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Foundry Dreams Spotlighted at Intel-Palooza

Foundry Dreams Spotlighted at Intel-Palooza

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
“Intel Foundry Day” was described by one executive as a “coming out party” to burnish the image of Intel Corp.’s foundry enterprise. This isn’t Intel’s first crack at wooing customers into its foundry. The thing is this: beyond building new fabs around the world, has Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger done enough to prove that his ‘IDM 2.0’ strategy for manufacturing, innovation and product leadership is also working for customers?

By lining up big guns like U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as “Foundry Day” speakers, Intel highlighted its power to pull strings and issue a reminder that it remains a heavyweight in the global semiconductor industry.

To establish itself as a credible, independent foundry, however, Intel must go beyond pageantry. 

Read More »Foundry Dreams Spotlighted at Intel-Palooza
Arm Doubles Down on AI, Chiplets With Neoverse Update

Arm Doubles Down on AI, Chiplets With Neoverse Update

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:

The artificial intelligence market is poised to be a top economic growth driver, and everyone wants a piece of the business. By updating its Neoverse IP to address AI and chiplets, Arm is moving to solidify its formidable position in the semiconductor design process. Global hyperscalers are already using Arm’s Neoverse, but the IP vendor is taking no chances. Will Neoverse CSS V3 and Neoverse CSS N3 help push Arm deeper into the AI market?

Arm Holdings Plc has unveiled updated versions of its Neoverse intellectual property for the semiconductor industry, aiming the two offerings directly at the artificial intelligence market with the goal of a the tighter embrace with its current customers and others exploring options in the fast-growing sector.

With Neoverse CSS N3 and Neoverse CSS V3, both updates on the earlier versions (dubbed CSS N2 and CSS V2, respectively), Arm is plunging headfirst into two of the hottest segments of the semiconductor world – AI and chiplets.

Read More »Arm Doubles Down on AI, Chiplets With Neoverse Update
Glazed with AI, Arm Market Value, Soar and Soar

Glazed with AI, Arm Market Value Soars

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:

Few companies have had as tangled a history as Nvidia Corp. and Arm Holdings, both of which have seen their valuations skyrocket on surging demand for artificial intelligence hardware, software and intellectual property. The only challenge for Arm lies in whether its growing list of AI customers would be similarly able to turn the company’s IP into huge windfalls. If not, a retreat in valuation could occur as suddenly as rapidly as the ascent of its shares.

It turns out Softbank Group has reasons worth billions of dollars to appreciate M&A regulators.

Arm Holdings, the once wholly-owned subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate, has turned into one of the most valuable properties in Softbank’s portfolio, courtesy of the buzz around artificial intelligence.

Read More »Glazed with AI, Arm Market Value Soars
As AI Challenges Chipmakers, EDA Must Up the Ante

As AI Challenges Chipmakers, EDA Must Up the Ante

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Whether foundry, processor IP company, or EDA vendor, practically every major player in the electronics industry is scrambling to adapt its business strategies, product lines and roadmaps to exploit the explosive growth of AI. What does the AI community want from EDA and who among EDA tool suppliers can rise to the occasion?

Everyone in the electronics industry wants to surf the AI wave. Just discussing AI is good business. Wall Street is listening.

More significantly, AI has begun breaking traditional business models and tech development practices. To process AI, hardware must be able to handle massive software workloads. AI chips/accelerators also typically require huge designs.

Read More »As AI Challenges Chipmakers, EDA Must Up the Ante
Chiplets: If It Happens in China, Will It Stay in China?

Chiplets: If It Happens in China, Will It Stay in China? 

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
China’s chiplet aspirations are well known. But will China use its domestic chiplet activities as an opportunity to decouple from the rest of the world? We think the reality is contrary.

Chiplets represent a once-in-a-lifetime revolution that will allow the semiconductor world to disaggregate the processes of designing, manufacturing, testing and packaging silicon – the fundamental matter who does what. China wants to seize this moment to play a big role in this new world order.

Read More »Chiplets: If It Happens in China, Will It Stay in China? 
Intel Tackles an Old Nemesis with Little Room for Errors

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
Amir Panush Writes Ceva's Next Growth Chapter

CEO Panush Writes Ceva’s Next Growth Chapter

By Junko Yoshida

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 Pixel Architecture Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light

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