Most Read articles – AMD CEO, Raspberry Pi SSDs, Samsung batteries

What are the topics covered this week? There’s Imec honouring AMD’s CEO, Silicon Box building a chiplet plant in Italy, adding NVMe SSDs to Raspberry Pi 5, technology company lay-offs, and  Samsung sampling solid state batteries to car manufacturers…

5. Imec honours AMD CEO for technology development and industry leadership
World-renowned semiconductor research lab Imec has named Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, as the winner of the 2024 Imec Innovation Award. “Since taking the helm of AMD in 2014, Dr Su’s technological acumen and leadership have propelled the company to the forefront of semiconductor technology development,” said Imec CEO Luc Van den hove. “Under her leadership, AMD has become one of the most respected developers of supercomputing chips, supporting the evolving requirements of the data center and gaming industries, and fueling the emergence of AI applications.”

4. Silicon Box to build chiplet plant in Italy
Three year-old Singapore chiplet startup Silicon Box will invest €3.2 billion in Italy to build a packaging plant in northern Italy, according to Italy’s industry minister Adolfo Urso. “Recent global upheavals highlight the need to build a more resilient supply chain for semiconductors in Europe,” said Urso yesterday. The move comes after negotiations between Intel and the Italian government about building a packaging plant in the country fell through.

3. Gadget Watch: NVMe Base Duo, adds fast NVMe SSDs to Raspberry Pi 5 [Gadget Master]
The NVMe Base Duo is a PCIe Gen 2 extension board designed for the for Raspberry Pi 5. Basically, it provides a way to add two super-fast NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) SSDs (solid-state drives) to your Raspberry Pi 5, whether for redundancy or, more probably, to just add a load more storage. You have to populate the base unit with one or two M-key NVMe SSDs (2230 to 2280 sizes supported) and mount it underneath or over your Raspberry Pi for a compact and fast system.

2. Tech Lay-Offs [Mannerisms]
21,000 employees have been laid off by Meta since January 2022 and 460,000 people have been laid off from Amazon in the past two years. 34,000 employees were laid off from tech companies between January 1 and February 13, according to Layoffs.fyi. In January, Microsoft and Google, announced plans to lay off 1,900 and 1,000 people, respectively.

1. Samsung sampling solid state batteries
Samsung says it has begun sampling solid state batteries to car manufacturers and will begin mass production of the batteries for EVs and other applications in 2027. Last year, the company set up a pilot line in Suwon and is using it to refine the product and improve yields. The company says that its solid-state batteries will have an energy density of 900 watt-hours per IMG_0291-150×150.jpeglitre which is 40% better than from its lithium-ion batteries.