By Bolaji Ojo

Has China become the single nation Western electronics manufacturers cannot do without?

This is the question on observers’ minds after the CEOs of Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc., and other chipmakers trooped to Washington DC on Monday to try and avert the imposition of a new slate of restrictions on the sales of high-end semiconductors to Chinese OEMs.

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Cheered by the CHIPS and Science Act and a spike in demand for AI, semiconductor industry executives are flirting with euphoria. Many gleefully tell us,“Chip guys are finally getting a little respect.” But with greater esteem comes greater responsibility. How many chip businesses are making measurable and transparent commitments to growing and operating sustainably?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Chiplets and heterogenous integration are about to change the way electronic systems are designed, tested, and manufactured. Semiconductor industry prophets believe that future is inevitable. They believe heterogenous, multi-chiplet architectures can reduce cost and power consumption compared with latest design nodes. Despite broad acceptance of this forecast, a question lingers: Who’s ready to do the heavy lifting?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Using AI as a tool is an idea broadly embraced in the semiconductor industry. But putting AI into practice needs validated data easily shared within the flow of design, testing and manufacturing. Stakes are high for an industry that must now forced to handle data coming from many sources in different forms.

The semiconductor industry’s quest for consistent data is foremost in discussions at the Semicon West and Design Automation Conference this week in San Francisco.

By Adele Hars

What’s at stake:
Quantum computing is a hot field. All the major industry players worldwide are working on it, with hefty help from governments and investors. Expectations are running high. At stake is who will hold the key to the new technology that could touch everything from pharmaceuticals to cybersecurity, AI, finance, healthcare, logistics and more.

France is a hotbed of quantum startups. At the end of 2022, CEA-Leti, the giant French microelectronics lab in Grenoble, added to the pack by spinning off its quantum hardware division. To head up the new company, called Siquance, CEA-Leti named Maud Vinet as CEO and Co-Founder. No surprise, perhaps, as Vinet had spent the last five years heading up Leti’s quantum hardware division.

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
In an AI market totally dominated by Nvidia, breaking the GPU giant’s logjam is, at minimum, a challenge for anyone, even a legendary CPU architect. However, Jim Keller’s secret weapon is not his reputation. It’s his belief that open-source policies accelerate innovation.

Jim Keller is a legendary CPU architect, his name linked to a host of commercially successful processors. Over three decades in several organizations, Keller, as a hands-on engineer, worked with or led teams who have developed architecture ranging from Alpha at Digital Equipment Corporation, K8, K12 and Zen at AMD, Apple’s A4, A5 and other apps processors, to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) Computer chip at Tesla.

Keller resembles a talented actor with a nose for great scripts and starring in a string of award-winning movies. However, it remains to be seen whether Tenstorrent, an AI hardware startup where Keller graduated from early investor to CEO today, will be the winner in the evolving AI race.