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Supply Chain has Become the Electronics Industry’s Defining Topic

ESMC, RISC-V: Supply Chain has Become the Electronics Industry’s Defining Topic

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
The electronics industry has always been consumed by the search for the “next big thing,” that huge design, product or new market that would create massive revenue and profits for the first group of companies to release it. The supply chain that brings these “breakthroughs” to the market is not typically in the limelight. Until now. Look no further than just announced European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a Dresden-based new foundry led byTSMC, joined by Bosch, Infineon and NXP. Another example is a brand new RISC-V JV, equally shared among NXP, Infineon, Qualcomm, Bosch and Nordic, unveiled late last week. For the foreseeable future, creating effective supply chains via partnerships will be the industry’s greatest passion. Pay attention.

In the world of electronics, the design engineer is a demi-god.

He (usually a man but, thank goodness, increasingly less so nowadays), designs, throws his creation over the wall and everyone else scrambles to bring it to production and sell to customers. The only engineers who get involved in the post-design processes are typically those who moved into management, sales positions and components engineers.

This is a worn process. The industry goes through it daily, thousands of times, and all over the world. Which makes engineers believe they rule the roost.

Read More »ESMC, RISC-V: Supply Chain has Become the Electronics Industry’s Defining Topic
supply chain

Yes, it is the Supply Chain, Ladies & Gents

By Bolaji Ojo

What’s at stake:
Modern commerce, of any kind, hangs on the strengths, durability and effectiveness of the supply chain(s) that supports it. In the electronics industry, when the supply chain is fragile, porous or insufficiently flexible, disaster is never far away, notwithstanding the type of business, the value or uniqueness of the design. Engineers, too, are negatively impacted when the supply chain crashes. Now, they are teaming up with other players to find solutions. Will this be a permanent move or will the momentum die as quickly as the next cycle?

What does the global electronics industry have in common with The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway’s ageless story of one man’s struggle with fate?

Read More »Yes, it is the Supply Chain, Ladies & Gents
Global Forecast

Chips, Politics, High Numbers

By Peter Clarke

Don’t trust the headline-grabbing numbers.

We’ve had a spate of semiconductor factory announcements in recent days from the U.S. semiconductor leaders Intel and Micron. They mentioned multibillion-dollar sums of money. Those who made timely appearances in such announcement were leaders of governments despite their busy agendas.

Read More »Chips, Politics, High Numbers
Stalag 17

Regressive AI

By David Benjamin

“Sgt. Schulz: How do you expect to win the war with an army of clowns?
“Lt. Dunbar: We sort of hope you’d laugh yourselves to death.”

                                                                        —Sig Ruman and Don Taylor in Stalag 17

I can’t help but sympathize with the writers’ strike in Hollywood. The news is that the script writers and screenplay authors in the movie biz, as well as those who write copy and compose jingles for commercials, are spooked about the adoption — by the film, television and streaming industries — of “generative artificial intelligence (AI),” the clever technology that powers ChatGPT and its brethren.

AI apps that mimic human speech and writing and devise deceptively realistic photos and video are, by their nature and function, an affront to those of us who have put in years of miserably remunerative labor over notebooks and keyboards as we evolve into good writers.

On the other hand, we’re talking Hollywood, where the vast bulk of the writing, by order of the powers that be, is only sporadically — often accidentally — “good,” and might not even be anthropomorphically “generative.” How many sincere and gifted “content providers” are allowed, in the risk-averse, copycat culture of film and TV production, to be actually and palpably inventive?

Read More »Regressive AI