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ST’s Key to Unlock China: ‘Manufacturing’

Conversation, Featured

What’s at stake:
Before the U.S. CHIPS Act changed the formula worldwide, “manufacturing” was a millstone around every semiconductor company’s neck. STMicroelectronics is turning this burden into a bonus, pitching its manufacturing ability to differentiate from competitors. But, will it work?

STMicroelectronics is a solid, non-nonsense semiconductor company proud of having built its business brick by brick. Its acclaimed MCU product lines are supported by an unparalleled developer community.

For decades, the Franco-Italian company stuck with its integrated device manufacturing (IDM) model, even when manufacturing lost its cachet in the industry. That trend prompted many chip companies to go fabless or “fab lite” in the early 2000’s.

As an IDM, ST today does everything from R&D, process technology development and product design to running several fabs, manufacturing, testing, and packaging.

Uninterested in the market trend du jour, rooted in a long market view with disciplined operations, ST is flourishing. It ships “4,000 to 5,000 MCUs every minute,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, ST’s President of Microcontrollers, Digital ICs and RF products Group, in a wide-ranging interview with The Ojo-Yoshida Report.

Intel Foundry Charts a Course to Breakeven

Featured, News & Analysis

By George Leopold

What’s at stake:
Fresh off receipt of U.S. government funding and tax breaks, Intel Corp. is spearheading the effort to revive American chip manufacturing. Will Intel Foundry’s internal sourcing strategy enable it to achieve a projected breakeven in 2027?

On the day it disclosed steep operating losses for its nascent foundry operations, Intel Corp. dropped the other shoe by unveiling a widely expected strategy that separates its fabless products unit from its fledgling foundry business.

The goal, Intel said, is establishing a “foundry-like relationship” among Intel Foundry, the chipmaker’s existing manufacturing operations, and its “product” business unit. The last is essentially the fabless portion of Intel Corp. that designs chips for data centers, networking and, the company hopes, future AI systems.

Jeff Bier: What Changed From VCRs to Software-Defined Vision?

Featured, Podcast

Jeff Bier discusses how advances in their basic building blocks are fundamentally changing the nature of embedded systems.

Players: Who’s Who in Chiplets

Featured

Compiled byThe Ojo-Yoshida Report

The Ojo-Yoshida Report has compiled a list of key chiplet players in a table below.

We highlight the movers and shakers in the rapidly emerging, and evolving, chiplets ecosystem. The table shows how the semiconductor industry at large is realigning to create a viable ecosystem for chiplets, especially how innovations in advanced packaging and system-in-package (SiP) segments are converging and colliding with chiplet manufacturing disciplines.

Recommended:
Growing Chiplet Ecosystem in a Snapshot

We divided the chiplet marketplace in several categories ranging from chiplet product companies, design startups to chiplet EDA tools/ IP vendors, manufacturing and packaging.

Growing Chiplet Ecosystem In a Snapshot

Featured

By The Ojo-Yoshida Editorial Team

Chiplets are on nearly every semiconductor firm’s radar; look at the membership of UCIe Consortium, the standards body working on die-to-die I/O physical layer (PHY), die-to-die protocols, and software stacks. UCIe Consortium has more than 130 members and counting.

The Ojo-Yoshida Report has compiled a list of key chiplet players in a table. (You can read our table here). Our goal is to highlight the movers and shakers in the rapidly emerging, and evolving, chiplets ecosystem. The table will also show how the semiconductor industry at large is realigning to create a viable ecosystem for chiplets, especially how innovations in advanced packaging and system-in-package (SiP) segments are converging and colliding with chiplet manufacturing disciplines.

Recommended:
Players: Who’s Who in Chiplets

Moreover, while it displays how prominent players in the semiconductor industry are catching up on the chiplet phenomenon, a new crop of startups is redefining this space with nimble product moves. It also shows how money is flowing in from the investment community joining the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon.

The Chiplet Revolution: Where We Stand Today

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By Ron Wilson

What’s at stake:
With all the talk of chiplets, it is important to have a perspective on what the real issues are, and where the industry stands with them. Looking into it, we find three categories of answers.

