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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
Chiplets: what lies below?

Chiplets: What Lies Below?

By Ron Wilson

What’s at stake:
One of the most important issues — and one of the least discussed — in creating multi-die systems is the substrate technology. There are several roads into the future, going in different directions. But one of them holds unique promise.

Much of the current excitement about chiplets tends to overlook an important point. Every multi-die system-in-package rests — quite literally — on a substrate. The characteristics of that substrate influence everything about the finished system, from the architecture to the cost to the likelihood of it ever reaching customers.

Read More »Chiplets: What Lies Below?
If Nvidia Is AI Hardware's Goliath, Where's David?

If Nvidia Is AI Hardware’s Goliath, Where’s David?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Lop-sided wins by a few companies have become the norm in certain segments of the semiconductor industry, specifically Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in the foundry business and Nvidia in the AI chip market. Armed with unfair advantages they have created for themselves, these two giants leave little room for competitors to operate.  

How did the industry let it happen?

Read More »If Nvidia Is AI Hardware’s Goliath, Where’s David?
Why Is Valeo Clinging to Lidars?

Why Is Valeo Clinging to Lidar?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Among all sensors designed into modern vehicles, lidars have seen the most upheaval – to a degree unanticipated even by leading lidar companies. There are no assurances even lidar pioneers like Valeo can keep up with the rapidly changing market landscape.

The causes for this volatility, or attributed to dynamism, include technology advancements, the rise and fall of robotaxis, rapid growth in Chinese EVs, a geographical split among OEMs marketing automated vehicles (L2+, L2++ vs L3), and the death of lidar companies who rode the SPAC boom until their investors bailed.

Read More »Why Is Valeo Clinging to Lidar?
semiconductor wafers

Is Localized Chip Production Doomed to Fail?

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

Powerful governments are pouring vast amounts of money into semiconductors to create or strengthen national or regional manufacturing and innovation hubs, departing from the globalized system that midwifed the industry. The system being built lacks long-term viability, but chipmakers are going along, drawn by government largesse and coercion. Can this new structure survive harsh business realities such as the need for global sales?

As much as $1.6 trillion may be spent on new semiconductor fabs, R&D, and STEM education programs globally by governments and chipmakers between 2020 and 2040 in a defensive, frantic and possibly doomed effort by leading economies to localize IC innovations and manufacturing in their territories, according to figures compiled by the Ojo-Yoshida Report.

Driven by parochial defense, military, supply security and other economic interests China, the European Union, Japan, South Korea and the United States are prodding the semiconductor industry into a new wave of massive, local fab construction projects with promises and plans that appear detached from the market’s fundamentals and historical operational system, according to observers.

Read More »Is Localized Chip Production Doomed to Fail?
Five Minutes 'On the Road' with Intel’s Gelsinger

Five Minutes ‘On the Road’ with Intel’s Gelsinger

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
What’s the deal with Intel and Mobileye? After Intel at CES officially unveiled an automotive strategy independent of Mobileye, the relationship between the companies on all things automotive became all the more mysterious. 

A few questions have been nagging me since I first learned about Intel’s re-entry into the automotive market.

  • Is Intel designing its auto strategy narrowly to avoid stepping on Mobileye’s toes?  
  • Given its continued 88 percent stake in Mobileye, what are Intel’s legitimate expectations for fully autonomous vehicles? 
  • If Intel aspires to be the key player in a rapidly changing automotive market, shouldn’t its solutions integrate both Mobileye’s ADAS and Intel’s in-vehicle infotainment platforms?
  • Do these two teams even talk to each other?
Read More »Five Minutes ‘On the Road’ with Intel’s Gelsinger