Featured

What Happens If China Blocks Intel’s Tower Deal?

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By Peter Clarke

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For want of a rider, the message was lost.
For want of a message, the battle was lost.
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Intel has dreams of being the world’s second largest foundry by 2030. Those are big dreams indeed, with geopolitical overtones, but without taking the first step along that road – the acquisition of Tower Semiconductor Ltd. – it could all come to nothing.

And if China blocks Intel’s takeover of Tower, it could potentially upend the U.S. chip giant’s foundry aspirations. It could even compel Intel to abandon chipmaking and follow AMD down the path of being a fabless processor vendor.

OEMs, Tier Ones, Chip Vendors Scramble for ADAS Edge

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
As vehicles grow more connected and automated, a wave of new chip companies are setting up shop within the automotive sector. But with greater emphasis on vehicles with driver-assist features, the demand for cutting-edge automotive SoC designs, as well as chip vendors’ relationships with the automotive supply chain, is rapidly changing.

The auto industry’s hard shift to ADAS has forced automotive chip suppliers to follow suit, altering their marketing pitches for computing-intensive central processors in vehicles. The annual derby over on “Tera-Operations Per Second (TOPS)” for vehicle CPUs/GPUs was no longer evident this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The focus has shifted to scalability in CPU/domain controllers.

Feeding a Hungry World With Precision Farming

Featured, News & Analysis

By George Leopold

What’s at stake:
The amount of arable land on the earth is shrinking — and food insecurity is growing — as the number of humans the planet must support approaches 10 billion. Proponents of precision agriculture say the technology can reduce world hunger by producing more food, fiber and fuel using fewer resources.

The digitization of agriculture has advanced beyond GPS-guided tractors to the precise planting of seeds and application of fertilizers and herbicides — precision sufficient to pinpoint a single plant or weed in a thousand-acre field.

BMW Fiasco: Failed Testing, Verification, Validation of AI-Driven ADAS

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
If you think a faulty sensor triggered a BMW to automatically accelerate to 110mph on a U.K. country road, think again. The problem is systemic. The incident exposes the inability of many carmakers to understand the relationship among individual modules to ensure system-level safety.

By now, we hope a Sunday Times of London report, BMW cruise control ‘took over and tried to reach 110mph‘, has become required reading for every system engineer developing AI-embedded ADAS vehicles, and for consumers eager to embrace automated vehicle features. The story’s alarming subhead reads, “A motorist was sent hurtling over the limit when his car’s technology misread signs.”

Optimzing HUD for My Buddy, the Car

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Carmakers are pitching more automated features consumers as “driver assist.” With many active safety functions, cars aren’t actaully assisting drivers. Rather, they are making decisions and acting autonomously. How, then, can humans read a vehicle’s intentions? Are head-up displays the best human-machine interface?

The BMW Group’s keynote during last week’s CES 2023 included a talking car used to demonstrate how the vehicle can change its paint job—coated with E Ink—with up to 32 different colors matching a driver’s emotional state.

Robotic Vehicle Proponents Have Hit the Skids

Featured, Opinion

What machines lack is the necessary ability to successfully interact with humans on public roads.

Chipmakers Face Another Year of Geopolitical Rifts

Conversation, Featured

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Geopolitical issues continue to pose serious challenges to the semiconductor industry and the fallout will continue in 2023. Pushed into a corner by stiff sanctions, China will be more motivated to wean itself off Western technology. This may cause an irreversible decoupling of the chip supply chain with significant implications.

China will fall short of its vaunted goal of self-sufficiency in technology production by 2025. Face with stiff economic sanctions, Beijing will accelerate plans to liberate itself from the Western-led semiconductor supply chain, according to veteran industry watcher Jean-Christophe Eloy.

The ‘Smart’ Home: If It Only Had a Brain

Bulletin, Featured

By David Benjamin

Once upon a time at the Consumer Electronics Show, the “smart home” was all the rage and just around the corner. It exploited a host of new technologies and launched great expectations for household convenience and connectivity. It was promoted and celebrated at CES in veritable floor shows on the show floor.

That was then. Now, in a panel discussion last week, six smart-home analysts enumerated the hitches and glitches that have kept most homes stubbornly stupid—or at least blissfully ignorant—for decades.

Expert panel on 'The Spinning Wheel of Technology – On the Road to Trusted Mobility,' hosted by Veoneer

CES Robocar Panel: ‘Humans Are in the Loop’

Bulletin, Featured, Partner Content

By David Benjamin

Call CES 2023 the Consumer Electronics Show of deferred dreams, during which some of high-tech’s loftiest aspirations seem to have hit a snag.

Thursday morning at the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center offered a vivid example of this theme, when a panel of automotive safety experts agreed that the dreamt-of era of autonomous vehicles (AV) is years away, a judgment rooted in the thorny issues of “how safe is safe” and how to get a partly, mostly or “fully” self-driving car to get along with the human “driver” inside.

Veoneer hosted the expert panel on “The Spinning Wheel of Technology – On the Road to Trusted Mobility.”

Research Chief Touts ‘Metaverse of Things’ at CES

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By David Benjamin

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) is bullish on the “Metaverse,” a coinage and concept upon which Facebook (now Meta) creator Mark Zuckerberg has gambled his reputation.

In the opening session at CES 2023 in Las Vegas Wednesday (Jan. 4), the CTA’s vice president for research, Steve Koenig, trumpeted his organization’s support for the still-embryonic Metaverse, calling it a “real trend” with potential applications for business strategy. He called it a “next generation of the Internet” that will evolve into a “Metaverse of Things” (MoT?).

“The Metaverse is closer than you think,” proclaimed Koenig.