What’s at stake?
Vehicle electrification helped push silicon carbide (SiC) out of labs and into systems, making SiC a commercially viable alternative to silicon-based power electronics. Some high-profile names have played key roles in that transition, but it may be too early for any company to claim victory in the evolving SiC technology race. Who’s best positioned to profit from the decades-long SiC development effort?
By Adele Hars
France-based substrate maker Soitec has a lot riding on silicon carbide (SiC). The company believes its SiC wafers “are going to transform the EV industry,” as Thomas Piliszczuk, executive vice president of global strategy, recently told The Ojo-Yoshida Report. That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s a significant element of Soitec’s equally bold plan to become a two-billion-dollar company over the next five years.
Read More »Soitec Aims for Big EV Win with Smart Cut SiC Wafers
What’s at stake?
Ambarella’s acquisition of Oculii brings the vision processor company a suite of radar perception algorithms. If Ambarella succeeds in executing vision-plus-radar sensor fusion in a single system-on-chip (SoC), it could raise the bar — and industry expectations — on what a vision chip can do. That, in turn, raises questions about where in the vehicle sensor fusion should take place and who ultimately “owns” the sensor fusion stack.
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at Stake?
The challenge posed by Nvidia – via its planned acquisition of Arm – to Intel’s x86 architecture is real and potentially unstoppable, and should not be casually dismissed. With a huge market at stake, we expect Intel to fight back hard. But no matter what kind of headwinds Nvidia faces from Intel, Arm licensees and international regulators, the deal signals that a new day is dawning in the chip market – one that will have major ramifications for all the players, and for consumers too.
What’s at stake?
The Nvidia-Arm deal idles at the intersection of U.S. politics, Jensen Huang’s promises and China’s long ambition to become the world’s tech industry leader. How badly does Huang want to get this done? How big a chunk of Nvidia’s technology arsenal is China looking to gain? And how fiercely will U.S. anti-China hardliners fight the proposed M&A? At stake is the future of U.S.–China relations.
What’s at stake?
Germany’s recently passed autonomous-vehicle regulations earned the country bragging rights as the first in the world to bring legal certainty to Level 4 AVs, in which automated driving features do not require human intervention.
Lawyers working for the U.S. AV industry, and those looking to score political points, maintain that delayed regulations in America could hamstring automakers in the global AV race. What’s really at stake, however, is public safety. Will AV rules under development in the United States come with enough muscle to help AV manufacturers raise public confidence in the long-term safety of driverless vehicles?
Read More »U.S. Lawyers Perpetuate Regulation Myths at The Autonomous
Early industry speculation, since debunked, was that Apple was making manufacturing deals with Hyundai and Kia. Earlier this year, Korea Times reported an Apple deal with “a joint venture of LG and Magna.” A report this month from Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper, however, says that Apple may go it alone.
Veteran auto industry observers put Magna high on the “likely” list. Automotive industry analyst Egil Juliussen called Magna “the most competent manufacturer” of vehicles but speculated that Apple “might recruit several different manufacturers.”
Read More »Apple Car: Makers & Sensors
What’s at stake?
Phil Magney, founder of VSI Labs, often says that Tesla is “a proxy of the future vehicle.” What, then, will Apple Car become? Will it be Tesla on steroids, a safer and more secure Tesla, or just a more transparent version of Tesla?
The departure of Doug Field, who resigned as the head of Apple’s car project (codenamed Titan) and jumped ship to Ford Motor Co. earlier this month, generated a fresh round of speculation that the car project at Apple might be stalled. We disagree with that analysis.
Read More »Unlocking Apple Car’s Supply Chain
Batteries are “by far the most expensive part of BEVs,” automotive industry analyst Egil Juliussen noted. “Supply chains are tricky.”
The big hitch in EV batteries is that there’s “so much new tech, new battery manufacturing, potential supply chain upheaval,” he said. However, he believes, “Apple will have a backup plan via China connections if the better technologies are not ready in time.”
Read More »What About EV Batteries?
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Rising economic nationalism is causing fissures in the global semiconductor supply chain. The rifts are threatening the IC market at a time of rapid growth, when it most needs to retain the collaborative and unified structure that has driven its expansion over several decades. As economic powers like China, the EU, and the United States move to militarize the global electronics supply chain to achieve their geopolitical objectives, companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. are caught in the fray. How TSMC and its competitors respond to these geopolitical pressures will determine whether the industry will continue to grow unhindered or enter a phase of extreme uncertainty and uneven product development.
