News & Analysis

Automotive Chip Drought Alters OEM/Supplier Balance of Power

Featured, News & Analysis

What’s at stake?
With last year’s chip shortage expected to linger well into 2022, any quick fix is fantasy. Automotive OEMs’ dramatic rethink of next-gen architectures extends to their IC partners, which face new expectations for interchangeable platforms and improved visibility into their business. OEMs are spending massively, and chip designers want that money. The questions come down to the accommodations chipmakers are willing to make, and how creative their solutions will be, as they pursue tighter OEM relationships.

TOPS Priorities Shift for ‘Datacenter on Wheels’

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
As the activity around CES 2022 makes clear, tech suppliers are hurtling toward more computing power, AI acceleration, and higher-resolution sensors for automotive platforms. But as compute and sensor capabilities grow exponentially, so does the pressure on auto OEMs to pick the right building blocks and implement them to optimal effect in their next-generation cars.

Intel: Time to Break up the Mothership

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By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?
Intel has long ruled the semiconductor world, but its dominance is coming to an end. The proposed IPO of its Mobileye division heralds a new dawn marked by the potential breakup of the industry icon.

Intel Corp. wants to hang on as the majority shareholder at Mobileye after it takes its automotive-IC subsidiary public in 2022. That status will last only a few years following the initial public offering. The same forces that led CEO Pat Gelsinger to reconsider Mobileye’s position as an integral part of Intel’s continuing operations will compel the full separation of the unit and result in even more fundamental changes at the parent.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (right) and Professor Amnon Shashua, Intel senior vice president and president and CEO of Mobileye, talk during Gelsinger’s visit to Mobileye headquarters in Israel in 2021. (Credit: Mobileye, an Intel Company)

Intel/Mobileye: Not All Mergers Create Equals

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Intel acquired Mobileye in 2017 — nearly a year into the two companies’ joint AV development partnership with BMW — with great expectations for the autonomous-vehicle revolution. But a lot has changed in four years. Today, BMW is hitching a ride with Qualcomm on ADAS/AV development. Next year, Intel will take Mobileye public. At stake is whether Intel can chart an automotive roadmap for Intel-branded products, independent of its high-flying subsidiary.

‘AV Problem’ Is Real, ‘Trolley Problem’ Isn’t

News & Analysis

Given that AVs will make good, bad, and ugly driving decisions without human input or intervention, society’s tolerance for AV machine errors can be expected to be vanishingly small.

Wideband Gap Semiconductor Applications.

Silicon Carbide Gets Ready for Prime Time

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By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake

Those who invested early in silicon carbide are seeing their efforts start to pay off. But competitors are popping up everywhere, putting more SiC-related M&A and partnership deals in place. The question is who, over time, can build the right ecosystem to advance SiC technologies, bring down costs and ensure a stable supply of raw materials and SiC wafers.

Unprocessed SiC wafers are transparent, complicating many of the manufacturing steps.

Early Laps of Silicon Carbide Race Go to ST

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By Junko Yoshida

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?

Soitec Develops 6-inch Engineered SiC Substrates for Bid EV Win

Soitec Aims for Big EV Win with Smart Cut SiC Wafers

News & Analysis

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.

Ambarella Buys Oculii (Image: Ambarella)

Vision Plus Radar: Where Should Fusion Take Place?

News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

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.   

A New Semiconductor World Imagined

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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.