Volvo Needs to Radically Rethink Ride Pilot
In 2017 Volvo promised self-driving cars for sale by 2021. Here’s what happened.
Truth & Consequences
So You Want to Build a Fab
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
Talking about building new fabs is easy and politically savvy. But the logistics of financing, constructing, equipping, staffing and operating a modern chip foundry are fraught with peril.
The Innovation Smokescreen
By David Benjamin
“Some Washington politicians support policies that will cause America’s most innovative companies to fall behind. These overreaching bills will strengthen our adversaries at a time when…” —American Edge TV ad
Read More »The Innovation Smokescreen
Qualcomm is Eating Mobileye’s Lunch
A string of design wins in key areas like driver monitoring has Qualcomm leading and Mobileye sputtering.
Shedding Light on Silicon Photonics
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
As new fabrication techniques and design tools emerge, the bandwidth, latency and energy-efficiency advantages of silicon photonics move closer to delivering data-driven applications and services. Researchers are pursuing multiple paths to deployment, with specific applications perhaps determining how best to harness light to connect chip components and computing platforms.
China’s Achilles’ Heel
By David Benjamin
“The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity. They do not have national spirit… We are just a heap of loose sand… Other men are the carving knife and serving dish. We are the fish and the meat.” — Sun Yat-sen
Read More »China’s Achilles’ Heel
Why Our Machines Will Never Be as Smart as We Are
By Girish Mhatre
What’s at stake?
Some foresee the advent of a maliciously motivated superintelligence. Don’t worry – it’s not going to happen. Strong AI is a myth.
Putin’s Brainstorm: Artificial Ignorance
By David Benjamin
“Older types of land mines typically explode when victims accidentally step on them or disturb attached tripwires. But the POM-3’s seismic sensor picks up on approaching footsteps and can effectively distinguish between humans and animals…”
— John Ismay, New York Times, 6 April
It doesn’t take long for my friend Wilhelm “Bombs Away” Bienfang—the world’s foremost “idea man”—to latch onto an embryonic technology and turn it into a veritable goldmine.
Within hours of learning that Russian soldiers, fleeing the carnage they had wreaked in Ukraine, had left behind a garden of seismically activated land mines, Bienfang had a potentially lucrative product on his drawing board.
Read More »Putin’s Brainstorm: Artificial Ignorance
Just What is an FPGA, Anyway?
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories examining AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx and what it means for the evolving FPGA market.
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
Both Intel and AMD have invested heavily to own a leading FPGA company. Setting aside relatively small embedded-computing and communications/networking markets, these are essentially bets on the future of the FPGA as a key partner for the CPU chip in data center servers. But unless major challenges in accessibility to software programmers and in device management are overcome, the partnership may not happen.
To appreciate why AMD would be so interested in FPGA vendor Xilinx — or for that matter, what Intel saw years ago in Altera — it helps to have some idea of just what an FPGA is, and what role the devices play in today’s semiconductor industry. The answer rests in one simple idea, unfortunately obscured by a poor choice of acronym and a lot of technical complexity. Perhaps we can untangle things a bit.
Read More »Just What is an FPGA, Anyway?
Surviving the Semiconductor Supply Chain Crisis
By Robert Hollingsworth
The Covid-19 pandemic engendered numerous unanticipated challenges for many companies. This is a story of the steps taken by one tech company to avoid closing its doors, and actually succeeding, while dealing with supply chain disruptions and other market forces largely out of its control.
Read More »Surviving the Semiconductor Supply Chain Crisis