Top articles in July on eeNews Europe

Feature articles | July 31, 2024

By Nick Flaherty

July saw some key AI acquisitions in Europe, from AMD to Graphcore.

AMD bought Europe’s largest private AI lab, Silo.ai, for $665m in July, while the acquisition of UK AI chip design Graphcore was confirmed by Softbank. Reports estimated that the deal was worth $400m, less than the funding raised by the company over the last few years. But this does provide Softbank with a chip business and deals with TSMC alongside its ownership of ARM.

An ARM microcontroller was also at the heart of a system in package for edge AI alongside a sparse AI accelerator from Femtosense, while MikroE provided a snappy path for its Click boards to move from prototyping to production.

In one of the best slogans for a while, the Dutch industry launched its rallying cry of ‘No Chips, No Glory’ to boost the supply chain with a funding bid under the EU Chips Act as the president of the Commission was re-elected for a second term..

Wildfires are breaking out around the world again this summer, and researchers have used a specially developed physics-based AI framework to predict how the fires will travel in a move that could save lives.

A more precise atomic clock is opening up improved navigation systems, while the news that Microchip has expanded into the 64bit market is a key article this month. The company is planning other 64bit architectures alongside these first ARM devices for both embedded and space applications.

But it is the development of a sub 1nm transistor technology that was of most interest in the month. The researchers in Korea have grown one dimensional metallic layers that can be as small as 0.4nm for process technologies in 2035 and beyond.