Today, Arm unveiled new computing solutions to accelerate autonomous decision-making with safety capability across automotive and industrial applications. The new suite of IP includes the Arm Cortex -A78AE CPU, Arm Mali -G78AE GPU, and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP, engineered to work together in combination with supporting software, tools and system IP to enable silicon providers and OEMs to design for autonomous workloads. These products will be deployed in a range of applications, from enabling more intelligence and configurability in smart manufacturing to enhancing ADAS and digital cockpit applications in automotive.

"Autonomy has the potential to improve every aspect of our lives, but only if built on a safe and secure computing foundation," said Chet Babla, vice president, Automotive and IoT Line of Business at Arm. "As autonomous decision-making becomes more pervasive, Arm has designed a unique suite of technology that prioritizes safety while delivering highly scalable, power efficient compute to enable autonomous decision-making across new automotive and industrial opportunities."

In the era of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), Industrial PC (IPC) is expected more than just a computer for general data processing. Faced with the increasing workload at the edge, end devices are required to be smart, automated and interconnected, which reflects on the demands of AI computing and M2M (Machine-to-Machine) communication in small-sized PCs.

The demand for AI computing emerged on the account of the decentralization trends in recent years to reduce cloud computing workloads and costs, and to reinforce AI performance at the edge, high-end embedded solutions is a must. But to downsize them and meanwhile support the conditions required by edge environments, like tight spaces and abrupt temperature changes, it's definitely a challenge for IPC manufactures.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the world's leading specialty foundry, announced today at its Global Technology Conference the next generation of its FDXTM platform, 22FDX+, to meet the ever-growing need for higher performance and ultra-low power requirements of connected devices. GF's industry-leading 22FDX (22 nm FD-SOI) platform has realized $4.5 billion in design wins, with more than 350 million chips shipped to customers around the world.

GF's new 22FDX+ builds on the company's 22FDX platform, offering a broader set of features that provide high performance, ultra-low power, and specialty features and capabilities for the newest generation of designs. The differentiated offering will further empower customers to create chips that are specifically optimized for Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, automotive, and satellite communications applications.

Today at the Intel Industrial Summit 2020, Intel announced new enhanced internet of things (IoT) capabilities. The 11th Gen Intel Core processors, Intel Atom x6000E series, and Intel Pentium and Celeron N and J series bring new artificial intelligence (AI), security, functional safety and real-time capabilities to edge customers. With a robust hardware and software portfolio, an unparalleled ecosystem and 15,000 customer deployments globally, Intel is providing robust solutions for the $65 billion edge silicon market opportunity by 2024.

"By 2023, up to 70% of all enterprises will process data at the edge. 11th Gen Intel Core processors, Intel Atom x6000E series, and Intel Pentium and Celeron N and J series processors represent our most significant step forward yet in enhancements for IoT, bringing features that address our customers' current needs, while setting the foundation for capabilities with advancements in AI and 5G," said John Healy, Intel vice president of the Internet of Things Group and general manager of Platform Management and Customer Engineering.

NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) today announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Arm Limited from SBG and the SoftBank Vision Fund (together, "SoftBank") in a transaction valued at $40 billion. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and non-GAAP earnings per share.

The combination brings together NVIDIA's leading AI computing platform with Arm's vast ecosystem to create the premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence, accelerating innovation while expanding into large, high-growth markets. SoftBank will remain committed to Arm's long-term success through its ownership stake in NVIDIA, expected to be under 10 percent.

There is expected to be more than 79 zettabytes of IoT data in 2025, but the real value of this data is found in the insights it generates. The closer to the data source we can produce these insights the better, because of the improved security, latency and energy efficiency enabled. Computational storage is emerging as a critical piece of the data storage puzzle because it puts processing power directly on the storage device, giving companies secure, quick and easy access to vital information.

Our expertise and legacy in storage puts Arm in a strong position to address the changing needs of this market - with around 85% of hard disk drive controllers and solid-state drive controllers based on Arm, we are already a trusted partner for billions of storage devices. Today, we're announcing Arm Cortex-R82, our first 64-bit, Linux-capable Cortex-R processor designed to accelerate the development and deployment of next-generation enterprise and computational storage solutions.

