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Chiplets: If It Happens in China, Will It Stay in China?

Chiplets: If It Happens in China, Will It Stay in China? 

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
China’s chiplet aspirations are well known. But will China use its domestic chiplet activities as an opportunity to decouple from the rest of the world? We think the reality is contrary.

Chiplets represent a once-in-a-lifetime revolution that will allow the semiconductor world to disaggregate the processes of designing, manufacturing, testing and packaging silicon – the fundamental matter who does what. China wants to seize this moment to play a big role in this new world order.

Read More »Chiplets: If It Happens in China, Will It Stay in China? 
Memo to Auto Chipmakers: AVs' Failure is Your Failure, Too

Memo to Auto Chipmakers: AVs’ Failure is Your Failure, Too

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

When autonomous vehicles do not perform as expected, the entire industry, including the semiconductor companies supplying the subsystems and other components, will be negatively impacted. End-users will ask: Why are you teaming up with auto OEMs to put on the roads vehicles that clearly need further technology development and design work?

Cruise and Waymo have one thing in common. Their autonomous vehicles have earned the humiliating disdain of some intended customers.  

If you are a semiconductor supplier whose products have been designed into Cruise’s autonomous vehicle or Waymo’s robotaxi, you’ve got the beginning of a public relations nightmare.

Read More »Memo to Auto Chipmakers: AVs’ Failure is Your Failure, Too
Chiplet Mission: Navigate Interconnect Complexity

Chiplet Mission: Navigate Interconnect Complexity

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake
Chiplets present a set of multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional technology and business problems with no one-size-fits-all answer. Numerous startups are proposing various solutions to tackle the complexity of die-to-die interconnects.

For every player in the semiconductor supply chain – from chip designers and EDA tool vendors to semiconductor foundries, OSAT companies and the Babel of technology startups – the toughest challenge, arguably, boils down to how to connect chiplets.

Fortunately, startups such as Eliyan, Blue Cheetah and YorChip are poised to tackle the issues, each in its own way.

Read More »Chiplet Mission: Navigate Interconnect Complexity
Intel Tackles an Old Nemesis with Little Room for Errors

Intel Tackles an Old Nemesis with Little Room for Errors

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

Intel has a comprehensive restructuring and recovery plan, but it is also being dogged by a self-created problem: low capacity utilization. It’s a hydra-headed challenge with conflicting solutions. By constructing new fabs, Intel adds to its fab-loading headache but not doing this will hobble the company’s competitiveness in the foundry business upon which its foundry future is now hinged. Will becoming a foundry for other foundries solve this problem?

Intel Corp.’s ongoing fab addition and expansion plan could potentially become a hugely profitable and restorative move or a major financial disaster.

And it all boils down to a simple but dreaded phrase: capacity utilization rate.

Whether Intel succeeds with its IDM 2.0 plan comes down to a single question: Will the chipmaker find enough customers for its foundry business and boost sales in its traditional business to push capacity utilization rate over currently low levels and above the strongly margin-boosting 80 percent rate?

Read More »Intel Tackles an Old Nemesis with Little Room for Errors
Amir Panush Writes Ceva's Next Growth Chapter

CEO Panush Writes Ceva’s Next Growth Chapter

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Ceva CEO Amir Panush has his work cut out for him. The DSP powerhouse’s growth was built on the industry’s standards-based high-quality IP. Now, Panush has to chart a new course as a pure-play IP company in a rough-and-tumble ‘Smart Edge’ market that’s still emerging and very fragmented. The odds are getting tougher.

Decades ago, Ceva took the cellular communication market by storm by licensing its DSP cores to clients who needed to design baseband processors for mobile phones and base stations.

The Israeli company thus emerged as a DSP powerhouse, as the worldwide demand for cellular phones kept soaring.

Ceva’s next step, in the mid-2000’s, however, had an even bigger impact. It struck gold in 2014 by acquiring RivieraWaves, a private company based in France. The French company provided wireless connectivity IP for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies – which do not depend on Ceva’s DSP. This acquisition became a new growth engine for the Israeli company.

Read More »CEO Panush Writes Ceva’s Next Growth Chapter
Waveguide Pixel Architecture Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light

Waveguide Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light

By Peter Clarke

The IMEC research institute presented a development at the recent International Electron Devices Meeting that could be part of a game-changing new wave in image sensors.

It is well-known that memory and logic designers have wrestled with problems as circuit complexity has increased while planar geometry scaling has hit limits. The same is true, although for different reasons, for the CMOS image sensor.

Read More »Waveguide Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light