Chiplets, systems in package, multi-die modules — there is a whole new vocabulary growing up around the old idea of putting more than one die into an IC package. By now the words, the technologies they represent, and the supply chains necessary to achieve them are resolving into three main categories, all under the general heading of multi-die modules (MDM).

The first category — well represented by recent massive GPU and datacenter CPU designs — best fits the acronym SiP. The second category — just emerging today — we might call decomposed SoCs. And the third category — arguably still several years away — we can properly call chiplet-based systems. To define each of these, we should discuss the issues that separate them and the issues they have in common.

NXP Nudges OEMs Toward Software-First Design

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
“Software-defined” is an inescapable trend even for automakers. Gone soon will be days when OEMs demanded tier ones to bring another (hardware) box with each new feature, so that they can pile up boxes in a vehicle that results in ever-growing complexity. While Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV) hold much promise, the trend demands that carmakers design vehicles using virtual ECUs in a virtual development environment.

For car buyers, software-defined vehicles (SDVs) could simply mean over-the-air updates or various apps running on in-vehicle infotainment systems that leave the underlying hardware unchanged.

For automotive design engineers, on the other hand, SDVs are both critical and problematic.

Are Tsetlin Machines About to Reframe AI?

Audition, Featured

By Peter Clarke

What’s at stake:
Right now, AI/ML is most powerful driver of technology but there are already signs that its runaway success is unsustainable on energy consumption grounds. Can a novel technology from a startup open up new frontiers in the artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) sector and ultimately impact the leaders of the semiconductor industry?

AI has a problem: the energy it consumes. A UK startup called Literal Labs may have a radical solution.

The company reckons a mathematical curiosity called the Tsetlin machine could provide an approach to many AI applications that is up to 1,000-times faster than GPU-based training and up to 10,000-times more energy efficient than today’s neural networks. If such efficiencies can be deployed while fitting into the established technology ecosystem, it could disrupt market leaders and enable AI at the edge, which has largely been stalled up until this point.

Where Jensen Went Wrong on Thomas Edison vs. AI

Where Nvidia’s Huang Went Wrong on Thomas Edison vs. AI

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
In Silicon Valley, power prevails. In the short run, if your business and technology have the power to make money, move the market, and change the rules, you won’t even be criticized when you’re wrong. But no business is future-proof, especially if its power depends on a resource — namely electricity — facing increased scarcity.

The Bay Area just finished a week-long AI party, talking up advancements like Nvidia’s new supersized AI chips and the simulation and software tools, developed by companies such as Ansys and Synopsys, that enabled them.

The tech community is blithely comparing the anticipated spread of AI to electricity that everyone nowadays takes for granted.

Executives like to style themselves as creators of a brand-new industry, similar to the electrification wave that accelerated the Industrial Revolution.

What Will Nvidia Do for an Encore?

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

Nvidia Corp.’s stratospheric sales growth and lofty stock valuation cannot mask its vulnerability to the semiconductor industry’s roiling and disruptive dynamics. The company now has targets on its back from rivals and even some customers smarting from the elevated pricing of its products. Can Nvidia string together a multi-year, unbroken grip on the AI market and break new ground to maintain its enviable performance?

Jensen Huang should be getting tired of posing for pictures.

At GTC2024, Nvidia’s GPU technology conference in San Jose, Calif., Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Monday, delivered his keynote speech in a rock-concert setting to an audience of more than 10,000 people — a record turnout for the annual event. Enthralled by Huang, many of them, including trade and mainstream journalists, made a beeline for the keynote and giddily took selfies with him.

There is no bigger celebrity in the semiconductor world today than Huang. Even other CEOs in the electronics industry are enamored with him.

“He is a giant-rock star,” said Sassine Ghazi, president and CEO of electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor IP supplier Synopsys Inc., speaking Wednesday at SNUG (Synopsys User Group) in Santa Clara, his company’s annual event for chip designers. Huang, an invited speaker at SNUG, swiftly returned the compliment when he joined Ghazi on the stage. “Synopsys is the most consequential company in our industry today,” Huang said. “Without Synopsys tools we will not be able to do what we do.”