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highway driving

L3 Cars: Unsafe at Any Speed?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The automotive industry is opening another can of worms with its push for hands-free driving. Some argue a traffic jam pilot system — hands-free driving in steady highway traffic (60km per hour) — might be safely deployed. Perhaps. But what if a car had to stop suddenly in traffic because a human driver did not respond promptly to the car’s takeover request? Carmakers are sliding their definition of hands-free driving, hoping to deploy to higher speed motorways and city streets. Innovations are welcomed, but where are the safeguards?

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Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot

Let Go of the Wheel, But Watch Your Back

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The auto industry is promoting hands-free highway driving as the next best thing to self-driving cars. But is it, really? In the aviation industry, it’s widely known that even well-trained professional pilots experience “mode confusion,” when there is a shift in the balance of driver control versus automation. At issue here is carmakers’ rigorous system engineering. The auto industry must prove that conditional automation will not place human drivers at risk.

Leading carmakers are increasingly infatuated with “hands-free” driving, a phenomenon that reveals their fascination with automation for automation’s sake. The hands-free push is another step along the path to the automakers’ perpetually promised, but still undelivered, vision of highways teeming with fully autonomous vehicles.

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African entrepreneurship redefined to include investors, female entrepreneurs, tech ecosystems

Fostering Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa

What’s at stake?
Across the continent, a growing entrepreneurial community stands ready to ensure that Africa doesn’t miss out on the transformational benefits of the digital economy. It’s incumbent on government, business, and educational institutions to support their efforts.

By Fred Ohwahwa

The Digital Age has arrived in Africa, as evidenced by rising mobile penetration and usage figures for widely adopted social networking and communications applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp. From small businesses to large, the young to the elderly, rural areas to the urban centers, digitization is gradually becoming a way of life on the continent.

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Everyone who can afford it is signing extended pay-to-play commitments with draconian terms

Semiconductor Purchase Obligations Surge in Length, Cost, Complexity, and Risk

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

Ironclad semiconductor purchase commitments are now heavily favored by chipmakers and foundries seeking to spread the financial burden of IC production, but the rigid terms of the often-lengthy contracts could spell trouble for everyone if market conditions change.

Leading electronics manufacturers and semiconductor suppliers are signing ironclad, multibillion-dollar supply contracts as they struggle with unprecedented shortages and a spike in average selling prices for components and raw materials. The contracts terms typically require the prepayment of huge sums in multiyear commitments, further widening the sourcing gap between the industry’s biggest and richest enterprises and their smaller competitors.

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SiC laser cut boules

Laser-Cutting the Cost of Silicon Carbide Wafers

By Adele Hars

What’s at stake:
Investors are hot on the silicon carbide market, but the high cost of the wafers is an impediment to high volumes. Halo Industries, a startup just coming out of stealth mode, claims it has a solution that saves on the time, cost, and energy required to slice the SiC boules (ingots) into wafers. It’s got a big client and strong funding, but it has an unusual business strategy and is up against some much bigger players. Will Halo be able to scale to high volume fast enough to beat the competition?

Silicon carbide wafers are extremely expensive — anywhere from 20 to 50 times pricier than silicon. The drivers of the cost differential begin at the very beginning, with the weeks that the starting SiC boules spend in furnaces that are almost half as hot as the sun. The inefficiencies mount as the boules are cut with diamond wire saws, wherein up to 40% of the boule ends up as waste (or the more technical term, kerf), in the form of SiC dust lost in the sawing process. Yields are terrible, and the sawing process takes hours per wafer. Andrei Iancu, CEO and founder of Halo Industries, told the Ojo-Yoshida Report that his company’s laser systems are intended to replace saws, virtually eliminating waste and improving yield quality.

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Valeo Lidar's production

Valeo Sits Atop Lidar Market – So Far

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Sorting out hype from reality is critical when it comes to automotive lidars. At stake for auto OEMs is selecting the appropriate sensors for ADAS and AV applications, and determining which vendors they can count on to deliver.

In an automotive lidar market crowded with startups touting new technologies and claimed design wins, it may come as a surprise that the most dominant lidar supplier in the world is Valeo, a stodgy French Tier One behemoth with a history that spans nearly a century.

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China Eastern crash 737-800 Boeing

China Crash Shrouded in Mystery

By George Leopold

What’s at stake?
Scarce flight data and Beijing’s clampdown on crash information are likely to hamper the investigation into why a China Eastern Airlines flight suddenly nosedived into the ground.

The mystery deepens over precisely what transpired in the cockpit of China Eastern Airlines Flight MU5735 in the moments before the Boeing 737-800 plunged more than 20,000 feet in just over a minute on Monday, before crashing in China’s mountainous Guangxi region.

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AMD Xilinx FPGA

AMD/Xilinx: Chipmakers Bulk Up as AIoT Cycle Heats Up 

Editor’s note: This is the final installment in our series examining AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx and what it means for the evolving FPGA market.

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?
New computing architectures are being imagined and explored by the biggest players in the semiconductor industry, marking the acceleration of an emerging technology cycle that could put as much as two-thirds of the $600 billion market within their reach. AMD’s acquisition of FPGA powerhouse Xilinx makes it a more viable competitor in this new world.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s acquisition of Xilinx Inc. closed in February, bringing the era of the large independent FPGA vendor to a close. It also heralds a new dawn of technology integration, the possible emergence of a new CPU-GPU architecture, and the stiffening of competition among the industry’s largest chip vendors.

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