Blind Freddie asked me to link this article with the above post. When I asked why he said it was obvious:
POSTED ON
MAY 2, 2022 UPDATED ON
MAY 18, 2022
Osaka, Japan-based ASIC provider, MegaChips Corp. (Japan) has announced its entry into the US market. MegaChips is one of the world’s leading custom ASIC providers for consumer, telecom/network, industrial and automotive apps. Headquartered in Japan, it has offices in Silicon Valley and Taiwan. MegaChips is ISO9001 certified and ensures the highest levels of intellectual property security.
Douglas Fairbairn.
Right on time!
Looking at the announcement, has Megachips made a late entry into the global edge AI chips market? Douglas Fairbairn, Director of Business Development for MegaChips LSI USA Corp., said: “From our perspective, we’re not late for production, but right on time. There have been a number of companies entering this market from an IP point of view. However, those companies, in general, are still gaining traction and are not yet at the volume production stage, which is where we’re most interested in participating. We see a lot of market potential for volume ahead of us. There are still areas that might be a good early entry point for us to take advantage of beginning in 2022, and ramping up in 2023 and 2024.”
There are already a couple of areas where volume has been attained, such as the data center market, which is dominated by Nvidia and Intel. However, MegaChips is not addressing that market.
So, how is the AI chip industry positioned to address emerging cases for integrated processors, etc.? By integrated processors, things like RISC-V, or ARM, that are being embedded in other chips, or in SoCs. If that’s the case, the AI chip industry is very well positioned to take advantage of that emerging trend, which has been underway for some time.
What people have found is that the existing processors from ARM or RISC-V do not address the power performance requirements of the AI industry. There are some low-end cases that can be handled with software on these embedded processors. In general, people are looking for either accelerators to pair with those processors, or completely new processors, that would replace the embedded processor and AI into a much higher performance functionality.
In this case, MegaChips’ partner, BrainChip, is an example of an accelerator that would be combined with the existing embedded processors. In the case of its other IP partner, Quadric, they could be either used as an accelerator, or even supersede the need for an embedded processor.”