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What Will Nvidia Do for an Encore?

Featured, Opinion

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.”

Oculi’s ‘Software-Defined’ Vision Sensor Is Fresh and Foreign

Audition, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Before founding Oculi, Charbel Rizk was a designer of autonomous systems frustrated with computer vision systems available on the market. Traditional sensors, often built for human consumption, produce massive volumes of data, which result in systems needing more bandwidth and suffering from increased latency. Can Rizk convince other systems designers to embrace Oculi’s new vision architecture originally developed to fulfill Rizk’s own wish list?

Oculi, a Baltimore, Maryland startup, offshoot of a Johns Hopkins University research team, has developed a vision technology architecture in which sensing and processing both reside at the pixel level. The company calls it Sensing and Processing Unit (SPU).

Charbel Rizk, Oculi’s founder and CEO said in a recent interview with the Ojo-Yoshida Report, “My claim to the world is that we will always enable the lowest power, bandwidth, latency and ultimately cost computer vision solution with privacy.”

This is big talk among the many players in sensing and processing, all of them pursuing ultimate edge AI solutions in a broad range of embedded systems.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Silicon Carbide

Featured, Opinion

By George Leopold

The power semiconductor material silicon carbide seemed poised for a different sort of band-gap leap in recent weeks as developers again touted SiC’s potential role in addressing skyrocketing electricity demand. That demand will only grow as sprawling data centers take on more energy-intensive AI workloads.

We were expecting to hear more about the promise of SiC technology and new applications this week from a key developer, Onsemi. Hours before we were to be briefed on its strategy, the chip maker based in Scottsdale, Ariz., abruptly postponed its announcement that appeared to be tied to a co-located event with AI chip giant Nvidia. No word on when Onsemi will reschedule its SiC platform announcement.

Tech Vision: Synopsys ‘Evolves’ to Thrive

Featured, Podcast

Synopsys sets its sights on expanding from silicon to system design

MicroLED Displays Can Survive the Apple Blow

Featured, Opinion

By Peter Clarke

Late last month, Ams Osram AG (Unterpremstatten, Austria) sent out a press release saying that “a cornerstone project underpinning its microLED strategy got unexpectedly cancelled today,” thus prompting the company “to reassess its microLED strategy.” That triggered an avalanche of speculations that Apple may have just killed off the prospects for microLED technology.

I argue that Apple’s move has not killed those prospects off entirely. Ams Osram and a number of microLED startups have been undermined by Apple’s change of mind and must now adjust to a slower-moving environment.

Silicon Box Brings Advanced Packaging to Europe

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Less than a year after the launch of its first chiplet foundry in Singapore, Silicon Box is setting its sights on northern Italy to open another advanced panel-level packaging foundry with a $3.6 billion (€3.2 billion) investment. Is the startup overreaching?

Sehat Sutardja, his wife Weili Dai, along with Byung Joon (BJ) Han, three co-founders of the startup Silicon Box, unveiled their plan in Milan this week, accompanied by Adolfo Urso, Italian Minister of Enterprises and the “Made in Italy” initiative.

The move reflects Silicon Box’s push for global expansion, coupled with Italy’s long-standing efforts to attract investment from technology companies.

The Electronics Supply Chain Is (Still) a Hot Mess

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?

The electronics industry’s cycles cannot be controlled but they don’t also have to be as devastating as they have been in the past or even now. The industry is failing the credibility test by the unbridled response to upcycles and downcycles, which often lay the foundation for the future occurrence of problems being corrected. For an industry that makes precision equipment for others, this is a distinct black eye.

The electronics supply chain is in shambles. Again.

The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) projects IC revenues will increase 13 percent this year, reversing the drop from 2023. Look closely, though, and the market reality is disheartening and perplexing.

The story here is nuanced. Supply chain demons, unchained, lurk in the wings. Rather than grapple with its anomalies – top of which is demand-supply disequilibrium – industry executives are looking beyond the recent shortages and sales slowdown to clamber atop one another in a rush to embrace artificial intelligence, the current growth driver.

But what about the forecast inaccuracies, unrealistic orders, capacity utilization challenges, mismatched capex budgets vs. “real” production need that have bedeviled the electronics market for decades? These issues have not disappeared, and no amount of AI-fueled recovery will keep them from wreaking havoc on the industry within another short period of time.

How Could Software-Defined Vehicles Go Wrong?

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
The first order of business in discussing Software-Defined Vehicle is to define it, clearly. What is it? More important, what do carmakers plan to do with SDVs? Too many marketers are abusing the terminology to push their own self-serving agenda.

General Motors last week announced resumption of sales of its Chevrolet Blazer EV, whose software quality issues forced suspension of deliveries in December.

When a carmaker like GM says its fixes are now delivered by software updates, the message to the general public is “Don’t worry. This is no big deal.”

However, GM’s Blazer EV stop-sale was a huge deal.

Two Paths Diverged: Tale of High-NA EUV Lithography

Tale of High-NA EUV Lithography: Two Paths Diverged

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By Ron Wilson

What’s at stake:
The leading edge of the semiconductor industry is struggling mightily to reach what they have named the Angstrom era. The phrase refers to an arbitrary point, somewhere around the so-called 3 nm process node, where it becomes fashionable to name technology nodes in Angstroms rather than in nanometers — hence, not 1.5 nm but 15 Angstroms. It is at about this point that the requirements for ever more detailed patterns on silicon wafers exceed the capabilities of today’s EUV lithography systems and procedures.

It is possible with great care nowadays to print patterns on the surface of a wafer in which the lines are about 13 nm apart — just fine enough for today’s so-called 5 nm processes. These patterns are projected onto a layer of radiation-sensitive material — a photoresist layer, so-called for mostly historical reasons. The pattern is then developed, and transferred through rather tortuous etching and cleaning processes to temporary layers of material that lie just beneath the resist. These layers, in turn, form a hard barrier through which material can be etched away, or added to the surface of the wafer to form the transistors and wires that make up the IC.

For the 3 nm generation, the most critical layers — such as those that make electrical connections to the transistors or that make up the first levels of metal interconnect — will require resolution just slightly finer than 13 nm in order to make connections to the most closely packed transistors. That is beyond the capabilities of today’s EUV systems with today’s procedures.

Why Fintech Companies Are Closing Shop in Nigeria

Featured, News & Analysis

By Fred Ohwahwa

What’s at stake:

Tech investors who doled out what is beginning to look like ‘easy money’ to start-ups in Africa’s leading economy are discovering the enterprises need more than funds. Now that some of the companies have ended belly up, investors are taking stock and trying to figure out how much handholding future investments will need.

Amid the global challenging economic environment, many start up tech companies in Nigeria folded up in 2023. At the last count, eight of such companies went under.

In a country with astronomically high unemployment rate – estimated at 33 percent by some projections – this is a significant development considering the country’s leading position in fintech across Africa.