Interview While the IT industry waits to see if and when Intel will introduce software-defined silicon in Xeon CPUs, one startup us is moving ahead with plans to bring a pay-for-what-you-use pricing model to the telecom market with its "base station-on-a-chip" later this year.
Silicon Valley-based EdgeQ, which is led by Qualcomm and Intel executives, announced last week that it has begun sampling an EdgeQ-based 5G small cell and OpenRAN PCIe accelerator card for base stations with telecom operators and equipment makers.
Things are apparently moving smoothly enough for the startup that Adil Kidwai, EdgeQ's head of product management, told The Register that its RISC-V-based chip will appear in mass-manufactured products like small cells and base station accelerator cards "by the end of this year."
If EdgeQ chips appear in telecom products on schedule, it could represent a significant change in how companies pay for equipment. That's because the startup is offering its chip first and foremost as software-defined silicon, meaning an organization would only have to pay for the features it uses, that can be toggled on or off through over-the-air updates from EdgeQ and its system partners.
EdgeQ believes the software-defined silicon model will make it more cost-effective and, therefore, more feasible for organizations to transition from 4G networks to 5G networks. The reason, according to Kidwai, is the model will allow organizations to spread out the costs for ramping up 5G deployments and adding new features, rather than paying a lot of money upfront for the equipment and any unwanted options.
"If you buy from anybody else other than EdgeQ, you have to pay for all the features on the get-go, which means a lot of capex investment. With EdgeQ, what you can do is you can buy features à la carte," said Kidwai, who previously worked on network and AI products at Intel.
This means, for example, an IT manager at an organization can start out by only paying for basic connectivity features in an EdgeQ-based small cell and then upgrading over time to new features, like network slicing, location services, and ultra-low latency.
"You can buy a low-latency feature, and six months down the line, if you want more throughput or more bandwidth, if you want to go from 2x2 to 4x4 [antennas], or you want to move from 1 Gbps to 5 Gbps, you don't have to buy a new box," Kidwai said.
With EdgeQ's chip supporting 4G connectivity in addition to 5G, the startup claims the software-defined silicon model can help organizations save money in their transition from 4G to 5G. This supposes a scenario where an organization buys an EdgeQ-based small cell and pays only for 4G connectivity before eventually making an upgrade to 5G.
"EdgeQ is the only solution in the world which can enable a seamless transition over the air without throwing away any capex investment that you have," Kidwai said.
The startup is making software-defined silicon sound like a boon for the industry, but if ceding complete control over a box in exchange for consumption-based pricing doesn't sound like your cup of tea, EdgeQ said its chip also has performance and efficiency advantages over rivals.
Kidwai claimed that the EdgeQ-based 5G small cell that's being sampled can currently provide 2.2 Gbps, which is roughly 10x the speed of what 4G small cells in the market provide now. He added that EdgeQ expects to reach 5 Gbps in throughput within the next few months.
"From a power consumption perspective, we are only one-third of the nearest competitor," Kidwai said. ®
The global economy may be in a tenuous situation right now, but the semiconductor industry is likely to walk away from 2022 with a "healthy" boost in revenues, according to analysts at IDC. But beware oversupply, the analyst firm warns.
Semiconductor companies across the world are expected to grow collective revenues by 13.7 percent year-on-year to $661 billion, IDC said in research published Wednesday. Global semiconductor revenue last year was $582 billion.
"Overall, the semiconductor industry remains on track to deliver another healthy year of growth as the super cycle that began in 2020 continues this year," said Mario Morales, IDC group vice president of semiconductors.
Big Tech in America has had enough of Congress' inability to pass pending legislation that includes tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to boost semiconductor manufacturing and R&D in the country.
In a letter [PDF] sent to Senate and House leaders Wednesday, the CEOs of Alphabet, Amazon, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, VMware, and dozens of other tech and tech-adjacent companies urged the two chambers of Congress to reach consensus on a long-stalled bill they believe will make the US more competitive against China and other countries.
"The rest of the world is not waiting for the US to act. Our global competitors are investing in their industry, their workers, and their economies, and it is imperative that Congress act to enhance US competitiveness," said the letter.
