Cruise Crash Walkthrough Analysis
Phil Koopman’s stellar one-hour walkthrough of what happened at the Cruise Robotaxi crash on Oct. 2, 2023.
Featured
Can AVs ‘Understand’? The Case of the Vanishing Pedestrian
Please, let’s stop calling Autonomous Vehicles “smart.” A new AV might be equipped with superior sensors and more powerful processors, but none of these can make its perception and predictions any more accurate, unless programmed to do so.
Chiplet Mission: Navigate Interconnect Complexity
What’s at stake
Chiplets present a set of multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional technology and business problems with no one-size-fits-all answer. Numerous startups are proposing various solutions to tackle the complexity of die-to-die interconnects.
For every player in the semiconductor supply chain – from chip designers and EDA tool vendors to semiconductor foundries, OSAT companies and the Babel of technology startups – the toughest challenge, arguably, boils down to how to connect chiplets.
Fortunately, startups such as Eliyan, Blue Cheetah and YorChip are poised to tackle the issues, each in its own way.
Read More »Chiplet Mission: Navigate Interconnect Complexity
Intel Tackles an Old Nemesis with Little Room for Errors
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Intel has a comprehensive restructuring and recovery plan, but it is also being dogged by a self-created problem: low capacity utilization. It’s a hydra-headed challenge with conflicting solutions. By constructing new fabs, Intel adds to its fab-loading headache but not doing this will hobble the company’s competitiveness in the foundry business upon which its foundry future is now hinged. Will becoming a foundry for other foundries solve this problem?
Intel Corp.’s ongoing fab addition and expansion plan could potentially become a hugely profitable and restorative move or a major financial disaster.
And it all boils down to a simple but dreaded phrase: capacity utilization rate.
Whether Intel succeeds with its IDM 2.0 plan comes down to a single question: Will the chipmaker find enough customers for its foundry business and boost sales in its traditional business to push capacity utilization rate over currently low levels and above the strongly margin-boosting 80 percent rate?
Read More »Intel Tackles an Old Nemesis with Little Room for Errors
Interconnecting Chiplets: A Many-Layered Challenge
The Ojo-Yoshida Report podcast series Dig Deeper—Chiplets interviews Tony Mastroianni of Siemens.
CEO Panush Writes Ceva’s Next Growth Chapter
What’s at stake:
Ceva CEO Amir Panush has his work cut out for him. The DSP powerhouse’s growth was built on the industry’s standards-based high-quality IP. Now, Panush has to chart a new course as a pure-play IP company in a rough-and-tumble ‘Smart Edge’ market that’s still emerging and very fragmented. The odds are getting tougher.
Decades ago, Ceva took the cellular communication market by storm by licensing its DSP cores to clients who needed to design baseband processors for mobile phones and base stations.
The Israeli company thus emerged as a DSP powerhouse, as the worldwide demand for cellular phones kept soaring.
Ceva’s next step, in the mid-2000’s, however, had an even bigger impact. It struck gold in 2014 by acquiring RivieraWaves, a private company based in France. The French company provided wireless connectivity IP for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies – which do not depend on Ceva’s DSP. This acquisition became a new growth engine for the Israeli company.
Read More »CEO Panush Writes Ceva’s Next Growth Chapter
Waveguide Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light
By Peter Clarke
The IMEC research institute presented a development at the recent International Electron Devices Meeting that could be part of a game-changing new wave in image sensors.
It is well-known that memory and logic designers have wrestled with problems as circuit complexity has increased while planar geometry scaling has hit limits. The same is true, although for different reasons, for the CMOS image sensor.
Read More »Waveguide Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light
Chiplets: What Lies Below?
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake:
One of the most important issues — and one of the least discussed — in creating multi-die systems is the substrate technology. There are several roads into the future, going in different directions. But one of them holds unique promise.
Much of the current excitement about chiplets tends to overlook an important point. Every multi-die system-in-package rests — quite literally — on a substrate. The characteristics of that substrate influence everything about the finished system, from the architecture to the cost to the likelihood of it ever reaching customers.
Read More »Chiplets: What Lies Below?
If Nvidia Is AI Hardware’s Goliath, Where’s David?
What’s at stake?
Lop-sided wins by a few companies have become the norm in certain segments of the semiconductor industry, specifically Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in the foundry business and Nvidia in the AI chip market. Armed with unfair advantages they have created for themselves, these two giants leave little room for competitors to operate.
How did the industry let it happen?
Read More »If Nvidia Is AI Hardware’s Goliath, Where’s David?
Vegas Falcons Patrol the Sphere
Lately, when the physical world poses a problem, the first instinct of the Silicon Valley mind is to respond, “Oh, there’s a technology to fix that.”
Throwing more tech at the flaws in technology is a malaise not new, but increasingly prevalent in recent times.
For sure, there are technologies that can solve technology problems. But we often forget that there are effective alternatives that don’t require the services of an EE, or even an electrician.
Or electricity.
I was reminded of this humble truth during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Read More »Vegas Falcons Patrol the Sphere