By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
Whether foundry, processor IP company, or EDA vendor, practically every major player in the electronics industry is scrambling to adapt its business strategies, product lines and roadmaps to exploit the explosive growth of AI. What does the AI community want from EDA and who among EDA tool suppliers can rise to the occasion?

Everyone in the electronics industry wants to surf the AI wave. Just discussing AI is good business. Wall Street is listening.

More significantly, AI has begun breaking traditional business models and tech development practices. To process AI, hardware must be able to handle massive software workloads. AI chips/accelerators also typically require huge designs.

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
China’s chiplet aspirations are well known. But will China use its domestic chiplet activities as an opportunity to decouple from the rest of the world? We think the reality is contrary.

Chiplets represent a once-in-a-lifetime revolution that will allow the semiconductor world to disaggregate the processes of designing, manufacturing, testing and packaging silicon – the fundamental matter who does what. China wants to seize this moment to play a big role in this new world order.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.