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The Secret Life of a Quantum Computing CEO
By Adele Hars
What’s at stake:
Quantum computing is a hot field. All the major industry players worldwide are working on it, with hefty help from governments and investors. Expectations are running high. At stake is who will hold the key to the new technology that could touch everything from pharmaceuticals to cybersecurity, AI, finance, healthcare, logistics and more.
France is a hotbed of quantum startups. At the end of 2022, CEA-Leti, the giant French microelectronics lab in Grenoble, added to the pack by spinning off its quantum hardware division. To head up the new company, called Siquance, CEA-Leti named Maud Vinet as CEO and Co-Founder. No surprise, perhaps, as Vinet had spent the last five years heading up Leti’s quantum hardware division.
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Chips, Politics, High Numbers
By Peter Clarke
Don’t trust the headline-grabbing numbers.
We’ve had a spate of semiconductor factory announcements in recent days from the U.S. semiconductor leaders Intel and Micron. They mentioned multibillion-dollar sums of money. Those who made timely appearances in such announcement were leaders of governments despite their busy agendas.
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Jim Keller Sketches AI Strategy to Bypass Nvidia
What’s at stake:
In an AI market totally dominated by Nvidia, breaking the GPU giant’s logjam is, at minimum, a challenge for anyone, even a legendary CPU architect. However, Jim Keller’s secret weapon is not his reputation. It’s his belief that open-source policies accelerate innovation.
Jim Keller is a legendary CPU architect, his name linked to a host of commercially successful processors. Over three decades in several organizations, Keller, as a hands-on engineer, worked with or led teams who have developed architecture ranging from Alpha at Digital Equipment Corporation, K8, K12 and Zen at AMD, Apple’s A4, A5 and other apps processors, to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) Computer chip at Tesla.
Keller resembles a talented actor with a nose for great scripts and starring in a string of award-winning movies. However, it remains to be seen whether Tenstorrent, an AI hardware startup where Keller graduated from early investor to CEO today, will be the winner in the evolving AI race.
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Intel Hones Funding Plans for its Mammoth Fab Splurge
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake ?
Intel Corp.’s fab building spree has put it on the hook for capital expenditure valued at tens of billions of dollars at a time of dwindling cash flow. Western governments are supportive and Intel, too, is deploying a financial approach unusual in the chip sector. Will these suffice? Quite unlikely. Intel cannot pull back, however, so it will have to take on even more loans to fulfill its burgeoning fab pledges.
Intel Corp. wants to dramatically alter the semiconductor production landscape.
If it succeeds, the chipmaker will dramatically shift a hefty chunk of manufacturing activities swiftly from one region to another, accelerate the rebalancing of the electronics supply chain and impact the dynamics of economic, geopolitical and security discourse between the world’s major powers.
Interfacing in a Faceless Era
By David Benjamin
From the first time I heard it, I cringed at the utterance of the word “interface.” It’s a relatively new term, coined to describe contact via an electronic device. It’s not just ugly. It’s an oxymoron. The machines that enable interfaces are a means to avoid the indignity of showing one’s face.
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Renesas Picks Its Battle on Edge AI
What’s at stake?
In pursuit of the edge AI market, Renesas must bridge two disparate worlds. The more probabilistic AI realm deals with data and model creation. The embedded world – more deterministic in nature – does linear programming. Renesas must transit between these worlds without jeopardizing its status in either.
Embedded system designers are curious about AI, but they aren’t necessarily interested in coding. Put bluntly, AI makes them uncomfortable.
Herein lies the dilemma for leading MCU/MPU suppliers, including Renesas, who covet the seemingly large edge-AI market.
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Chiplets Are Still a Work in Progress
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake:
Chiplets could break through the barriers obstructing Moore’s Law and disrupt the semiconductor supply chain. But they depend on sometimes-complex packaging solutions that are far from established technologies.
With their claimed ability to deconstruct one massive, leading-edge SoC into an assembly of smaller dies built in less-aggressive processes, chiplets hint at a way forward that bypasses the dotage of Moore’s Law. By offering an alternative, they also promise a diversion around the two-party monopoly on chip fabrication beyond 10nm, suggesting more diverse, robust supply chains.
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That Severe Auto IC Shortage? It Will Happen Soon Again
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
The electronics supply chain is broken and needs a full course of treatment. But industry and governments worldwide are pouring resources mainly into ensuring the availability of leading-edge products. The auto IC supply chain is on the other end, though. That was where the disequilibrium started and where it was most noticeable. Not fixing it portents more trouble, says an industry executive.
Michael Hurlston is an engineer and not a physician. But he could easily be that health expert warning clients against not completing the full course of their immunization. The virus may mutate and become direly resistant to future treatments, Hurlston might say.
A semiconductor industry veteran and CEO at fabless chipmaker Synaptics Inc., Hurlston’s expertise diverges strongly from medicine. But after witnessing many of the semiconductor industry’s cyclical swings, Hurlston can identify the roots of the recent supply shortages that drove panic buying and crippled many automotive manufacturing plants over the last couple of years.
Read More »That Severe Auto IC Shortage? It Will Happen Soon Again
Auto Industry Euphoric over Chiplets. Why?
What’s at stake?
Although actual chiplet-implemented automotive semiconductor devices aren’t here yet, automakers are busily imagining what chiplets can bring to their future. Is the chiplet mania wishful thinking, or will it finally open the future for flexible, scalable and differentiated automotive semiconductors that carmakers have always wanted?
Responding to a strong pull from the industry, Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC), an international R&D organization backed by strong corporate partnerships, is kicking off the first world-wide automotive-focused chiplet event in Leuven, Belgium on June 20th. It will bring together representatives from more than 25 companies, including tier ones, tier twos, OEMs and tool vendors, Also invited are outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) companies, and foundries.
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