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.
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.
Read More »Wally Rhines Places All His Chips on a Crypto Startup
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?
What’s at stake?
Details of Europe’s semiconductor strategy are being debated. The keys to success are maintaining and expanding the current chip ecosystem while laying the groundwork to leverage advanced manufacturing nodes.
What’s at stake?
The momentum behind RISC-V is well-known. But the market penetration of the RISC-V cores is harder to pin down. Reportedly, there’s a RISC-V core in every earbud. But will the core ever grow up to be a full-fledged smartphone processor, on par with an Arm-based apps processor?
So, how many RISC-V cores did the semiconductor industry ship in 2021?
That’s a basic question to ask about RISC-V’s commercial success.
Read More »RISC-V Beyond Embedded: How Many Cores Will It Take?
What’s at stake?
Sorting out hype from reality is critical when it comes to automotive lidars. At stake for auto OEMs is selecting the appropriate sensors for ADAS and AV applications, and determining which vendors they can count on to deliver.
In an automotive lidar market crowded with startups touting new technologies and claimed design wins, it may come as a surprise that the most dominant lidar supplier in the world is Valeo, a stodgy French Tier One behemoth with a history that spans nearly a century.
Read More »Valeo Sits Atop Lidar Market – So Far
Refreshed by new blood on its senior executive team, Codasip, touting itself as “one of the top three, credible RISC-V companies,” is reintroducing itself. Spun out of its founder’s PhD thesis and decade-long research on how best to design new and better CPUs, Codasip is today a full-fledged RISC-V company, hot on the heels of RISC-V market leaders SiFive and Andes Technology.
Read More »As RISC-V Catches Tailwinds, Codasip Refreshes Ambition
In Ford’s latest earnings call, CEO Jim Farley explained that Ford chose GlobalFoundries as its semiconductor supplier over Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. with two goals in mind. Ford is seeking to ensure the capacity exists for an adequate supply of its automotive chips. The automaker also seeks to develop “feature-rich” chips and nodes to support the automotive industry.
The first goal, clearly, is about managing Ford’s supply chain. But regarding the second goal, what on earth do Ford and GlobalFoundries mean by “feature rich”?
Read More »Mystery Behind GlobalFoundries’ ‘Feature-Rich Node’
What’s at stake?
The Ojo-Yoshida Report spoke with author Peter Norton to discuss his latest book, Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. Norton, an associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, coined the term Autonorama as a “technofuturistic” label for decades-old auto industry marketing that now promises a driverless future. We’ve seen this show before, Norton argues, and, as in the past, it won’t deliver safe, sustainable “mobility solutions.” The author pulls no punches in documenting decades of unfulfilled auto industry promises, tracing the history of car dependency and its transition to high-tech car dependency, and offers recommendations for more efficiently transporting people to and from their destinations.
Here’s our conversation with the author Peter Norton.
Read More »Car Culture Morphs into High-Tech Car Dependency
What’s at stake?
If you’ve been convinced that autonomous vehicles are the future for transportation systems, take a hard look at the humble roboshuttle, an early proving ground for AV concepts. Highly automated buses and shuttles have been around for a couple of decades, but few of those deployments have made it past trials to become sustained commercial enterprises. The self-driving van’s boxy build and plodding pace often get the blame for the riding public’s indifference. Unless developers and municipalities start paying proper attention to transportation market fundamentals, however, it may be naïve to assume that robotaxis will fare any better. We believe the chronic malaise of the roboshuttle business holds lessons for the broader AV industry.