TSMC on Monday kicked off a virtual tech symposium, where it announced its new 12 nm N12e node for IoT edge devices, announced the new 3DFabric Technology, and detailed progress on its upcoming 5 nm N5 and 3 nm N3 silicon fabrication nodes. The company maintains that the N5 (5 nm) node offers the benefits of a full node uplift over its current-gen N7 (7 nm), which recently clocked over 1 billion chips shipped. The N5 node incorporates EUV lithography more extensively than N6/N7+, and in comparison to N7 offers 30% better power at the same performance, 15% more performance at the same power, and an 80% increase in logic density. The company has commenced high-volume manufacturing on this node.

2021 will see the introduction and ramp-up of the N5P node, an enhancement of the 5 nm N5 node, offering a 10% improvement in power at the same performance, or 5% increase in performance at the same power. A nodelet of the N5 family of nodes, called N4, could see risk production in Q4 2021. The N4 node is advertised as "4 nm," although the company didn't get into its iso-power/iso-performance specifics over the N5 node. The next major node for TSMC will be the 3 nm N3 node, with massive 25%-30% improvement in power at the same performance, or 10%-15% improvement in performance at same power, compared to N5. It also offers a 70% logic density gain over N5. 3DFabric technology is a new umbrella term for TSMC's CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate), CoW (chip on wafer), and WoW (wafer on wafer) 3-D packaging innovations, with which it plans to offer packaging innovations that compete with Intel's various new 3D chip packaging technologies on the anvil.

TSMC on Monday announced the N12e silicon fabrication node. An enhancement of its 12 nm FinFET node, N12e is designed for value 5G application processors, MODEMs, and IoT edge devices, such as true-wireless earbuds, smartwatch processors, wearables, VR HMDs, entry-level and mainstream SoCs, etc. The node has been derived from the company's 12FFC+_ULL node, and fits into the 12-16 nm class of nodes. It's intended to succeed the company's 22ULL node (in terms of pricing), offering a 76% increase in logic density, 49% increase in clock speed at a given power, 55% improvement in power draw at a given speed, 50% reduction in SRAM leakage current, and low Vdd, with support for logic voltages as low as 0.4 V. That last bit in particular should make the node suitable for tiny, battery-powered devices such as wearables.

AAEON and AOTU.AI are excited to announce the launch of the BrainFrame Edge AI Developers Kit (DevKit) on an Intel AI platform for IoT that will allow developers and system integrators to rapidly create and deploy Smart Vision applications. AI computer (smart) vision applications are often bespoke and laborious to build and deploy. The BrainFrame Edge AI DevKit provides a new paradigm in creating solutions such as vision-based access control, uniform compliance, manufacturing automation, and video analytics.

AAEON's fanless industrial computer is powered by 8th Generation Intel Core i5 Processors and Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU and pre-installed with the Aotu.ai BrainFrame Smart Vision platform. BrainFrame is a platform designed to be easy to scale and highly configurable to allow any connected camera to become a continuously monitoring Smart Vision system. BrainFrame's automatic algorithm fusion and optimization engine is powered by VisionCapsules, Aotu.ai's open source algorithm packaging format. These self-contained capsules have a negligible memory footprint and include all necessary code, files, and metadata to describe and implement a machine learning algorithm.

In response to the long-distance business opportunities in the era of 5G IoT, and the trend towards storage of massive amounts of data, Apacer, a leading industrial storage and memory brand, has launched SSDs tailored specifically for network attached storage (NAS) applications. Apacer has been deeply involved in the field of industrial memory for more than 20 years, focusing on the development of non-volatile flash memory and SSD applications, and providing highly customized industrial-grade storage and memory solutions.

Considering NAS users' stringent data storage and security requirements, Apacer's NAS SSDs combine high durability, high efficiency, high reliability, and silent operation. They make it easy to quickly upgrade from traditional hard drives or ordinary SSDs, and create security and reliability for home office or small-and-medium-business (SMB) NAS applications.

AAEON, an industry leader in Edge Computing solutions, announces the SRG-3352 Edge IoT Gateway System. The SRG-3352 offers reliable and cost saving edge network operations, with flexibility to connect edge nodes and sensors with cloud services. The SRG-3352 is powered by the Arm Cortex-A8 800 MHz RISC processor. This innovative processor reduces the energy requirements of the system, saving electricity costs and allowing the system to be deployed with solar power or battery operated. With very little heat output, the system can operate in a wide range of temperatures from 0°C up to 60°C without loss in performance.

