What are the topics covered? There’s Wolfspeed and Jaguar Land Rover announcing a strategic supply partnership, 16Mbit FRAM (ferroelectric RAM) aimed at automotive applications, Synaptics buying AI visual sensing specialist, SiFive RISC-V processing cores and the US strategy over China’s advanced chip industry….
5. Jaguar Land Rover secures Wolfspeed silicon carbide for its electric vehicles
Wolfspeed and Jaguar Land Rover have announced a strategic supply partnership for silicon carbide electric vehicle power train semiconductors. “Wolfspeed’s silicon carbide technology will be used specifically in the vehicles’ inverter, managing the transfer of power from the battery to the electric motors,” according to the car company. “The first Range Rover vehicles with this technology will be available from 2024, and the new all-electric Jaguar brand the following year.”
4. 16Mbit FRAM for automotive and industry
Infineon Technologies is taking orders for 8 and 16Mbit FRAM (ferroelectric RAM) aimed at automotive and industrial non-volatile data-logging. “The memories feature operation from 1.71V to 3.6V, support up to 54Mbit/s of throughput over a low-pin count interface and are available in a RoHS-compliant, 24ball FBGA package,” according to the company. “These products combine low-power operation with instant nonvolatility and unlimited read/write cycle endurance.” It claimed read and write performance of equivalent to parallel-interface battery-backed static RAMs with 35ns access time.
3. Synaptics buys Emza Visual Sense
Synaptics has bought Emza Visual Sense, the AI visual sensing specialist. The addition extends Synaptics’ position in Edge AI and allows it to immediately serve the PC market with a proven solution for human presence detection (HPD) applications, supporting look-away detect and on-looker detect features, while addressing system user security and privacy concerns
2. High-performance RISC-V cores from SiFive
SiFive has announced two high-performance RISC-V processing cores. “P670 and P470 are specifically designed for the most demanding workloads for wearables and other advanced consumer applications,” said SiFive v-p Chris Jones. “We have optimised these RISC-V Vector-enabled products to deliver performance and efficiency improvements and we are in evaluations with a number of top-tier customers.” Both are also available in space-saving versions without vector units.
1. A Witty Strategy [Mannerisms]
The US has been either very witty or very lucky in its strategy of denying China an advanced chip industry. The US sat idly by as China spent hundreds of billions of dollars – $170 billion alone in the National Integrated Circuit Fund – on subsidising fabs and startups. Then it set to picking off these investments one by one for various reasons – stealing IP, selling to the military, supplying unauthorised customers etc etc – until one by one the projects failed as the US denied them software or machinery or skilled people.
