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Whither STMicroelectronics after Annus Horibilis?

ST Looks Beyond Troubled MCU Waters

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:

STMicroelectronics is resetting market expectations for its intermediate term performance. It’s a good move for the company, considering the challenges it faces in key market segments. Executives believe the company’s strong technology portfolio, IDM structure complimented by foundry partners and intense focus on key markets will help it achieve goals set years ago. Resetting goals may be a brilliant move but a tactical retreat and regrouping may prove even more critical to achieving the new objectives. Will ST deliver?

STMicroelectronics NV believes it will be a $20 billion company by 2030. For now, though, Jean-Marc Chery, president and CEO at ST, won’t say what revenues the company will have in 2025 and 2026. 

Chery calls 2025 “a transition year” for ST. Go ahead and add 2026 – with or without Chery’s consent. ST will by the end of 2024 fall $4 billion short of its record revenue of $17.3 billion in 2023. The CFO believes ST will cross that threshold again in 2027 or 2028.

Take your pick. 

By 2030, though ST expects revenue to be about $20 billion, a goal set years before. By then, Chery, now 64 years old, will likely have moved on, no longer CEO at ST. If you were to pose a question to the CEO in 2030, someone else will have to answer in Chery’s titular name. That’s the way this game is played. 

Read More »ST Looks Beyond Troubled MCU Waters
Can South Korea get 'processing-in-memory' to stick?

Can South Korea Get ‘Processing-in-Memory’ to Stick?

By Peter Clarke

What’s at stake:
Processing-in-memory (PIM) has not yet lived up to its potential due to the market strength of incumbent computing architectures and the cost efficiencies of keeping logic and memory manufacturing separate. A number of startups targeting their AI processors at the “edge” are now using variations on the PIM approach within embedded memory on their system-on-chip processors, but most use CMOS logic, and they cannot target the densest form of memory, DRAM. If Samsung and SK Hynix can standardize DRAM components to include PIM then the technique could transform AI processing.

South Korea’s semiconductor leaders Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are working together to standardize processing-in-memory (PIM) in the form of an LPDDR6-PIM DRAM, according to Business Korea. The tasks such a chip might do include some of the highly parallel mathematics operations that are part of machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI).

Read More »Can South Korea Get ‘Processing-in-Memory’ to Stick?
AI Past, Present, and Future (Part 2)

AI Past, Present, and Future (Part 2)

By Clive (Max) Maxfield

What’s at stake:

As artificial intelligence advances at a breakneck pace, we are standing at a crossroad where the line between science fiction and reality blurs. How will we navigate the ethical, economic, and personal impacts of artificial intelligence innovations? To understand where we’re heading, we first need to explore where we’ve come from and consider the present-day breakthroughs that are defining the world of our future.

In Part 1 of this mini-series on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), we predominantly pondered the days of AI Past. We commenced in the 1700s by considering some of the automata — self-operating machines or control mechanisms designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations or respond to predetermined instructions — that were created at that time.

Read More »AI Past, Present, and Future (Part 2)
Infineon on Tightrope Chasing AI Power and 'Green'

Infineon on Tightrope Chasing AI Power and ‘Green’

By Kolade Ojo

Infineon Technologies Inc. faces a paradox. It must successfully juggle two challenging and potentially conflicting objectives.

The first – powering AI – represents a lucrative business opportunity while the second – sustainable manufacturing – has become a major societal obligation in a world concerned about climate change and global warming. Both goals are desirable, but neither can be easily achieved by a chipmaker serving the hot artificial intelligence and power markets from locations in a country passionate about the impact of manufacturing on the environment.

Read More »Infineon on Tightrope Chasing AI Power and ‘Green’
What Drove Investors to Fund (or Decline) Tenstorrent

What Drove Investors to Fund (or Decline) Tenstorrent

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Startups live or die by the amounts they raise. This rule applies even to Tenstorrent, a hot AI company with Jim Keller, a legendary CPU designer, at its helm. Although Keller personally calling Amazon chief Jeff Bezos helped land an undisclosed sum from Bezos’ investment firm, that’s an aberration. Tenstorrent still must go through the wringer. We sat down with the startup’s vice president of investor relations and asked what’s been happening behind the scenes.

Tenstorrent just closed $693 million in its Series D round.

In a media environment where people constantly crave more AI stories, news of a hot AI processor company gets headlines. But among investors, we suspect that things are much different. Just being an AI company doesn’t grease the fast track to funding. 

That got me thinking.

Read More »What Drove Investors to Fund (or Decline) Tenstorrent

A Come-to-De Geus Semiconductor Moment

Aart de Geus, executive chair, founder of Synopsys Inc, recipient of the 2024 SIA Robert Noyce Award, discusses industry-wide “waves” that have changed the world. He shares with us where technology developments in the computational age will take us.

Intel: It’s Time for the Unthinkable

Intel: It’s Time for the Unthinkable

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:

Intel pioneered so much and led the semiconductor industry for so long that it became difficult for its leaders, and even government officials to imagine a different future for the iconic brand. But Intel today is not the company it was 20 years ago, the market plays have changed dramatically and so have the players in it. It’s time to rethink Intel and imagine a different future for the company. Doing so, will require drastic changes.

Intel Corp. is the story. Not former CEO Patrick Gelsinger, whose tenure ended abruptly on Sunday.

Neither is the story about the company’s newly appointed co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Like Gelsinger, both are minor characters in the Intel saga, their current positions fleeting. Preferably, Zinsner’s and Holthaus’s tenures should end quickly and as abruptly as Gelsinger’s.

What happens to Intel next and how its future will be shaped should dominate discussions at the company and among its different audiences.

Read More »Intel: It’s Time for the Unthinkable
After Covid, MCU Makers Gambled … and Lost. What’s Next?

After Covid, MCU Makers Gambled … and Lost. What’s Next?

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:

The microcontroller market is in shambles because suppliers let their guards down, excessively adding production capacities because of wildly optimistic forecasts and doubled orders for components from customers. The recovery of the MCU market will take several years. As they rebuild, vendors must also review their recent experiences and try (again) to install safeguards against reoccurrence of the errors that are today hurting the sector.

In June, 2023, the Ojo-Yoshida Report asked: What’s Next for Microchip’s Steve Sanghi? The answer came in a sudden rush this week.

Sanghi, founder and former CEO of Microchip Technology Inc., is back again in the corner office, having stepped in temporarily to assume leadership of the company from Ganesh Moorthy, who will retire as of the end of November.

A scamp might say Moorthy, a 23-year veteran of Microchip who took over from Sanghi in 2021, was pushed out due to sales problems at the microcontroller vendor. That would not be totally untrue. Microchip is hurting, alongside the rest of the microcontroller market. Other MCU CEOs may be spared, but most suppliers in the sector are rambling through the roughest gloom in the history of the market with at least one year of tepid growth ahead.

It’s rough saying it – and perhaps a tad unfair – but microcontroller vendors mainly have themselves to blame for the mess.

Read More »After Covid, MCU Makers Gambled … and Lost. What’s Next?