The SRG-3352 is designed to provide a great value and cost-effective platform not only with initial investment, but also in long term costs. With rugged design and Arm processor, the system provides stable and reliable operation, reducing maintenance needs. To connect from edge to cloud, the SRG-3352 supports 3G/4G LTE as well as NB-IoT to help reduce carrier costs.

Lenovo Group (HKSE: 992) PINK SHEETS: LNVGY) today announced Group revenue in the first quarter of US $13.3 billion, up almost 7% year-on-year (up 10% year-on-year excluding currency impact). Pre-tax income grew 38% compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to US $332 million, while net income also increased by 31% year-on-year to US$213 million. Basic earnings per share for the first quarter were 1.80 US cents or 13.95 HK cents.

"Our outstanding performance last quarter proves that Lenovo has quickly regained momentum from the impact of the pandemic and is capturing the new opportunities emerging from remote working, education and accelerated digitalization," said Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Chairman and CEO. "While the world continues to face challenges, Lenovo is focused on delivering sustainable growth through our core businesses as well as the new services and solutions opportunities presented by our service-led intelligent transformation."

Marvell today announced an integrated set of access, aggregation and core Ethernet switch and PHY solutions that intelligently enable secure and efficient data movement throughout enterprise networks. The new portfolio is purpose-built to address the specific requirements of the borderless enterprise as mobility and cloud applications extend the boundaries of the traditional campus environment. Today's enterprise IT organizations are tasked with delivering a seamless experience - including to an ever-growing remote workforce - with zero-downtime, higher bandwidth performance for video and content sharing, and data protection and security. Marvell's unified Prestera Ethernet switch and Alaska PHY solution set is architected from the ground up with insightful telemetry, flow-aware intelligence, scalable performance and advanced integrated security technologies that set the bar in switching.

With a complete line of GE, 2.5GE, 5GE, 10GE, 25GE, 100GE and 400GE platforms, the portfolio is designed to fit a variety of network architectures at different speeds, densities and scales at small, medium and large enterprise IT organizations. This latest generation of solutions, comprised of four cutting-edge Prestera Ethernet switches and corresponding Alaska Ethernet PHYs, create a clear path to upgrade enterprise networks to multi-gigabit Ethernet in support of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G deployments. Marvell's intelligent workload management enables optimized data processing at or near the network access edge, improving the performance of hybrid cloud architectures. Insightful telemetry capabilities enable the solution to produce data that facilitates network automation and expedites forensic analytics. Advanced security features underpin trustworthiness and provide network embedded protection from ever-evolving security threats. To support emerging use cases in retail, manufacturing, hospitality, finance and education, Marvell's switching family is built with flexibility and feature richness to address the imminent needs these networks face.

It was reported last week that NVIDIA is "interested" in acquiring UK chip-design firm Arm from Japan's SoftBank that holds a treasure chest of tech IP. Now Bloomberg reports that things are getting serious between NVIDIA and SoftBank, with the two reportedly engaged in "advanced talks" over the possible acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA. The graphics and scalar compute giant recently surpassed Intel in market capitalization.

With a few quick moves, NVIDIA stands a real chance of displacing Intel as makers of the world's most popular CPU machine architecture, driven mainly by smartphones, tablets, networking infrastructure, wearables, and IoT devices. The Arm architecture is also taking strides into the server space, and Apple recently decided to dump Intel x86 in favor of Arm-powered homebrew SoCs. Arm could cost NVIDIA an arm and a leg. New Street Research LLP estimated Arm's valuation at USD $44 billion if its IPO took off in 2021, and as much as $68 billion by 2025.

Synaptics Incorporated today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire DisplayLink Corp., a leader in high-performance video compression technology, for $305 million in an all-cash transaction. The deal is expected to close in Synaptics' first quarter of fiscal year 2021, subject to customary closing conditions, and be financed from existing cash on hand. Synaptics expects the transaction to add approximately $94 million in annualized sales and be immediately accretive to non-GAAP gross margins, non-GAAP operating margins, and non-GAAP earnings post-close.

