Senior Product Engineer

Japan targets 26% global share in self-driving cars by 2030s. Japan will target a 26% global share in self-driving cars in the 2030s under a new growth strategy that Takaichi Sanae's government plans to draft this summer. The government set numerical goals for 34 of 61 products and technologies chosen in March for priority public and private investment. It also wants Japanese companies' share of undersea cable installations to rise to about 35% by 2030 from 20% now, citing demand tied to AI. For content, the government aims to lift overseas sales of Japanese anime to 6 trillion yen (US$38 billion), in 2033, about four times 2022 levels. Officials plan to add a roadmap covering investment needs and expected economic effects to the growth strategy. Food for thought. Implications, context, and why it matters. Demographic pressures are the driving force behind Japan's new growth strategy. * The targets respond to demographic strain, since Japan has the world's highest share of people aged 65 and older at 29.1% 1. * Labor gaps are already biting, with a projected shortfall of 36,000 bus drivers by 2030 that is forcing service cuts in cities and rural areas 1. * Freight faces a similar squeeze, as a 36% shortage of truck drivers is expected by 2031 and could reduce national transport capacity by about a third by 2030 2. * Corporate bankruptcies have climbed to a 13-year high and household consumption is falling, so the government is tying its push into self-driving vehicles and AI to keeping growth going despite worker shortages 3. Japan's new strategy is steering rival automakers toward alliances. * To reach its goals for self-driving cars, the government is supporting frameworks that nudge long-time rivals such as Toyota and Honda to work together on AI-powered self-driving technology 4. * Nissan and Honda have also teamed up, saying they have fallen behind foreign rivals and cannot catch up while trying to do everything on their own 5. * Companies are also looking overseas for know-how to speed up work on self-driving technology. * Honda is co-developing AI chips with U.S. startup Mythic, a semiconductor company, under a joint development agreement, while Toyota has a preliminary agreement with Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving technology company, to explore collaboration on autonomous driving technologies 67. Stay updated on the go with our mobile app. Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app. How would you feel if you could no longer use Tech in Asia? Share, tag us, and land on our Wall of!

Mythic selects memBrain technology from Silicon Storage Technology for its next generation of ultra-low-power Analog Processing Units. Mythic has chosen memBrain neuromorphic hardware intellectual property (IP) from Microchip Technology's Silicon Storage Technology (SST) subsidiary for its next-generation edge to enterprise Analog Processing Units (APUs). Mythic will utilize SST's SuperFlash embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) bitcells to deliver high levels of analog compute-in-memory (aCIM) performance per watt. The partnership enables Mythic to achieve 120 TOPS/watt inference processing for power-efficient AI acceleration at the edge and in the data center: Mythic's APUs are targeted to be up to 100 times more energy-efficient than conventional digital Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). One hundred fifty billion units of SST SuperFlash technology that Mythic is licensing have been shipped to date. SuperFlash technology is the de facto eNVM solution for a broad spectrum of industries including industrial, automotive, consumer and computing for critical data and code storage, and is licensed by all of the top ten semiconductor foundries worldwide. "Mythic is pioneering innovative solutions in AI inference processing and AI sensor fusion for industrial, automotive and data center applications, effectively overcoming current AI power limitations," said Mark Reiten, vice president of Microchip's Edge AI business unit. "As the core memory technology for Mythic's next-generation products, memBrain delivers significant power efficiency and high performance for both edge and data center applications." The memBrain cell features: * Up to 8 data bits per bitcell (8 bpc) storage * Single digit nanoamp (nA) bitcell read current * 10-year data retention at operating temperature * 100,000 endurance cycles * Full state machine control of the 8 bpc multi-state write operation * Single cycle multiply-and-accumulate operations for aCIM "Mythic selected SST after an industry-wide search of eNVM technologies and determined the memBrain cell technology best enabled us to achieve the ultra-low-power and high performance required by our customers," said Dr. Taner Ozcelik, Mythic's chief executive officer. "Additionally, the wide foundry availability of its industry-proven SuperFlash technology, coupled with the outstanding support of the SST engineering team has been invaluable during our product development cycle." SST's memBrain technology has been developed and deployed in 40 nm and 28 nm foundry processes using production-ready SuperFlash memory. 22 nm memBrain development is planned to extend the technology roadmap. Designed to provide reliable, high-performance and low-power non-volatile storage directly on the chip, SuperFlash memory is widely used in applications that require fast access times, high endurance and data retention without the need for external memory components. Pricing and Availability Customers interested in SST's memBrain solutions and SuperFlash technology should access the SST website or contact a regional SST sales executive for details. Those interested in Mythic's products should visit the Mythic website or contact Taner Ozcelik at [email protected].

SoftBank-backed AI chip firm Mythic raises $125m to rival Nvidia. Mythic has raised US$125 million in a funding round led by DCVC to advance its AI chip technology and compete with Nvidia. Investors in the round include New Enterprise Associates, Atreides Management, SoftBank Group, Honda Motor, and Lockheed Martin. Mythic develops analog computers designed to process large AI data sets with lower power usage than traditional digital CPUs. The company appointed Taner Ozcelik, a former Nvidia executive, as CEO in 2024. Mythic plans to use the new capital to commercialize its products and expand its customer base. Food for thought. * The company says its analog processing units (APUs) reach 120 trillion operations per second per watt, about 100x the energy efficiency of top GPUs 1, and can process up to 750x more tokens (the chunks of text these models read and generate) per second per watt than Nvidia's highest-end GPUs on large language models 2. The 750x figure comes from internal tests on production silicon validated by customers, with no public MLPerf or other third-party results for independent checks against Nvidia 2. * Software supports ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange, an open model format) and NVIDIA TensorRT (an inference optimizer for Nvidia GPUs), plus mainstream frameworks 2. * The company cites validation by the U.S. Department of Defense, auto original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and defense partners 2. Honda Motor and Lockheed Martin are strategic investors 2. The silicon is in production, and the company raised $125 million, yet it has not named paying customers or design wins 2. * Data centers face rising power limits as AI could use 10% of U.S. electricity by decade's end 1. That pressure prompts teams to look past GPU-heavy inference infrastructure (running trained models to generate outputs). * System integrators (IT services firms that design and deploy hardware/software stacks) with MLOps teams can offer model porting, optimization, plus benchmarking on non-Nvidia accelerators such as Mythic's APUs 2. * Service teams can test whether analog compute or other inference chips cut operating costs plus power use for select edge workloads (on-device or near where data is generated) 2. Early skill in quantization (reducing numerical precision to improve efficiency) and retraining workflows (fine-tuning models after conversion) can set these firms apart 3. How would you feel if you could no longer use Tech in Asia?