Conversation

VW-Horizon Deal: Winners, Risks, and Legacy OEMs’ Future

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What’s at stake?
China is primed to dominate the global EV market. Hence, news of the VW-Horizon Robotics agreement doesn’t necessarily represent a design win for the Chinese AI chip startup. At stake is the survival of Volkswagen, among the world’s largest legacy OEMs. Has VW considered the consequences of this deal ten years down the road?

When the news of Volkswagen’s 2.4-billion euro investment in China’s AI startup broke last week, Tu Le was one of our first calls.

Qualcomm’s Automotive Gambit: Doubling Down on Smartphones

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What’s at stake:
Qualcomm senior vice president Nakul Duggal does not lose sleep over carmakers’ veiled threats about developing their own chips. Duggal says Qualcomm understands that different OEMs are at different levels of maturity. Chip suppliers jockeying to lead carmakers to next-generation EV/AV architectures must understand what customers want, and know every OEM’s development stage. That understanding will allow them to offer multi-generational and scalable SoCs tailored to customers’ requirements.

Dave Doherty, president and COO of Digi-Key Corp.

Digi-Key Plays the Darwin Card

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By Bolaji Ojo

Sales are surging at component distributors amidst swollen margins as the electronic industry continues its multi-year upturn. But distributors are also witnessing turbulence amidst supply shortages, extended lead times, weakening global economy, export restrictions and other geopolitical pressures occasioned by the stiffening rivalry between China and the United States.

electrical and electronics engineering as a career

CHIPS Act: Opening a Pipeline for New Engineers

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The CHIPS Act has become law, fueled by the political will to shore up America’s manufacturing and technological edge to counter China. The pandemic-induced global chip shortage helped generate bipartisan support for the new legislation as both government and industry came to the realization that decades of offshoring might have been a mistake. But ultimately, the CHIPS Act will be deemed successful only if it broadens the pipeline of U.S.-educated EEs who are trained and ready to step into jobs at the promised domestic facilities.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France (in the center) listens to Jean-Marc Chery, STMicroelectronics CEO talks. Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market stands next to Macron.

CHIPS Act: Europe Moving Fast, With Intel Along for the Ride

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
As shown this week when STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries revealed their joint 300mm fab project in Crolles, France, Europe is moving full-speed ahead with its CHIPS Act. At stake is the future not just of European chip companies, but its entire high-tech industry. We caught up with Jean-Christophe Eloy, CEO of Yole Group, to get his assessment of the E.U.’s ambitious strategy.

Few would have predicted that 27 disparate European states could unite to forge a strategy for resurrecting the region’s semiconductor industry.

Ayar Labs Mounts Chip-to-Chip Optical Connectivity Campaign

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Ayar Labs, a startup focused on optical chip-to-chip interconnections, is gathering investors and semiconductor industry partners, including Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Nvidia. Might its collaborators’ disparate demands for customization overstretch the startup’s engineering team?

RISC-V’s CTO on the Art of Herding Cats

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The measure of success for an open-source community such as RISC-V can be memberships, number of shipped products or revenues generated by its member companies. But just as significant is the number of specs ratified within the community. This matters because specs form the groundwork for members’ technical advancements, engagements with developers and future adoption of the technologies involved.

Internet of Things IoT connected devices Arm

Ian Drew: On IoT and Life After Arm

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
IoT devices are fundamentally different from PCs or mobile phones. They must last 20 to 30 years when deployed in industrial settings. “Imagine a critical vulnerability found in a gateway that sits on top of your oil rig,” says entrepreneur and Arm veteran Ian Drew. Software engineers and chipmakers might be clueless about their own older products that went into that gateway. At stake is the long-term viability and security of IoT devices.

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Wally Rhines Places All His Chips on a Crypto Startup

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By Bolaji Ojo

Walden “Wally” Rhines is a stalwart of the semiconductor industry and a veteran of two of the electronics industry’s most important companies. At 75, Rhines could be retired, serving as a statesman to the semiconductor industry, playing golf in the sunniest parts of the world or touring exotic places on luxury cruise ships. Instead, Rhines is CEO at homomorphic encryption startup Cornami, where he is shepherding potentially groundbreaking work on data center security.

The El-Ouazzane Leap: Intel to STMicroelectronics

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By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
European semiconductor companies are traditionally run by executives who have spent the better part of their careers with a single company, breathing the same familiar air for decades. But Remi El-Ouazzane, president of STMicroelectronics’ microcontrollers and digital ICs group, is a relative newcomer to ST who acknowledges that his predecessor laid the cornerstone of its strategy for its success over the next five years. If that’s the case, then what is expected of the nontraditional El-Ouazzane, a transplant to Geneva from faraway Santa Clara?