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Avalanche of AV Bills Slams U.S. State Legislatures

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Autonomous vehicle companies are rushing to get laws on the books allowing them to test their driverless vehicles on public roads. Few states have held public hearings on these proposals, and even fewer have included stakeholders in the discourse.

Autonomous-vehicle (AV) companies are marching through the states, both red and blue, fiercely advancing new legislation that will pave the way for automated driving. While the bills vary slightly, their agenda is uniform: to secure a free pass for companies to mobilize and test their highly automated vehicles — without human drivers — on public roads, with few safety questions asked and precious few legal and financial strings.

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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger

CHIPS Act: Feeding Frenzy Begins

By George Leopold

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.

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what autonomous vehicles see

A Blurred Line: AV Capability and Human Responsibility

By Junko Yoshida 

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.

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Data Center Alley in Virginia

The Data Center Boom is Unsustainable

By George Leopold

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.

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Server racks in data centers

Data Center Energy Puzzle

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.

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Rupert Baines

As RISC-V Catches Tailwinds, Codasip Refreshes Ambition

By Junko Yoshida

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
Ford Semiconductors

Will Ford Build Ford Semiconductors?

By Junko Yoshida

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?

Read More »Will Ford Build Ford Semiconductors?