By Peter Clarke
What’s at stake: AI and RISC-V as drivers of commercial semiconductor activity have each been around for a dozen years or so. A lot of startups were formed to address these opportunities in the early years. However, it is often the established player that wins the market and venture capital does not have infinite patience. A reframing of the opportunities is triggering startup closures and more are likely to follow.
Business activity ebbs and flows in cycles while technology comes in waves.
The two are not unrelated. The mix of human herd-mentality, commerce and external factors such as politics, tend to modulate a repeated business cycle of about three to five years duration.
Meanwhile, academic progress based on previous technical achievements can produce a groundswell of activity often in the form of startups. These startups – or established players backing the same technology – can move the frontier forward, which in turns sets the context for consolidation and fresh academic investigations.
With that as a background, I sense we are at a turning point and that a broad shake out is about to happen in processor-based startups. This includes AI, RISC-V and more general processor activity. This is related, in part, to the maturity of the AI and RISC-V paradigms.