DisplayLink's high performance software compression technology enables universal docking and casting of high bandwidth video from any device to any display using any transport medium such as USB, Ethernet or Wi-Fi. For the Enterprise IT market, the solution supports multi-OS environments including Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS and Ubuntu Linux enabling a myriad of devices to seamlessly dock to multiple high resolution (4K, 8K) displays.

5G has been a trending topic in the recent times because of the big technological breakthrough and all the solutions that its major features will make a reality: Low latency, bigger bandwidth with higher frequency, and overall faster "real-time" connection.

With those features 5G will connect virtually everyone and everything together in a fast and reliable network through the air while protecting privacy and security issues, that will mean the era of real IoT: Smart cities and smart transportations; remote medical care and wirelessly connected Industrial devices, and high-quality video streaming, to say the least.

Axiomtek - a world-renowned leader relentlessly devoted in the research, development and manufacture of series of innovative and reliable industrial computer products of high efficiency - is proud to introduce the NA346, a 4-LAN fanless network appliance platform designed in a small form factor. This ultra-small desktop network appliance is powered by the Intel Celeron processor N3350 (code name: Apollo Lake) featuring the lowest Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 6 W to meet the specific configurations of low-power requirement. The reliable NA346 is positioned as an entry-level SD-WAN, VPN and security gateway for industrial IoT security applications.

"The 5G network is foreseeable to transfer data with greater bandwidth, higher speed and boost the edge computing and AIoT application. The cutting-edge NA346 offers two mini-PCIe slots and SIM socket supporting 3G/4G/LTE communications and connectors to 5G modules," said Kiwi Lee, a product manager of Product PM Division at Axiomtek. "Space limitation is one of the constraints in today's industrial environment. Axiomtek's ultra-small NA346 can be easily installed in narrow spaces. Featuring fanless operation, this network security appliance is perfect to be used in noise-sensitive environments."

Synaptics Incorporated today announced the signing of definitive agreements under which Synaptics will acquire certain assets and manufacturing rights associated with the wireless IoT business of Broadcom for approximately $250 million in an all-cash transaction. Under the terms of the agreements, Synaptics will acquire certain rights to Broadcom's existing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS/GNSS products and business in the IoT market as well as future roadmap devices designed in advanced process nodes. The acquisition further strengthens and accelerates Synaptics' position in the fast-growing consumer IoT market.

Synaptics expects the transaction to add approximately $65 million in current annualized sales and provide significant revenue growth potential. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to Synaptics' non-GAAP gross margins and non-GAAP earnings post-close.

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, the low power programmable leader, today launched the new Lattice Certus -NX family of FPGAs. The devices lead the general-purpose FPGA market in I/O density, delivering up to twice the I/O density per mm2 in comparison to similar competing FPGAs, and provide best-in-class power savings, small size, reliability, instant-on performance, and support fast PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces to enable data co-processing, signal bridging, and system control. Certus-NX FPGAs target a range of applications, from data processing in automated industrial equipment to system management in communications infrastructure. The Certus-NX devices are the second family of FPGAs developed on the Lattice Nexus platform, the industry's first low power FPGA platform using 28 nm FD-SOI process technology. With the launch of Certus-NX, Lattice marks the release of the second device family developed under Lattice's new product development strategy in just six months.

"Certus-NX delivers unique and innovative capabilities that set it apart," said Linley Gwennap, Principal Analyst at The Linley Group. "Compared to competing FPGAs of similar gate counts, Lattice offers a much smaller package, greater I/O density, and lower power."

The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing breakthrough value to businesses across every vertical, from manufacturing, to energy, to agriculture, to real estate, to healthcare and more. IoT provides real-time insights into assets, enabling businesses to reduce operational expenses, unplanned downtime and unnecessary servicing.

While the benefits of IoT are well established and significant, one of the biggest hurdles for customers is securing IoT devices - both for new digitization initiatives as well as for legacy Operational Technology and industrial control system environments. Two years ago, Microsoft announced a $5 billion investment in IoT to further our commitment to build a trusted, easy-to-use platform for our customers and partners to build connected solutions - no matter where they are starting in their IoT journey.

IBASE Technology Inc. (TPEx: 8050), a world-leading manufacturer of industrial motherboard boards and embedded computing solutions, has revealed its latest EC-3200 AI computing platform that is based on the cutting-edge power-efficient and high-performance NVIDIA Jetson Tegra X2 (TX2) processor. The NVIDIA Jetson TX2 pairs a dual-core Denver 2 alongside a quad-core ARM Cortex -A57 processor and provides 256 CUDA cores on the NVIDIA's advanced Pascal GPU architecture with up to 1.33 TFLOPS, delivering exceptional AI performance.

