ELECTRONICS NEWS HIGHLIGHT W11.2024

1. TI lays off power chip R&D team in Beijing

According to the latest information from SEMI, Texas Instruments recently laid off one of its chip design teams in Beijing, which was mainly responsible for low-power chip research and development.

According to insiders, TI’s layoffs were affected by sluggish consumer demand. On the other hand, due to fierce competition from power chip manufacturers in China, TI had to make this layoff decision.

Recently, TI said in its financial report last month that the company’s industrial sector was increasingly weak and the auto industry continued to decline. Many other industries have also experienced declines at different times. It is said that: The tense relationship between China and the US may also be the cause of TI’s revenue decline, leading to layoffs from this company.

Learn more: TI lays off power chip R&D team in Beijing

2. Renesas announces the acquisition of PCB design software leader Altium

According to the latest information from Renesas Electronics Corporation, this group has acquired Altium Limited, one of the leading companies in PCB design – electronic design through an Arrangement Scheme under Australian law. Renesas will acquire all shares of Altium for a total equity value of approximately A$9.1 billion.

Renesas and Altium’s collaboration aims to build a platform for component lifecycle management, integrated electronics system design, and unification of these steps at the system level. The current electronic systems design process is a complex and iterative process involving many stakeholders and design steps, from component selection and evaluation to simulation and physical design PCB management. Unifying these steps at the system level aims to increase efficiency and save costs, shortening development cycles.

With the combination of Altium’s sophisticated cloud platform capabilities and Renesas’ robust Embedded solutions portfolio, combining high-performance, analog processors and connectivity that enables integration with vendors third parties in the ecosystem to seamlessly execute all electronic design steps in the cloud. “The addition of Altium will enable us to provide an open and integrated development platform, helping businesses of all sizes and industries build and scale their systems more easily. We look forward to working with Altium’s talented team as we continue to invest and take our combined platform to the next level of value for our customers. Makes our lives easier ” said Hidetoshi Shibata, CEO of Renesas.

Learn more: Renesas announces acquisition of PCB design software leader Altium

3. NVIDIA affirms its leadership in current AI technology

NVIDIA has recently established itself as the current leader in AI chips. Having powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) like the H100 has become the industry standard for AI developers, especially for large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots and other Other general AI applications. This success has fueled NVIDIA’s record earnings, with its stock price skyrocketing in recent years.

NVIDIA reported revenue of $22.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, exceeding Wall Street expectations. It also added that it expects revenue in the current quarter to be 24 billion USD, net profit to be 12.29 billion USD compared to revenue in the same quarter in 2022 of 6.1 billion USD. “Given the pace of development, AI technology has reached its peak.Demand is growing worldwide across companies, industries and countries.” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

NVIDIA is also currently having many revenue problems due to current US sanctions preventing the sale of NVIDIA AI Chips to China for military use. It would have been much higher without this sanction. Data center revenue from China fell “significantly” in the fourth quarter 2023 due to U.S. licensing requirements, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress warned.