By Peter Norton
Technology companies like Mobileye say their high-definition (HD) digital maps can make our roads safer. But it’s up to the rest of us to ensure that they really do.
Read More »If HD Maps Make Driving Safer, They May Make Walking More Dangerous
Pat Gelsinger certainly scored a choice seat at President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union Address. The Intel Corp. CEO was seated a row in front of First Lady Jill Biden, giving Gelsinger some “run” during a nationally-televised event.
Intel and its rivals are dispatching legions of lobbyists to DC, all circling a $52-billion honey pot authorized by Congress for semiconductor R&D. Makers of chips and laws are anxiously awaiting congressional action to fully fund the CHIPS for America Act.
Read More »CHIPS Act: Feeding Frenzy Begins
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Semiconductor sales forecasts for 2022 were calculated before war broke out in Ukraine and the West slapped economic sanctions on Russia. That makes the forecasts highly unreliable for capital expenditure, supply chain and other enterprise planning.
We know that humans and machines can coexist. They’ve been doing it for centuries. But the key to this harmony is knowing what machines can—or can’t — do, and defining the human role in this equation.
In the world of autonomous driving, I see society teetering above a slippery slope. On the one hand, transparency about AV capabilities is decreasing. A California Superior Court ruling last week allows Waymo to treat certain safety-related crash data as trade secrets. On the other hand, human drivers are growing both more complacent and more confused about their responsibilities in highly but not fully automated vehicles.
Read More »A Blurred Line: AV Capability and Human Responsibility
By Adele Hars
What’s at stake?
A new crop of startups like Innoscience and Navitas dominates the soon-to-be billion-dollar power-GaN market. Fast chargers for mobile phones are the drivers, with a 70 percent CAGR. Electric vehicles (EV), renewables and data centers are next – but they’re in the sites of the old guard. Will the upstarts make the transition?
What’s at stake?
The number of new data centers being built is outpacing incremental efforts at energy efficiency. As big-data applications scale workloads, cloud service providers and other hyperscalers can barely keep up with pandemic-driven demand for computing, storage and analytics. In the last quarter alone, the cloud sector is estimated to have grown by more than $50 billion. The data center business model of seemingly endless construction of server farms consuming ever-greater amounts of power is unsustainable.
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
As use of the Web grows more intense — think of the difference between searching for a nice cat video vs. entering an immersive virtual-reality experience — and the demand spreads through the developing world, a rapid proliferation of huge cloud data centers is likely. But the energy consumption and environmental impacts of data centers could bring big and unwelcome changes to infrastructure, climate and quality of life as data centers spread into countries already challenged by power generation, water shortages and a warming climate.
Refreshed by new blood on its senior executive team, Codasip, touting itself as “one of the top three, credible RISC-V companies,” is reintroducing itself. Spun out of its founder’s PhD thesis and decade-long research on how best to design new and better CPUs, Codasip is today a full-fledged RISC-V company, hot on the heels of RISC-V market leaders SiFive and Andes Technology.
Read More »As RISC-V Catches Tailwinds, Codasip Refreshes Ambition
What’s at stake?
The pendulum is swinging back to a vertical-integration business model among system companies in smartphone and datacenter markets. Carmakers, which have long depended on Tier Ones to design various ECU boxes for adding features, will be next. Do these OEMs have the will, capital, talent and corporate culture to design big, differentiated SoCs for their next-generation vehicles internally?
By Bolaji Ojo
The collapse last week of Nvidia Corp.’s proposed acquisition of semiconductor IP vendor Arm Plc surprised very few, but it still left us with (too) many questions, most of them unanswerable.
How did Nvidia wobble into such a quagmire and how can the industry avoid such in future? Nvidia paid a hefty price for the unconsummated deal. The company lost its $1.25 billion deposit, drew the ire of competitors and some of its own OEM customers, and injected unnecessary controversy into its operations. Nvidia will recover from the negative impacts of the deal and may have reaped some benefits, but was the plan worth the wasted time and resources?
Read More »Nvidia Bid for Arm: Was It Just a Lark?