Designed to operate under an extended temperature range from -20°C to +60°C, the EC-3200 leverages the integrated GPU-computing power of the Jetson TX2 platform in building edge inference servers to analyze and better manage real time traffic flow in smart cities or to optimize the efficiency of operational processes in intelligent factories. "Current edge and cloud-based AI products require better computational and video analytics capability to perform demanding real-time data processing and overcome latency issues," said Wilson Lin, Director of IBASE Product Planning Department. "The EC-3200 is no doubt a durable solution, especially built with a fanless design for non-stop operation and takes advantage of the GPU-accelerated parallel processing of NVIDIA Jetson TX2 to handle data intensive and mission-critical workloads with power efficiency and unmatched reliability."

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., today announced the Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform - the Company's most advanced, integrated, comprehensive offering designed specifically for robotics. Building on the successful Qualcomm Robotics RB3 platform and its broad adoption in a wide array of robotics and drone products available today, the Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform is comprised of an extensive set of hardware, software and development tools.

The Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform is the first of its kind to bring together the Company's deep expertise in 5G and AI to empower developers and manufacturers to create the next generation of high-compute, low-power robots and drones for the consumer, enterprise, defense, industrial and professional service sectors - and the comprehensive Qualcomm Robotics RB5 Development Kit helps ensure developers have the customization and flexibility they need to make their visions a commercial reality. To date, Qualcomm Technologies has engaged many leading companies that have endorsed the Qualcomm Robotics RB5 platform, including 20+ early adopters in the process of evaluating the platform.

New manufacturing processes powered by AI and big data reduce defects that can go unnoticed by human inspection, resulting in improved product quality and efficiency. With the advent of the AIoT era, ASUS has embraced new technologies and methods to develop advanced manufacturing capabilities. At the end of 2019, ASUS expanded the company's AIoT business unit to be able to develop more solutions for industries and, in the process, renamed it the AIoT Business Group (AIoT BG). After consideration and planning around the three major aspects of successful manufacturing - design power, technical ability and continuous profitability - ASUS transformed operations to achieve the flexibility, speed, productivity and quality required for supply-side Industry 4.0 upgrades.

Detecting defects by hand is a major pain point and cause of inefficiencies in manufacturing processes. By investing in smart manufacturing solutions that utilize AI for producing metal peripherals, fans, printed circuit boards and other computer components as well as for system assembly, ASUS was able to remove efficiency bottlenecks and reduce losses resulting from misjudgment of manufacturing defects by factory employees. Moving forward, ASUS will continue to use artificial intelligence and big data to statistically classify different types of quality defects, determine their causes and improve processes at the source of defects to further improve and push the boundaries of manufacturing quality.

VIA Technologies, Inc. today announced that it has received AWS IoT Greengrass certification for the VIA Mobile360 M820 in-vehicle safety system. AWS IoT Greengrass seamlessly extends AWS services to edge devices and allows the systems to act in real-time using locally generated data when an internet network connection is not available - a vital feature for vehicles on the road.

"AWS Greengrass IoT certification for the VIA Mobile360 M820 underlines our commitment to providing an optimized deployment path for operators to enable AWS services across their vehicle fleets," commented Richard Brown, VP of International Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. "This highly-integrated solution accelerates the integration of advanced fleet management and in-vehicle safety applications from the edge to the cloud."

Intel today introduced its new 10th Gen Intel Core vPro processors, built to power the next generation of business computing innovation for the increasingly remote workforce. The new mobile and desktop PC processors deliver increased productivity improvements, connectivity, security features and remote manageability - all to empower IT to deliver amazing experiences, helping employees stay connected, more productive, more secure and in the flow with minimal interruptions.

"Built for business, the Intel vPro platform is a comprehensive PC foundation for performance, hardware-enhanced security, manageability and stability. With our new 10th Gen Intel Core vPro processors, we've enhanced that solid PC foundation to help tackle not only today's challenges, but also those of future work environments across the PC lifecycle," said Stephanie Hallford, Intel vice president of the Client Computing Group and general manager of Business Client Platforms.