12-19: NVIDIA and Didi have announced that DiDi will leverage NVIDIA GPUs and AI technology; Samsung has partnered with Baidu to produce its new cloud-to-edge AI chip; etc.
Chipsets
NVIDIA and Didi Chuxing (DiDi) have announced that DiDi will leverage NVIDIA GPUs and AI technology to develop autonomous driving and cloud computing solutions. DiDi will use NVIDIA GPUs in the data center for training machine learning algorithms and NVIDIA DRIVE for inference on its Level 4 autonomous driving vehicles. (CN Beta, Globe Newswire)
NVIDIA has introduced NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, a highly advanced software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles and robots. The platform is powered by a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) called Orin. The singular Orin SOC aims to deliver 200 TOPs of performance on a single chip, featuring a massive 17B transistors and delivering roughly 7 times the performance of NVIDIA’s Xavier SOCs. (ZDNet, Forbes, NVIDIA, WCCFTech, OfWeek)
NVIDIA has revealed that the online retailer Alibaba Group Holding and search engine giant Baidu are using its AT technology for shopping recommendations and customer click increases. (NY Times, The Street, Channel News Asia, UDN)
NVIDIA has announced new inference speedups for automatic speech recognition, natural language processing and text-to-speech with TensorRT 7. With this breakthrough, NVIDIA has now accelerated training and deployment of the entire conversational AI pipeline. (VentureBeat, NVIDIA, Silicon Angle, TechRadar, Sina)
Samsung Electronics has partnered with Baidu to produce its new cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Kunlun, with mass production slated for early 2020. Kunlun will be built on Baidu’s own XPU neural processor architecture for cloud, edge, and AI and will be made with Samsung’s 14nm process. Samsung will also make the chips using its I-CubeTM, or interposed-cube, package solution. (CN Beta, Samsung, ZDNet)
Broadcom is allegedly in the early stages of trying to sell one of its wireless chip units, a transaction that could be worth as much as USD10B. FBAR technology has received some competition in recent years, such as rival Qorvo’s filtering technology, which uses smaller components. Such technologies could replace FBAR completely, making the unit less desirable to Broadcom as a going concern. (Laoyaoba, Apple Insider, WSJ)
Touch Display
LG Display (LGD) is expected to upgrade its Gen-6 of small and medium-sized OLED production lines in 2020. The Gen-6 (1500×1850mm) flexible OLED production line (E6) located in LGD Gyeonggi Road added touch integration equipment and transformed the backplate process from LTPS to LTPO. It is expected to offer a touch-integrated OLED panel for Apple iPhone in 2020. (CN Beta, Small Tech News)
Samsung Electronics is currently looking to making an investment in plant and equipment during 1H20 to start mass-producing microLEDs. Samsung Electronics has reportedly raised the level of its technology in producing microLEDs significantly so that the price of single microLED chip can be set less than USD86K (KRW100M). (GSM Arena, ET News)
Memory
Samsung Electronics reportedly intends to spend USD8B on expansion of its 3D NAND production facility and fab in Xi’an. Samsung’s Xian fab can now process 120,000 wafer starts per month. After the expansion, it will reportedly increase its output to 130,000 wafer starts per month, but it is likely that these will be 3D NAND wafers with a higher number of layers. (CN Beta, AnandTech, Reuters, Pulse News)
Samsung Electronics and Yangtze Memory Technology (YMTC) have both stepped up equipment purchases for building additional new NAND flash fabrication lines since 2H19, according to Digitimes. (Digitimes, Yahoo, Digitimes)
According to TrendForce, DRAM spot prices have begun to rebound, in turn improving the overall DRAM market sentiment, and memory component buyers in the contract market will be induced to raise their inventories as well. Contract prices are expected to rally as early as 1Q20. TrendForce’s latest updates to its 1Q20 price forecast are as follows: contract prices of PC DRAM, specialty DRAM, and mobile DRAM products will experience minor QoQ drops, while contract prices of server DRAM products will register a QoQ increase. (Laoyaoba, TrendForce, TrendForce, press)
Sensory
UltraSense’s unique technology can now enable a multi-functional touch interface to be done through virtually any material and any material thickness, including metal, glass, wood, ceramic and plastic, to cost-effectively turn any surface into a virtual button or gesture. With Machine Learning touch classifier technology (with the patents to back it up), the sensor tech made by UltraSense can evolve and change. (CN Beta, SlashGear, Yahoo)
Phone
Wingtech claims that with the approval of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the total amount of funds raised by Wingtech is approximately CNY6.5B. There are two main uses, one is to pay CNY4.337B in the balance of the acquisition of Nexperia. The second is to repay loans and replenishment, to pay intermediary fees and taxes of CNY2.16B. (My Drivers, East Money, SCMP)
Facebook has acquired the Spanish cloud gaming startup PlayGiga for EUR70M (about USD78M). PlayGiga is operating cloud gaming services in Italy, Argentina, Chile and Spain, and was aiming to launch in the Middle East soon. (CN Beta, CNBC, Variety, Seeking Alpha)
Samsung Galaxy A01 is launched – 5.7” 720×1560 HD+ Infinity-V, octa-core, rear dual 13MP-2MP depth + front 5MP, 2+16GB, Android 10, no fingerprint scanner, 3000mAh, about EUR100 (est.). (GSM Arena, Samsung, XDA-Developers)
Huawei P smart Pro is unveiled in Europe – 6.59” 1080×2340 FHD+ IPS, HiSilicon Kirin 710F, rear tri 48MP-8MP ultrawide-2MP depth + front 16MP pop-up, 6+128GB, Android 9.0, side fingerprint scanner, 4000mAh 10W, EUR350. (GSM Arena, Gizmo China)
Home
Major companies, including Google, Amazon, and Apple, have formed a new working group, managed by the Zigbee Alliance, aims to create a standard for smart home device connectivity. The technology is to be called Connected Home over IP, and it aims to both simplify the development of smart home devices and make choices easier for consumers. (Neowin, Connected Home over IP, Ars Technica, CN Beta)
Artificial Intelligence
Hugging Face has raised a USD15M funding round led by Lux Capital. the startup released an open-source library for natural language processing applications. (TechCrunch, VentureBeat)
Payment
Initially launched in 2015, Samsung Pay has now grown to serve 26 countries across the globe. Samsung plans to expand its digital wallet and mobile payment system further in 2020. (GSM Arena, Sam Mobile, IT Home)
