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Are Tsetlin Machines About to Reframe AI?

Audition, Featured

By Peter Clarke

What’s at stake:
Right now, AI/ML is most powerful driver of technology but there are already signs that its runaway success is unsustainable on energy consumption grounds. Can a novel technology from a startup open up new frontiers in the artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) sector and ultimately impact the leaders of the semiconductor industry?

AI has a problem: the energy it consumes. A UK startup called Literal Labs may have a radical solution.

The company reckons a mathematical curiosity called the Tsetlin machine could provide an approach to many AI applications that is up to 1,000-times faster than GPU-based training and up to 10,000-times more energy efficient than today’s neural networks. If such efficiencies can be deployed while fitting into the established technology ecosystem, it could disrupt market leaders and enable AI at the edge, which has largely been stalled up until this point.

Where Jensen Went Wrong on Thomas Edison vs. AI

Where Nvidia’s Huang Went Wrong on Thomas Edison vs. AI

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
In Silicon Valley, power prevails. In the short run, if your business and technology have the power to make money, move the market, and change the rules, you won’t even be criticized when you’re wrong. But no business is future-proof, especially if its power depends on a resource — namely electricity — facing increased scarcity.

The Bay Area just finished a week-long AI party, talking up advancements like Nvidia’s new supersized AI chips and the simulation and software tools, developed by companies such as Ansys and Synopsys, that enabled them.

The tech community is blithely comparing the anticipated spread of AI to electricity that everyone nowadays takes for granted.

Executives like to style themselves as creators of a brand-new industry, similar to the electrification wave that accelerated the Industrial Revolution.

What Will Nvidia Do for an Encore?

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

Nvidia Corp.’s stratospheric sales growth and lofty stock valuation cannot mask its vulnerability to the semiconductor industry’s roiling and disruptive dynamics. The company now has targets on its back from rivals and even some customers smarting from the elevated pricing of its products. Can Nvidia string together a multi-year, unbroken grip on the AI market and break new ground to maintain its enviable performance?

Jensen Huang should be getting tired of posing for pictures.

At GTC2024, Nvidia’s GPU technology conference in San Jose, Calif., Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Monday, delivered his keynote speech in a rock-concert setting to an audience of more than 10,000 people — a record turnout for the annual event. Enthralled by Huang, many of them, including trade and mainstream journalists, made a beeline for the keynote and giddily took selfies with him.

There is no bigger celebrity in the semiconductor world today than Huang. Even other CEOs in the electronics industry are enamored with him.

“He is a giant-rock star,” said Sassine Ghazi, president and CEO of electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor IP supplier Synopsys Inc., speaking Wednesday at SNUG (Synopsys User Group) in Santa Clara, his company’s annual event for chip designers. Huang, an invited speaker at SNUG, swiftly returned the compliment when he joined Ghazi on the stage. “Synopsys is the most consequential company in our industry today,” Huang said. “Without Synopsys tools we will not be able to do what we do.”

Oculi’s ‘Software-Defined’ Vision Sensor Is Fresh and Foreign

Audition, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Before founding Oculi, Charbel Rizk was a designer of autonomous systems frustrated with computer vision systems available on the market. Traditional sensors, often built for human consumption, produce massive volumes of data, which result in systems needing more bandwidth and suffering from increased latency. Can Rizk convince other systems designers to embrace Oculi’s new vision architecture originally developed to fulfill Rizk’s own wish list?

Oculi, a Baltimore, Maryland startup, offshoot of a Johns Hopkins University research team, has developed a vision technology architecture in which sensing and processing both reside at the pixel level. The company calls it Sensing and Processing Unit (SPU).

Charbel Rizk, Oculi’s founder and CEO said in a recent interview with the Ojo-Yoshida Report, “My claim to the world is that we will always enable the lowest power, bandwidth, latency and ultimately cost computer vision solution with privacy.”

This is big talk among the many players in sensing and processing, all of them pursuing ultimate edge AI solutions in a broad range of embedded systems.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Silicon Carbide

Featured, Opinion

By George Leopold

The power semiconductor material silicon carbide seemed poised for a different sort of band-gap leap in recent weeks as developers again touted SiC’s potential role in addressing skyrocketing electricity demand. That demand will only grow as sprawling data centers take on more energy-intensive AI workloads.

We were expecting to hear more about the promise of SiC technology and new applications this week from a key developer, Onsemi. Hours before we were to be briefed on its strategy, the chip maker based in Scottsdale, Ariz., abruptly postponed its announcement that appeared to be tied to a co-located event with AI chip giant Nvidia. No word on when Onsemi will reschedule its SiC platform announcement.

Tech Vision: Synopsys ‘Evolves’ to Thrive

Featured, Podcast

Synopsys sets its sights on expanding from silicon to system design

MicroLED Displays Can Survive the Apple Blow

Featured, Opinion

By Peter Clarke

Late last month, Ams Osram AG (Unterpremstatten, Austria) sent out a press release saying that “a cornerstone project underpinning its microLED strategy got unexpectedly cancelled today,” thus prompting the company “to reassess its microLED strategy.” That triggered an avalanche of speculations that Apple may have just killed off the prospects for microLED technology.

I argue that Apple’s move has not killed those prospects off entirely. Ams Osram and a number of microLED startups have been undermined by Apple’s change of mind and must now adjust to a slower-moving environment.

Silicon Box Brings Advanced Packaging to Europe

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Less than a year after the launch of its first chiplet foundry in Singapore, Silicon Box is setting its sights on northern Italy to open another advanced panel-level packaging foundry with a $3.6 billion (€3.2 billion) investment. Is the startup overreaching?

Sehat Sutardja, his wife Weili Dai, along with Byung Joon (BJ) Han, three co-founders of the startup Silicon Box, unveiled their plan in Milan this week, accompanied by Adolfo Urso, Italian Minister of Enterprises and the “Made in Italy” initiative.

The move reflects Silicon Box’s push for global expansion, coupled with Italy’s long-standing efforts to attract investment from technology companies.

The Electronics Supply Chain Is (Still) a Hot Mess

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

The electronics industry’s cycles cannot be controlled but they don’t also have to be as devastating as they have been in the past or even now. The industry is failing the credibility test by the unbridled response to upcycles and downcycles, which often lay the foundation for the future occurrence of problems being corrected. For an industry that makes precision equipment for others, this is a distinct black eye.

The electronics supply chain is in shambles. Again.

The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) projects IC revenues will increase 13 percent this year, reversing the drop from 2023. Look closely, though, and the market reality is disheartening and perplexing.

The story here is nuanced. Supply chain demons, unchained, lurk in the wings. Rather than grapple with its anomalies – top of which is demand-supply disequilibrium – industry executives are looking beyond the recent shortages and sales slowdown to clamber atop one another in a rush to embrace artificial intelligence, the current growth driver.

But what about the forecast inaccuracies, unrealistic orders, capacity utilization challenges, mismatched capex budgets vs. “real” production need that have bedeviled the electronics market for decades? These issues have not disappeared, and no amount of AI-fueled recovery will keep them from wreaking havoc on the industry within another short period of time.

How Could Software-Defined Vehicles Go Wrong?

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
The first order of business in discussing Software-Defined Vehicle is to define it, clearly. What is it? More important, what do carmakers plan to do with SDVs? Too many marketers are abusing the terminology to push their own self-serving agenda.

General Motors last week announced resumption of sales of its Chevrolet Blazer EV, whose software quality issues forced suspension of deliveries in December.

When a carmaker like GM says its fixes are now delivered by software updates, the message to the general public is “Don’t worry. This is no big deal.”

However, GM’s Blazer EV stop-sale was a huge deal.