Podcast: Western EV Battery Strategy Starts with Final Assembly
Author Charles Murray argues the West must build up its battery assembly lines to confront China’s dominance.
Featured
Ethernet Switches: Marvell’s Ticket to Automotive
By Junko Yoshida
What’s at stake:
For more than a decade, the automotive industry has known the day is imminent for an inevitable change in its in-vehicle network backbone from Controller Area Network (CAN) to Ethernet. Now, more than ever, carmakers know they must cross the chasm. Marvell is showing how.
Car companies must sink or swim in a tempest turbulent with big changes in the technologies they use and the business models they pursue.
Read More »Ethernet Switches: Marvell’s Ticket to Automotive
AI Rivalry Heats up, But Catching Nvidia Won’t Be Easy
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Catching up with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence market will not be easy but many in the high-tech world are determined to try. Chipmakers are leading the calvary. Hyperscalers, OEMs and others aren’t far behind. They’ve got their work cut out for them.
12 years ago, Nvidia Corp. placed a huge wager on artificial intelligence (AI). Payday came recently in the form of a historic valuation on Wall Street.
But the company had barely a week to celebrate its new status as the world’s most valuable semiconductor company before it became clear it will have its hands full defending its position in the AI market.
Read More »AI Rivalry Heats up, But Catching Nvidia Won’t Be Easy
Apple’s Display Tech Choice in Vision Pro
What’s at stake:
Displays inside Apple’s Vision Pro are based on Micro-OLED, most likely made by Sony, not the microLED technology in which Apple has invested decades of work and capital. What has gone wrong?
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.
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?