Featured

Does Your Car Know Jack? Or Jill? Or Anyone?

Featured, News & Analysis

What’s at stake:
Cars with features such as highway hands-free operation are designed to work, in principle, “collaboratively” with a human driver. The big caveat is that most carmakers know next to nothing about our real-world driving behavior. At issue is how human drivers and partially automated vehicles can collaborate when neither side knows jack about the other.

Consider the moment when a car disengages its automated features and asks the carbon-based life form behind the wheel to take over. Suddenly, the driver must take charge, regardless of whether he/she is – cognitively or physically – ready.

This is carmakers’ decidedly one-sided expectation, for which human drivers are ill-prepared.

a small company is ro be merged with a bigger company

Analysts: Onsemi Is Natural Candidate to Buy Wolfspeed

Conversation, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Silicon-based power electronics devices and silicon carbide (SiC) power devices have commonalities. Suppliers of both types tend to be more vertically integrated. Where they diverge is their yields. SiC yield – from wafers to devices – is dramatically lower than silicon-based power devices. With everyone racing to nail down base manufacturing technology, the stakes center on how long Wolfspeed can keep competitors at bay.

To be clear, Wolfspeed is not for sale.

However, considering all factors affecting today’s silicon carbide (SiC) business, the industry experts tend toward the conclusion that On Semiconductor Corp. (Onsemi) is the most logical suitor to buy Wolfspeed. Here’s why.

The Artificial Me

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By David Benjamin

“Generating a bio is a great way to show people some of the limitations of this system. Asking it to generate a bio for the same person three times in a row is an eye-opener for some. For me it was wrong universities, wrong field of study, and made up some awards that don’t exist. But it did upgrade me to IEEE Fellow (nice!)”

— Prof. Philip Koopman, Carnegie-Mellon University

Phil Koopman devised a foolproof method (see above) for testing the data-farming accuracy of the latest “artificial intelligence” application, ChatGPT—which is supposed to be so good at writing that journalists, p.r. flacks, and even “creative types” like me will soon be tucked away in a bed of mothballs.

Infineon is building the 300mm Smart Power Fab in Dresden

Infineon Flourishes on ‘Good Times’ for Power Semiconductors

Featured, News & Analysis

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?
Seeing robust growth prospects in power semiconductors, Infineon is tightening its viselike hold on the market with acquisitions and investments in new fabs. And it is not keeping quiet about its intentions either.

Infineon Technologies AG has two key messages for its direct competitors and the entire semiconductor industry.

The first missive is simple. A downturn-inducing storm may be brewing in the semiconductor sector but it will not make landfall at Infineon. The company will grow at a double-digit this fiscal year, it said in a March 28 performance update.

Your Next Car Will Know How Drunk You Are

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
“Saving lives” on roads shouldn’t be a pie-in-the-sky ‘vision’ owned by companies pushing self-driving cars. To save lives today, we need something far more earthbound: stop people from drinking and driving. Can in-vehicle alcohol detection systems freshly mandated in the U.S. address the problem, and will consumers cooperate?

Throwing technologies at social problems has always been a tricky proposition.

Corporate Culture? What Corporate Culture?

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Many companies talk up their corporate missions and/or corporate cultures. But these intangible are, well … intangible. It’s hard to judge whether they really mean the corporate slogans printed on posters and tacked up on the wall. But, to veteran observers, there are clues.

Autonomous vehicle companies routinely talk about their “safety first” corporate culture. Companies in every industry spout mottos like “Quality is in our DNA.”

For an outsider, namely me, only one point — beyond platitudes and posters — is clear. They repeat these golden rules because they’re “the right things to say.”

Microchip: Could This M&A Predator Become Prey?

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Microchip actively participated in the consolidation of its industry segment, but its success, rising valuation and stable business make it a target too. Can any rival dare to take it up now that it is so much bigger?

Even after the frenzied mergers and acquisition actions of the last decade, the semiconductor industry still has quite a few juicy targets but not many are as mouth wateringly appealing as Microchip Technology Inc.

The microcontroller supplier is a voracious consolidator that has gobbled up some 25 companies in the last 12 years, but it stands the risks of becoming a victim of its own success.

Microcontroller board connects to an electronic project

Microchip Forges Strategies on MCUs, Analog, Power

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
MCUs are fundamentally different from microprocessors – in product longevity, legacy process nodes and a host of permutations they are expected to offer. But MCU diversity comes with costs. The question is not only how long Microchip can keep up with what it’s doing, but also how it can do better.

The core of Microchip’s business is MCUs, more accurately described as “embedded control,” noted Steve Drehobl, Microchip senior vice president.

Microchip has the full gamut of microcontrollers, ranging from 8- and 16-bit with digital signal controller to 32-bit MCUs and FPGA. But its emphasis is really not so much about the core, Drehobl noted. “It’s all about the peripherals.”

Microchip: Preserving Corporate Culture After M&A

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Microchip has kept what some might consider the lost art of employee-centric management. But how does a company preserve its culture when it keeps acquiring other companies. Microchip has answers.

The human resource management style of Microchip clashes with that of many Silicon Valley companies.

Headquartered in Chandler, Ariz., some 700 miles away from Santa Clara, Calif., Microchip has scrupulously retained, nurtured, and perfected the art of managing a congenial, cohesive, and people-centric company.

Microchip CEO Pursues ‘Bowling Pin’ Strategy

Conversation, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Microchip claims it is no longer so easy to pigeonhole it as an 8-bit MCU company. CEO Ganesh Moorthy explains plans to leverage its bread-and-butter semiconductor products, create more permutations and product combinations, as Microchip plots to lead fragmented embedded/IoT markets.

Microchip is already in the “Things” market, CEO Ganesh Moorthy recently told The Ojo-Yoshida Report. That penetration, in his mind, puts the company in a well-timed position to seize the “megatrend” of the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

Here’s why.