As widely reported by the media, the Semiconductor Industry Association has sent a letter to President Biden urging him to include in his recovery and infrastructure plan “substantial funding for incentives for semiconductor manufacturing, in the form of grants and/or tax credits, and for basic and applied semiconductor research.” According to SIA, “bold action is needed to address the challenges we face. The costs of inaction are high.” Speaking of challenges,TSMC Board of Directors has recently approved the issuance of bonds for a total amount of nearly $9 billion to finance TSMC’s capacity expansion and/or pollution prevention related expenditures. The Board has also approved the establishment of a wholly owned subsidiary in Japan to expand TSMC’s 3DIC material research, investing $186 million.
Processor updates: Micro Magic, Alibaba, Baidu, NeuReality
Sunnyvale-based Micro Magic claims it has developed an ultra-low power 64-bit Risc-V core consuming only 10mW at 1Ghz, thus achieving a record breaking 250,000 Coremarks/Watt performance. According to the company, the processor – built in a 16nm FinFET process – reaches such an outstanding efficiency when running at a 350mV supply voltage.
Some architecture and performance details about the processors developed by Chinese Internet giants Alibaba and Baidu have recently been made available – along with tons of other interesting content – on the HotChips conference website (HC32 archive). Presentations from the 2020 edition of the event include slides from Alibaba Group describing the Xuantie 910 processor and the Hanguang 800 NPU, as well as slides from Baidu providing some details about the Kunlun processor.
NeuReality, an Israel-based AI hardware startup, has reportedly emerged from stealth mode announcing an $8 million seed round and the addition of Naveen Rao, the GM of Intel’s AI Products Group and former CEO of Nervana System, to the company’s board of directors. NeuReality is reportedly developing a high performance inference platform for datacenters.
