Most read articles in May on eeNews Europe

Feature articles | May 31, 2022

By Nick Flaherty

The top article on eeNews Europe covered a wide range of topics, from boards to chips to the war in Ukraine. The most popular article was the imminent launch of Kontron’s programmable logic controller based around the Raspberry Pi4 compute module.

However it is RISC-V that dominates the list with its gaining momentum. Students in Denmark designed a RISC-V chip with open source tools and had it made on Google’s multi-project wafer service, while Espressif announced a shift away from the Tensilica cores exclusively to RISC-V. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International talked to Nick Flaherty about those trends and the challenges involved, while Dr Sailesh Chittipeddi, Executive Vice President and General Manager of IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit at Renesas Electronics also highlighted the move to RISC-V alongside its recovery in the ARM microcontroller maker in a frank discussion. But there are challenges, as RISC-V startup Rivos found when faced with the legal wrath of Apple.

The industry is heading for a significant decline, says analyst Malcom Penn, backed up by the latest results from Bosch. The supercycle of high demand and capacity shortages will come to an end in Q3 or Q4 this year, and new capacity coming onstream will drive down prices in the industry, which may be good news for customers. This is the continuing cycle of the industry, and doesn’t impact on the long term average growth that will see the semiconductor market doubling to $1tn by 2030, but a dip of 20 to 30% next year will provide some pretty significant bumps in the road that will see 2nm and 1nm process technology. Imec in Belgium also detailed its path beyond 1nm to the age of the atomic transistor.

But there is still plenty of innovation. The first version of the ARM Coretex M5 will be on display next month, while ST Microelectronics is developing its first high performance neural processor unit, running alongside an M55 core. At the same time, a number of deals for FreeRTOS on various microcontrollers was of interest for developers adding secure cloud connectivity to their designs.

The war in Ukraine continues to be an issue for the industry in Europe, with Siemens and contract manufacturer Jabil pulling out of operations in Russia as a result of the continuing hostilities.