By Peter Clarke

What’s at stake:
Processing-in-memory (PIM) has not yet lived up to its potential due to the market strength of incumbent computing architectures and the cost efficiencies of keeping logic and memory manufacturing separate. A number of startups targeting their AI processors at the “edge” are now using variations on the PIM approach within embedded memory on their system-on-chip processors, but most use CMOS logic, and they cannot target the densest form of memory, DRAM. If Samsung and SK Hynix can standardize DRAM components to include PIM then the technique could transform AI processing.

South Korea’s semiconductor leaders Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are working together to standardize processing-in-memory (PIM) in the form of an LPDDR6-PIM DRAM, according to Business Korea. The tasks such a chip might do include some of the highly parallel mathematics operations that are part of machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI).

Read More »Can South Korea Get ‘Processing-in-Memory’ to Stick?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Startups live or die by the amounts they raise. This rule applies even to Tenstorrent, a hot AI company with Jim Keller, a legendary CPU designer, at its helm. Although Keller personally calling Amazon chief Jeff Bezos helped land an undisclosed sum from Bezos’ investment firm, that’s an aberration. Tenstorrent still must go through the wringer. We sat down with the startup’s vice president of investor relations and asked what’s been happening behind the scenes.

Tenstorrent just closed $693 million in its Series D round.

In a media environment where people constantly crave more AI stories, news of a hot AI processor company gets headlines. But among investors, we suspect that things are much different. Just being an AI company doesn’t grease the fast track to funding. 

That got me thinking.

Read More »What Drove Investors to Fund (or Decline) Tenstorrent

By Bolaji Ojo

Intel Corp. is the story. Not former CEO Patrick Gelsinger, whose tenure ended abruptly on Sunday.

Neither is the story about the company’s newly appointed co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus. Like Gelsinger, both are minor characters in the Intel saga, their current positions fleeting. Preferably, Zinsner’s and Holthaus’s tenures should end quickly and as abruptly as Gelsinger’s.

What happens to Intel next and how its future will be shaped should dominate discussions at the company and among its different audiences.

Read More »Intel: It’s Time for the Unthinkable

Siemens EDA builds toward package-board-mechanical integration.

By Bolaji Ojo

In June, 2023, the Ojo-Yoshida Report asked: What’s Next for Microchip’s Steve Sanghi? The answer came in a sudden rush this week.

Sanghi, founder and former CEO of Microchip Technology Inc., is back again in the corner office, having stepped in temporarily to assume leadership of the company from Ganesh Moorthy, who will retire as of the end of November.

A scamp might say Moorthy, a 23-year veteran of Microchip who took over from Sanghi in 2021, was pushed out due to sales problems at the microcontroller vendor. That would not be totally untrue. Microchip is hurting, alongside the rest of the microcontroller market. Other MCU CEOs may be spared, but most suppliers in the sector are rambling through the roughest gloom in the history of the market with at least one year of tepid growth ahead.

It’s rough saying it – and perhaps a tad unfair – but microcontroller vendors mainly have themselves to blame for the mess.

Read More »After Covid, MCU Makers Gambled … and Lost. What’s Next?