The semiconductor market is flattening out after a period of record revenues, according to research outfit Omdia.
The report joins a growing list of warnings that the chip industry is heading for a slowdown because of companies stockpiling components and global economic effects such as inflation.
Omdia's latest analysis of the worldwide semiconductor market shows that it reached a plateau in the first quarter of 2022 following five straight quarters of record revenues and continual growth in demand.
Scientists in Germany claim to have developed bipolar transistors from organic materials, opening a path for flexible and transparent electronics.
The study, led by Shu-Jen Wang, post-doctoral researcher Technische Universität Dresden, built an organic bipolar junction transistor using doped rubrene. That could help the semiconductor industry to make the switch to organic materials, increasing access to a wide library of materials for building electronic devices.
Transistors are the basis of today's digital circuits and, at a simple level, allow one signal to control another. They can amplify a signal, or switch between 'on' and 'off' states, through control of a current of charge carriers – which are either electrons or their positive counterpart (holes), or both.
In the world of fabless chip designers, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm usually soak up the most attention since their chips are fueling everything from top-end supercomputers to mobile devices.
This hunger for compute is what has allowed all three companies to grow revenue in the high double digits recently. But there's one fabless chip designer that is growing faster among the largest in the world and it's far from a household name: Marvell Technology.
Silicon Valley-based Marvell grew semiconductor revenue by 72 percent to $1.4 billion in the first quarter, which made it the fastest growing out of the top 10 largest fabless chip designers during that period, according to financials compiled by Taiwanese research firm TrendForce.
If you've been ripping your hair out about the ongoing semiconductor shortage, you should know that chip manufacturers are at least trying to spend their way out of the problem at record levels.
Chipmakers across the world are expected to increase spending on equipment for front-end manufacturing plants by 20 percent to an all-time high of $109 billion in 2022, according to the latest World Fab Forecast report from semiconductor industry group SEMI.
To help illustrate how much money semiconductor companies are spending on fab equipment, consider the fact that they only handed over $55 billion for new kit in 2019, which means that the estimated investments this year represent a roughly 2x increase from three years ago.
Intel has found a new way to voice its displeasure over Congress' inability to pass $52 billion in subsidies to expand US semiconductor manufacturing: withholding a planned groundbreaking ceremony for its $20 billion fab mega-site in Ohio that stands to benefit from the federal funding.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was tentatively scheduled to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the Ohio manufacturing site with state and federal bigwigs on July 22. But, in an email seen by the newspaper, the x86 giant told officials Wednesday it was indefinitely delaying the festivities "due in part to uncertainty around" the stalled Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
That proposed law authorizes the aforementioned subsidies for Intel and others, and so its delay is holding back funding for the chipmakers.
The Gallium group, believed to be a Chinese state-sponsored team, is going on the warpath with an upgraded remote access trojan (RAT) that threat hunters say is difficult to detect.
The deployment of this "PingPull" RAT comes as the gang is broadening the types of organizations in its sights from telecommunications companies to financial services firms and government entities across Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa, according to researchers with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence group.
The backdoor, once in a compromised system, comes in three variants, each of which can communicate with the command-and-control (C2) system in one of three protocols: ICMP, HTTPS and raw TCP. All three PingPull variants have the same functionality, but each creates a custom string of code that it sends to the C2 server, which will use the unique string to identify the compromised system.
Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.
The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.
The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.
Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-yong is said to be courting Dutch chipmaker NXP on a visit to Europe to bolster the company's position in the automotive semiconductor market.
According to the Asian Tech Press, Jae-yong, who has been released on probation after serving time on corruption charges, is expected to visit several chipmakers and semiconductor manufacturing vendors including the Netherland's NXP and ASML, as well as Germany's Infineon. Press became aware of Jae-yong's plans after a Seoul Central District Court approved the vice chairman's travel plans.
NXP offers a wide array of microprocessors, power management, and wireless chips for automotive, communications, and industrial applications. However, the Asian Tech Press said Samsung's interest in the company, which is valued at approximately $56 billion, is primarily rooted in the company's automotive silicon.
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