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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (right) and Professor Amnon Shashua, Intel senior vice president and president and CEO of Mobileye, talk during Gelsinger’s visit to Mobileye headquarters in Israel in 2021. (Credit: Mobileye, an Intel Company)

Intel/Mobileye: Not All Mergers Create Equals

Featured, News & Analysis

What’s at stake?
Intel acquired Mobileye in 2017 — nearly a year into the two companies’ joint AV development partnership with BMW — with great expectations for the autonomous-vehicle revolution. But a lot has changed in four years. Today, BMW is hitching a ride with Qualcomm on ADAS/AV development. Next year, Intel will take Mobileye public. At stake is whether Intel can chart an automotive roadmap for Intel-branded products, independent of its high-flying subsidiary.

Wideband Gap Semiconductor Applications.

Silicon Carbide Gets Ready for Prime Time

Featured, News & Analysis

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake

Those who invested early in silicon carbide are seeing their efforts start to pay off. But competitors are popping up everywhere, putting more SiC-related M&A and partnership deals in place. The question is who, over time, can build the right ecosystem to advance SiC technologies, bring down costs and ensure a stable supply of raw materials and SiC wafers.

Unprocessed SiC wafers are transparent, complicating many of the manufacturing steps.

Early Laps of Silicon Carbide Race Go to ST

Featured, News & Analysis

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?‌
‌Vehicle electrification helped push silicon carbide (SiC) out of labs and into systems, making SiC a commercially viable alternative to silicon-based power electronics. Some high-profile names have played key roles in that transition, but it may be too early for any company to claim victory in the evolving SiC technology race. Who’s best positioned to profit from the decades-long SiC development effort?

Crystalline Structure of Silicon Carbide

SiC Power Devices: A Breed Apart

Featured, Truth & Consequences

By Ron Wilson

What’s at stake‌
‌Silicon carbide isn’t just about drill bits and abrasives anymore. The material also goes into transistors that are increasingly vital to green energy and transportation. The SiC supply chain may determine whether you can actually take delivery on that electric car you’ve been thinking about, or the solar panels to help charge it.

Open Letter to Ted Tewksbury, Velodyne’s New CEO

Featured, Opinion

By Junko Yoshida

Dear Ted, ‌
‌‌
‌Velodyne’s recent announcement introducing you as its new CEO didn’t surprise me. You’re the right executive arriving at the right time to correct the course of a vision-challenged company that has lost its way.

Velodyne went public in September 2020 through the dubious mechanism of a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with blank-check company Graph Industrial. Since then, as the corporate board and its largest shareholder have relentlessly exchanged accusations, Velodyne has become best known for its dysfunction.

Farm Drones Going Hog Wild

Audition, Featured

By Junko Yoshida

Drones are coming to the farm, hot above the heels of marauding wild boars.

With the explosive growth of feral hog populations that wreak havoc on crops and fields, farmers worldwide are suffering a significant uptick in crop loss.

Stepping to the front lines in this agricultural clash is Sara Nozkova, CEO and cofounder of Flox Robotics, a drone startup based in Sweden.

NXP Resets, Victim No Longer

Featured, Forensics

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake‌
‌NXP is growing, well above the semiconductor industry average, and is leveraging prior acquisitions and financial strength to establish itself as a major player in the market. Can the company maintain this growth profile in the face of hungry competitors and against the backdrop of its own history? It may take several years for NXP to prove it can withstand market and geopolitical pressures beyond its control.

JIC is a Poor Replacement for JIT

Featured, Opinion

By Bolaji Ojo

The electronics industry is at it again. Notorious for offering bewildering solutions to chronic and possibly unsolvable problems, OEM and semiconductor executives are convulsed with figuring out a fix for the supply shortages that have shuttered some automotive manufacturing plants and crimped sales as global economies struggle to recover from the pandemic.

Open Letter to Zuck: Prove to Us That ‘Ethics in Tech’ Is Not an Oxymoron

Featured, Opinion

By Girish Mhatre

Dear Zuck,

You can hide behind a rebranding, but you can’t run from your most egregious accomplishment: You’ve delivered, in a most terrifying way, on that infamous slogan of yours, “Move fast and break things.” You’ve broken people, societies and dented American democracy. What you’ve built is nothing less than “a toxic propaganda guidebook for the ages,” according to New York Times columnist Kara Swisher.

A New Semiconductor World Imagined

Featured, News & Analysis

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at Stake?
The challenge posed by Nvidia – via its planned acquisition of Arm – to Intel’s x86 architecture is real and potentially unstoppable, and should not be casually dismissed. With a huge market at stake, we expect Intel to fight back hard. But no matter what kind of headwinds Nvidia faces from Intel, Arm licensees and international regulators, the deal signals that a new day is dawning in the chip market – one that will have major ramifications for all the players, and for consumers too.