By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Ceva CEO Amir Panush has his work cut out for him. The DSP powerhouse’s growth was built on the industry’s standards-based high-quality IP. Now, Panush has to chart a new course as a pure-play IP company in a rough-and-tumble ‘Smart Edge’ market that’s still emerging and very fragmented. The odds are getting tougher.

Decades ago, Ceva took the cellular communication market by storm by licensing its DSP cores to clients who needed to design baseband processors for mobile phones and base stations.

The Israeli company thus emerged as a DSP powerhouse, as the worldwide demand for cellular phones kept soaring.

Ceva’s next step, in the mid-2000’s, however, had an even bigger impact. It struck gold in 2014 by acquiring RivieraWaves, a private company based in France. The French company provided wireless connectivity IP for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies – which do not depend on Ceva’s DSP. This acquisition became a new growth engine for the Israeli company.

Read More »CEO Panush Writes Ceva’s Next Growth Chapter

By Peter Clarke

The IMEC research institute presented a development at the recent International Electron Devices Meeting that could be part of a game-changing new wave in image sensors.

It is well-known that memory and logic designers have wrestled with problems as circuit complexity has increased while planar geometry scaling has hit limits. The same is true, although for different reasons, for the CMOS image sensor.

Read More »Waveguide Casts CMOS Image Sensors in a New Light

By Ron Wilson

What’s at stake:
One of the most important issues — and one of the least discussed — in creating multi-die systems is the substrate technology. There are several roads into the future, going in different directions. But one of them holds unique promise.

Much of the current excitement about chiplets tends to overlook an important point. Every multi-die system-in-package rests — quite literally — on a substrate. The characteristics of that substrate influence everything about the finished system, from the architecture to the cost to the likelihood of it ever reaching customers.

Read More »Chiplets: What Lies Below?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Lop-sided wins by a few companies have become the norm in certain segments of the semiconductor industry, specifically Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in the foundry business and Nvidia in the AI chip market. Armed with unfair advantages they have created for themselves, these two giants leave little room for competitors to operate.  

How did the industry let it happen?

Read More »If Nvidia Is AI Hardware’s Goliath, Where’s David?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Among all sensors designed into modern vehicles, lidars have seen the most upheaval – to a degree unanticipated even by leading lidar companies. There are no assurances even lidar pioneers like Valeo can keep up with the rapidly changing market landscape.

The causes for this volatility, or attributed to dynamism, include technology advancements, the rise and fall of robotaxis, rapid growth in Chinese EVs, a geographical split among OEMs marketing automated vehicles (L2+, L2++ vs L3), and the death of lidar companies who rode the SPAC boom until their investors bailed.

Read More »Why Is Valeo Clinging to Lidar?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
After shedding Mobileye, Intel has searched its soul to intuit how it can make a difference in a congested automotive chip market. Rather than shoving more teraflops into a car’s central compute technology, Intel believes its new mission is addressing unanswered questions with which carmakers are grappling — safer, software-defined vehicle architecture, much more energy efficient EVs and the dawn of the chiplet. With no quick fixes possible, is Intel ready to play the long game?

Twenty-five years ago, when Microsoft at CES pitched a plan to wedge its operating system and PC technology into the living room, TV set manufacturers wept crocodile tears for consumers. “The last thing we want,” CE companies said, is “the blue screen of death on their living room TVs.”

Fast forward to 2024. Intel Corp. slouches toward CES, unveiling its all-out plans for the automotive market. Will this moment in history become yet another example of the PC industry horning in on somebody else’s business?

Not necessarily.

Read More »Intel: It’s the Whole Car, Not Teraflops