electronics markets.
Read More »Microchip: Riding RISC-V All the Way to New FPGA Platform
Examining Tesla’s Claim on Drastic SiC Reduction
We asked Yole Intelligence to analyze what Tesla’s claim entails and the future of the SiC market.
Love Has No Algorithm
By David Benjamin
“You’d be surprised how much time I spend explaining to my colleagues that the chief dangers of AI will not come from evil robots with red lasers coming out of their eyes.”
—Congressman (with a Master’s degree in AI) Jay Obernoite
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, the question that haunted the conventioneers, from engineers and marketing flacks to a seedy and asocial army of “influencers,” was “How do I talk to my washing machine?”
Read More »Love Has No Algorithm
Automation in Cars: Promises & Fallacies
Panelists will speak on the growing confusion over different SAE levels, regulatory and legal challenges, and consumer protection.
The Man Who Put Renesas Back on The Global IC Map
What’s at stake:
The founders of Renesas Electronics in 2010 had high hopes to make their company Japan’s flagship semiconductor supplier. Instead, Renesas lost its way. The life-or-death question for almost a decade has been, who could save Renesas and how he could pull it off. Has Renesas found its guy?
It has taken a generational change, an intrepid global view and exceptional financial savvy to breathe a new life into Renesas, Japan’s ailing chip company. In the most recent financial call, Hidetoshi Shibata, Renesas CEO, declared, “I believe Renesas is finally joining the ranks with global peers in the semiconductor industry.”
Read More »The Man Who Put Renesas Back on The Global IC Map
Renesas Aims High but Industry Cycle May Take a Toll
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake:
Renesas is aiming for much higher sales and market value by 2030. CEO Shibata believes the goals are achievable but becoming a $20 billion revenue enterprise with six times the capitalization may not depend solely on the company. The cyclical market will also have to play ball.
Prophesee’s Big Three: Sony, Qualcomm and Smartphones
What’s at stake:
The successful rollout of breakthrough technologies is often the raison d’être of startups. Yet, the more unfamiliar the technology, the tougher for a fledgling startup to get the world on board. So it has gone for Prophesee. Prophesee, nonetheless, is on the cusp of turning its event-based image sensor into mainstream image-capture features for smartphone cameras. The startup owes this progress to its two big partners. Sony put Prophesee through the wringer, forcing it to meet its stringent milestone schedule for event-based CMOS image sensor development. A new alliance with Qualcomm provides its Snapdragon platform to run Prophesee’s fusion software.
By teaming with Sony, the world’s largest CMOS image sensor company, and Qualcomm, which commands a 50-percent share of the mobile SoC market, Prophesee, a Paris-based startup, is finally finding a massive volume market for its unique event-based cameras in smartphones.
Read More »Prophesee’s Big Three: Sony, Qualcomm and Smartphones
Is That an AI in My Chip Design?
By Ron Wilson
What’s at Stake:
Advances in AI could change the way chips are designed, potentially slashing design time, engineering staffing, and risk. Or they could be a huge, expensive distraction. Either way, AI is attracting attention and investment in the chip-design community.
Ever since the explosive debut of ChatGPT, a cascade of punditry — with varying degrees of information and understanding — has told us that this changes everything about creative human activities. Given the enormous investment and risk going into chip design in the semiconductor industry, we need to ask just how advances in AI will affect electronic design automation (EDA) — the engine that makes chip design possible.
Read More »Is That an AI in My Chip Design?
Gauging ‘Reasonable Risk’ in ChatGPT
Since Open AI opened the door for anyone to play with ChatGPT last November, it seems as though the whole world can’t stop talking about it.
At the Ojo-Yoshida Report, Peter Clarke wrote a ChatGPT primer and declared it—despite its current idiosyncrasies — “an AI ‘babe in arms,’ destined to become far more capable and sophisticated.”
In contrast, Girish Mhatre, who penned “ChatGPT Will Eat Our Brains” for the Ojo-Yoshida Report, isn’t so sanguine. “The genie,” he cautioned, “is out of the bottle. Nothing will be the same again.” He suggests that OpenAI’s only responsible option is “to pull back, to restrict ChatGPT access to a trusted cadre of ‘tire kickers’ charged with probing every aspect of the product from a user point of view, for a year.”
Like everyone else, we’re probing both the intended and unintended consequences of generative AI.
Amidst this controversy, we recently had Missy Cummings as our podcast guest. Cummings is director of George Mason University’s Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Translational AI. She was one of the Navy’s first female “top gun” fighter pilots, flying an F/A-18 Hornet from 1988-1999.
Below is our conversation with Cummings on ChatGPT and generative AI, excerpted from our podcast.
Read More »Gauging ‘Reasonable Risk’ in ChatGPT