What’s at stake?
Ayar Labs, a startup focused on optical chip-to-chip interconnections, is gathering investors and semiconductor industry partners, including Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Nvidia. Might its collaborators’ disparate demands for customization overstretch the startup’s engineering team?
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
As new fabrication techniques and design tools emerge, the bandwidth, latency and energy-efficiency advantages of silicon photonics move closer to delivering data-driven applications and services. Researchers are pursuing multiple paths to deployment, with specific applications perhaps determining how best to harness light to connect chip components and computing platforms.
What’s at stake?
The need for speed and bandwidth is driving advances in silicon photonics. An ecosystem is coalescing around the light-based interconnects, with startups emerging to push the technology as established players like Intel scale transceivers and related photonic components. Leveraging current chip design and fabrication processes will be key to unleashing an anticipated Cambrian explosion of photonics-driven applications.
Momentum is building among key traffic-safety stakeholders to address the alarming uptick in U.S. fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists.
Read More »Pedestrian Rights Move to the Forefront in Traffic Safety Report
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
With inflation rising globally, and amid concerns that central bankers’ countermeasures will hobble growth, the massive inventory buildup over the past year could prove problematic for the electronics industry. But the closer working relationships that OEMs, chipmakers and distributors cultivated during the supply-chain crisis could help ensure a soft landing as inventories are drawn down.
What’s at stake?
Simply cramming a mess of new, automated features into cars is hardly an automotive safety panacea. A more likely remedy is the U.S. traffic-safety agency’s proposed updates on a New Car Assessment Program. At issue is road safety for everyone, both inside and outside the vehicles, including pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.
By Peter Norton
When you can finally ride the D.C. Metro’s Silver Line to Washington Dulles Airport, you’ll have car drivers to thank. They helped finance it. To get to the electrified and less car-dependent future that the climate emergency demands of us, we need revenues from road users to generate more transport choices, not more roads. Yet 20th-century legacies and distracting technology hype lie in the way. Metro’s example is both an inspiration and a warning.
Read More »Why Drivers Should Fund Rail
What’s at stake?
High-profile technology investors are leaning on lawmakers, hoping to shake loose federal funding to revive U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. With negotiations on industry subsidies stalled, these influencers could tip the scales toward more federal funding for domestic manufacturers.
What’s at stake?
There is, indeed, a growing acceptance that big-brain chip suppliers – Nvidia, Qualcomm and Intel/Mobileye – have already won the architecture battle for highly automated vehicles. Does that mean traditional automotive chip companies have surrendered? To the contrary. They still seem to be scheming for new angles to keep themselves relevant or beat rivals. Where in this turmoil will NXP’s new real-time automotive processors fit?
What’s at stake?
The measure of success for an open-source community such as RISC-V can be memberships, number of shipped products or revenues generated by its member companies. But just as significant is the number of specs ratified within the community. This matters because specs form the groundwork for members’ technical advancements, engagements with developers and future adoption of the technologies involved.
