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Straight From the Heart: Startup Celtro Eyes Self-Powered Pacemakers

Straight From the Heart: Startup Celtro Eyes Self-Powered Pacemakers

By Adele Hars

What’s at stake?
The pacemaker envisioned by Celtro is both leadless and battery-free. The company sees a big market opportunity, but there are miles to go to get there. A prototype is three years away.

Every year, about a million people around the world get a pacemaker implant – and every single one of those implants is battery powered. Celtro, an early-stage startup in Dresden, Germany, aims to create a new generation of pacemakers that run on energy harvested continuously and directly from the biochemical reactions that produce energy in cardiac cells.  Following Celtro’s recently announced seed-funding round, the Ojo-Yoshida Report had the opportunity to speak with the CEO, Gerd Teepe.

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Mobileye Radar Image

Imaging Radar Gets a Second Look for AVs

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Mobileye is promising “true redundancy” for Level 4 consumer autonomous vehicles by adding a subsystem that pairs a single LiDAR with a blanket of software-defined radar sensors. The company believes its new 4D imaging radars will be pivotal in the push to L4, and the market indeed appears to be giving radar a second look. Given the rise of competing approaches and LiDAR’s installed base in L2/L2+ cars and robotaxis, the challenges for Mobileye are its own aggressive timetable and the relative cost and complexity of its approach.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this month, the auto industry got a dose of reality and a fresh outlook on what’s in — and what’s in store — for the automotive sensor market.

What’s in? Imaging radar.

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Amnon Shashua, Mobileye CEO, at CES 2022

Mobileye Consumer AV Push: Facts Behind the Math?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The AV industry has generally come to accept that the highly automated vehicle market will start with robotaxis, scheduled for rollout one city at a time. Consumer-owned AVs without human drivers are believed to be years — some say decades — away. But Mobileye, whose parent company Intel plans to take it public later this year, is pushing an aggressive timetable for consumer AVs, warning the industry that consumer and industrial AV development must proceed in tandem if both sectors are to succeed. For now, OEMs are left with the daunting task of checking Mobileye’s math.

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The Inscrutability of Black Ice

The Inscrutability of Black Ice

By David Benjamin

“As someone who doesn’t drive, I am not sure how an AI would handle icy road conditions… Autonomous cars are not going to get angry, commit road rage-related crimes, or panic when suddenly confronted with black ice.” —Johnna Crider, CleanTechnica, Dec. 23, 2021

Like many other folks, I’ve faced the prospect of death a number of times. But in none of those circumstances was I ever palpably scared — until the whole horror was over with and I had a chance to think of how close I’d come to strolling into the sunset hand-in-hand with the Grim Reaper.

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Automotive Chip Drought Alters OEM/Supplier Balance of Power

Automotive Chip Drought Alters OEM/Supplier Balance of Power

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
With last year’s chip shortage expected to linger well into 2022, any quick fix is fantasy. Automotive OEMs’ dramatic rethink of next-gen architectures extends to their IC partners, which face new expectations for interchangeable platforms and improved visibility into their business. OEMs are spending massively, and chip designers want that money. The questions come down to the accommodations chipmakers are willing to make, and how creative their solutions will be, as they pursue tighter OEM relationships.  

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Datacenter on Wheels

TOPS Priorities Shift for ‘Datacenter on Wheels’

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
As the activity around CES 2022 makes clear, tech suppliers are hurtling toward more computing power, AI acceleration, and higher-resolution sensors for automotive platforms. But as compute and sensor capabilities grow exponentially, so does the pressure on auto OEMs to pick the right building blocks and implement them to optimal effect in their next-generation cars.

Read More »TOPS Priorities Shift for ‘Datacenter on Wheels’
Daniel Cooley

Silicon Labs’ CTO on IoT ‘Catalyst Moments’

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?‌
‌When it comes to easy-to-use IoT, we are still not there. The stakes are high for a pure-play IoT company like Silicon Labs. Silicon Labs’ CTO Daniel Cooley explains why Matter, an upcoming smart-home interoperability protocol backstopped by Apple, Google and others, matters in the consumer IoT space. He also pinpoints the breakthrough events in IoT’s journey thus far.

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Intel: Time to Break up the Mothership

Intel: Time to Break up the Mothership

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?
Intel has long ruled the semiconductor world, but its dominance is coming to an end. The proposed IPO of its Mobileye division heralds a new dawn marked by the potential breakup of the industry icon.

Intel Corp. wants to hang on as the majority shareholder at Mobileye after it takes its automotive-IC subsidiary public in 2022. That status will last only a few years following the initial public offering. The same forces that led CEO Pat Gelsinger to reconsider Mobileye’s position as an integral part of Intel’s continuing operations will compel the full separation of the unit and result in even more fundamental changes at the parent.

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