Most Read – EV sales, Amkor funding, Imec on chiplets

Let’s take them in reverse order…

5. Three month-old French AI startup loses three out of five founders after raising $220m
H, a French AI startup founded last May with a ‘seed’ round of $220 million, has seen three of its five founders resign. The three, who cited ‘operational differences’ as their reason for resigning, are Karl Tuyls, Daan Wierstra and Julien Perolat. Karl Tuyls was a research director at DeepMind, where he worked on game theory and multi-agent research. Daan Wierstra, who was to be H’s chief scientist, was a founding member at DeepMind. Julien Perolat worked on game theory and multi-agent research at DeepMind.

4. Q2 EV sales up 30% q-o-q
Q2 sales of EVs – including battery, hybrid and fuel cell vehicles – were up nearly 30% q-o-q and 24.2% y-o-y at 3.769 million units, says TrendForce. Battery EV (BEV) salesreached 2.328 million units in 2Q24, an 8% YoY growth. Tesla, the market leader, saw a 4.7% decline in sales y-y. BYD (excluding Denza) ranked second, with BEV sales growing by approximately 20% YoY. BYD exported over 100,000 EVs, including BEVs.

3. Amkor gets $600m Chips Act funding
Amkor, the Korean OSAT specialist, has been awarded $400 million under the US Chips Act and a loan of up to $200 million and a 25% tax credit on infrastructure investments to build a $2 billion test and packaging plant in Peoria, Arizona. “Companies such as TSMC, Apple, and GlobalFoundries will be able to package and test their essential chips domestically, enabling the full end-to-end cycle of the chip manufacturing process to occur in the United States,” says the US Department of Commerce.

2. Metaverse postponed
The Metaverse is some way off with Meta canceling the development of its high-end mixed-reality headset, which was intended to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro. The Metaverse is some way off with Meta canceling the development of its high-end mixed-reality headset, which was intended to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro. The project, named “La Jolla,” was aiming to launch a high end mixed reality head-set using high resolution, high cost, micro-OLED screens in 2027.

1. Chiplets beyond the hype
Imec’s Eric Beyne and Geert Van der Plas have penned this introduction to the Chiplet phenomenon: Ranked by the MIT Tech Review as one of ten breakthrough technologies of 2024, chiplets have made quite the entrance into the semiconductor world, write Beyne and Van der Plas. Chiplets are small, modular chips serving a specific function, such as CPUs or GPUs that can be mixed and matched into a complete system. The Lego-like approach hands manufacturers the flexibility to compose a system cost-effectively with lower entry costs for new chip designs and increased efficiency and performance.