By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
“Saving lives” on roads shouldn’t be a pie-in-the-sky ‘vision’ owned by companies pushing self-driving cars. To save lives today, we need something far more earthbound: stop people from drinking and driving. Can in-vehicle alcohol detection systems freshly mandated in the U.S. address the problem, and will consumers cooperate?

Throwing technologies at social problems has always been a tricky proposition.

Read More »Your Next Car Will Know How Drunk You Are

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
For years, Nvidia has hung its hat on autonomous driving as the linchpin of its AI technologies. However, that revenue stream is waning, not because AV is a solved problem but because it is just too hard a problem to solve. What’s the next big AI application? 

GTC, put together by Nvidia, is one of the world’s premier conferences dedicated to AI developers. Nvidia has used the venue to showcase its AI prowess built on GPU technology.

For several years, AI-enabled autonomous driving has highlighted every GTC. Nvidia presented its AI solutions — deployed in data centers for AI training and its multi-thousand teraflops SoC inside vehicles’ central brains doing AI inference. 

However, it was evident in a pre-GTC briefing this week that Nvidia has begun singing a markedly different tune on fully automated driving. 

Read More »Robocar No Longer Drives Nvidia GTC

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake?
Ahead of its GTC AI and metaverse conference for developers next week, we review the budding results of Nvidia’s decade-long investment in artificial intelligence and its steady buildup of a strong hardware and software position in the segment. Nvidia is aiming for the AI Moon, and it may just be within its reach.

Artificial Intelligence, warts and all, appears destined to play a significant role not just in the semiconductor industry but also in the larger global economy over the next decade and Nvidia Corp. is setting itself up as a pioneer and major beneficiary of the new expected opportunities.   

Read More »Nvidia: Not ‘Just a Chip Company’ Anymore

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
In an era of increasingly diversified embedded and IoT system designs, competition among semiconductor companies is no longer about whose chip has the best performing spec. The industry’s attention is quickly shifting toward development platforms. At stake for chip vendors is whether they have chops to design effective tools that offer flexibility, ease of use, and the accelerated design cycle that customers want.

The business model in semiconductors is in flux. Chip companies can no longer rest easy with a conventional one-time approach to revenue generation.

Nowadays, many companies hope to develop a better mousetrap that can turn one-time customers into a “captive audience” generating “a recurring revenue stream.”

Read More »IoT Chip Suppliers Race for a Better Mousetrap

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
RISC-V’s open-standard instruction set architecture has already proven an effective underlying technology for designers seeking differentiated microcontrollers/microprocessors. Will RISC-V find a new home in FPGAs? Microchip believes it has the answer.

Microchip is enjoying a market resurgence for its FPGA products.

Originally developed by Actel Corp., later acquired by Microsemi (October 2010), and now owned by Microchip (May 2018), the peripatetic FPGA is known for its immunity to single event upsets and for military-grade reliability. Those attributes have opened opportunities for Microchip’s FPGAs in avionics, military, and medical electronics markets.

Read More »Microchip: Riding RISC-V All the Way to New FPGA Platform

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Renesas is aiming for much higher sales and market value by 2030. CEO Shibata believes the goals are achievable but becoming a $20 billion revenue enterprise with six times the capitalization may not depend solely on the company. The cyclical market will also have to play ball.

Read More »Renesas Aims High but Industry Cycle May Take a Toll

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake:
The successful rollout of breakthrough technologies is often the raison d’être of startups. Yet, the more unfamiliar the technology, the tougher for a fledgling startup to get the world on board. So it has gone for Prophesee. Prophesee, nonetheless, is on the cusp of turning its event-based image sensor into mainstream image-capture features for smartphone cameras. The startup owes this progress to its two big partners. Sony put Prophesee through the wringer, forcing it to meet its stringent milestone schedule for event-based CMOS image sensor development. A new alliance with Qualcomm provides its Snapdragon platform to run Prophesee’s fusion software.

By teaming with Sony, the world’s largest CMOS image sensor company, and Qualcomm, which commands a 50-percent share of the mobile SoC market, Prophesee, a Paris-based startup, is finally finding a massive volume market for its unique event-based cameras in smartphones.

Read More »Prophesee’s Big Three: Sony, Qualcomm and Smartphones