By Girish Mhatre
What’s at stake?
To effectively compete, America must continue to attract and retain global talent in science and engineering, particularly foreign students. America’s economic and technological leadership rests on it in an increasingly bipolar world.
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake
Silicon carbide isn’t just about drill bits and abrasives anymore. The material also goes into transistors that are increasingly vital to green energy and transportation. The SiC supply chain may determine whether you can actually take delivery on that electric car you’ve been thinking about, or the solar panels to help charge it.
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
Extreme ultraviolet lithography has become critical to the capacity and resilience of the supply chain for advanced semiconductors. Tomorrow EUV may determine the very future of the industry.
The recent, earthshaking announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that he was changing Facebook’s name to Meta and plunging his fortunes into the creation of the “metaverse” prompted New York Times technology correspondent Kevin Roose to remind us that this brainstorm was hardly a newborn Minerva sprung from the head of the latest high-tech incarnation of Zeus. Roose notes that it dates all the way back to Snow Crash, a 1992 novel by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, whose “Metaverse” is a bleak dystopia in which virtual reality both substitutes for real life and mimics it.
Read More »Sci-Fi Implications of the Metaverse
What’s at stake?
The future of the driverless car: Are we attempting the impossible?
By Phil Koopman
Too often, I’ve read documents or listened to panel sessions that rehash misleading or just plain incorrect industry talking points regarding autonomous vehicle standards and regulations. The current industry strategy seems to boil down to “Trust us, we know what’s best,” “Don’t stifle innovation,” and “Humans are bad drivers, so computers will be better.”
Read More »Sneak Preview: Debunking Industry Narrative on AV Regulation
By Ron Wilson
When Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled the company’s process roadmap in July, part of the discussion was a wholesale renaming of Intel’s future process nodes. Superficially, this might have seemed an obvious marketing trick to mitigate painful comparisons against TSMC or Samsung. But beneath the surface, the renaming reflects both a decades-old struggle and a global financial reality.
Read More »That Name is More than a Game
A nagging issue that I noticed last month at AutoSens in Brussels, Rob Stead’s visionary annual conference on sensor technology for the “cars of the future,” is the gap between technology people and car guys. Even more confusing—perhaps to the very people creating the systems and devices that might, finally, foster a utopia of self-driving cars, trucks, buses and “Look, Ma, no hands!” Harley-Davidsons—is that some of the AutoSens crowd occupy both sides of the gulf.
Read More »The Romance of the Jalopy
What’s at stake?
Today, the top five U.S.-based companies by market cap are all tech companies. Together, they are worth nearly $9 trillion. Unlike the monopolists of the Gilded Age, they did not get there by price gouging consumers (quite the opposite, in fact). Rather, they are practiced in the art of crushing emerging competition by wielding their market power, often nefariously. That threatens jobs, consumer choice, and — as these companies become states within a state — democracy itself.
I once asked Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel, why his company shouldn’t face antitrust penalties for monopolistic practices.
Read More »Small Is Beautiful: How to Cut Big Tech Down to Size
By Chris Miller
What’s at stake?
Leaders of some of the world’s largest economies want TSMC to diversify its production locations. The only problem: They all think the Taiwanese semiconductor foundry should open shop in their own countries. While TSMC’s position is unique — and uniquely uncomfortable — chip industry executives increasingly are finding that geopolitics has been added to the calculus of business decision-making.
