Most Read Articles – QLC NAND, Gen AI, RISC-V

5. Rivos raises $250m to make RISC-V-based AI ICs
Rivos has raised $250 million to make datacentre AI processors using RISC-V cores. Rivos was founded by its CEO Puneet Kumar who worked at P.A. Semi and was sued for theft of trade secrets by Apple when he left P.A. to found Rivos in 2021. “The rapid changes in LLMs and the merger with the data analytics stack makes it vital that accelerators be easy to program and debug, and that data can seamlessly move between CPU and accelerator,” says Kumar. “Rivos addresses this need through our recompile-not-redesign approach.”

4. Airbus orders outstrip Boeing [Mannerisms]
Boeing’s deliveries of commercial aircraft faltered in Q1, according to the company’s reports. Boeing delivered 83 planes in Q3, down from 130 in Q1 2023. Airbus, saw an uptick in Q1, having delivered 142 of their planes, marking an increase from their Q1 2023 figure of 127.

3. Gen AI sparks IC boom, says Yole
Datacentre GPU and AI ASIC revenue could reach $156 billion by 2025 and $233 billion by 2029, says Yole Developpement. The massive growth that the data center GPU and AI ASIC market experienced in 2023 is expected to continue in 2024 before stabilising in 2025. Generative AI’s rise since late 2022 has boosted demand for high-speed memory technologies, including DDR5 DRAM, GDDR6 DRAM, etc., as well as HBM. Bit shipments are expected to keep growing vigorously in the next five years.

2. The 007 Contract
Huawei is building a $1.66 billion R&D complex in Shanghai as big as 224 football pitches to develop chip manufacturing equipment, reports the Nikkei. An important area will be litho machines. The Western ban on sales of advanced manufacturing equipment to China is behind the investment. The centre will employ 35,000 workers. Wireless and smartphone R&D will also be carried out there. Salary packages for staff are said to be up to double the going rate but the hours are brutal according to the Nikkei.

1. Micron in mass production of 232-layer QLC NAND
Micron is in mass production of a 232-layer QLC NAND which is shipping in select Crucial SSDs, in volume production to enterprise storage customers and sampling to OEM PC manufacturers in the Micron 2500 NMVe SSD. The NAND chip comes in capacities of 512GB, 1024GB and 2048GB. It has a sequential 1MB readIMG_2917-150×150.png up to 7100 MB/s, a sequential 1MB write up to 6000 MB/s, a random 4KB read up to 1000 KIOPS and a random 4KB write up to 1000 KIOPS. Latency is read (TYP): 50μs, writev (TYP): 12μs. MTTF is 2 million device hours.