Feb 10 2024
This Chinese city wants to be the Silicon Valley of chiplets

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Last month, MIT Technology Review unveiled our pick for 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. These are the technological advancements that we believe will change our lives today or sometime in the future. Among them, there is one that specifically matters to the Chinese tech sector: chiplets.

That’s what I wrote about in a new story today. Chiplets—the new chipmaking approach that breaks down chips into independent modules to reduce design costs and improve computing performance—can help China develop more powerful chips despite US government sanctions that prevent Chinese companies from importing certain key technologies.

Outside China, chiplets are one of the alternative routes that the semiconductor industry could take to improve chip performance cost-effectively. Instead of endlessly trying to cram more transistors into one chip, the chiplet approach proposes that the functions of a chip can be separated into several smaller devices, and each component could be easier to make than a powerful single-piece chip. Companies like Apple and Intel have already made commercial products this way. 

But within China, the technology takes on a different level of significance. US sanctions mean that Chinese companies can’t purchase the most advanced chips or the equipment to make them, so they have to figure out how to maximize the technologies they have. And chiplets come in handy here: if the companies can make each chiplet to the most advanced level they are capable of and assemble these chiplets into a system, it can act as a substitute for more powerful cutting-edge chips.

The technology needed to make chiplet is not that new. Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that has a chip-design subsidiary called HiSilicon, experimented with its first chiplet design product in 2014. But the technology became more important to the company after it was subject to strict sanctions from the US in 2019 and couldn’t work with foreign factories anymore. In 2022, Huawei’s then chairman, Guo Ping, said the company was hoping to connect and stack up less advanced chip modules to keep the products competitive in the market. 

Currently, there’s a lot of money going into the chiplet space. The Chinese government and investors have recognized the importance of chiplets, and they are pouring funding into academic projects and startups.

Particularly, there’s one Chinese city that has gone all-in on chiplets, and you very likely have never heard its name: Wuxi (pronounced woo-she). 

Halfway between Shanghai and Nanjing, Wuxi is a medium-sized city with a strong manufacturing industry. And it has a long history in the semiconductor sector: the Chinese government built a state-owned wafer factory there in the ’60s. And when the government decided to invest in the semiconductor industry by 1989, 75% of the state budget went into the factory in Wuxi.

By 2022, Wuxi had over 600 chip companies and was behind only Shanghai and Beijing in terms of semiconductor industry competitiveness. Particularly, Wuxi is the center of chip packaging—the final steps in the assembly process, like integrating the silicon part with its plastic case and testing the chip’s performance. JCET, the third-largest chip packaging company in the world and the largest of its kind in China, was founded in Wuxi more than five decades ago.

Their prominence in the packaging sector gives JCET and Wuxi an advantage in chiplets. Compared with traditional chips, chiplets are more accommodating of less-advanced manufacturing capabilities, but they require more sophisticated packaging techniques to ensure that different modules can work together seamlessly. So Wuxi’s established strength in packaging means it can be one step ahead of other cities in developing chiplets.

In 2023, Wuxi announced its plan to become the “Chiplet Valley.” The city has pledged to spend $14 million to subsidize companies that develop chiplets in the region, and it has formed the Wuxi Institute of Interconnect Technology to focus research efforts on chiplets. 

Wuxi is a great example of China’s hidden role in the global semiconductor industry: relative to sectors like chip design and manufacturing, packaging is labor intensive and not as desirable. That’s why there’s basically no packaging capability left in Western countries, and why places like Wuxi usually fly under everyone’s radar.

But with the opportunity presented by chiplets, as well as other advancements in packaging techniques, there’s a chance for chip packaging to enter center stage again. And China is betting on that possibility heavily right now to leverage one of its few domestic strengths to get ahead in the semiconductor industry.

Have you heard of Wuxi? Do you think it will play a more important role in the global semiconductor supply chain in the future? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified in front of the US Senate on social media’s exploitation of children, along with the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, Snap, and Discord. (Associated Press)

2. Mayors from the US heartland are being invited to visit China as the country hopes to find local support outside Washington politics. (Washington Post $)

3. A new class action lawsuit is suing the genetic testing company 23andMe for a data breach that seems to have targeted people with Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. (New York Times $)

4. Tesla is opening a new battery plant in Nevada, with manufacturing equipment bought from China’s battery giant CATL. (Bloomberg $)

5. A new Chinese documentary shows the everyday lives of ordinary blue-collar workers by stitching together 887 short videos shot by themselves on their mobile phones. (Sixth Tone)

6. Baidu’s venture capital arm is planning to sell its stakes in US startups, as the US-China investment environment has become much more politically sensitive. (The Information $)

7. Huawei and China’s biggest chipmaker, SMIC, could start making five-nanometer chips—still one generation behind the most advanced chips today—as early as this year. (Financial Times $) 

8. A pigeon was detained in India for eight months, suspected of carrying spy messages for China. It turns out it’s an open-water racing bird from Taiwan. (Associated Press)

Lost in translation

Shanghai’s attempt to ban ride-hailing services from picking up passengers near the Pudong Airport lasted exactly one week before it was called off. From January 29 on, Chinese ride-hailing apps like Didi all stopped servicing users in the Shanghai airport area at the request of the local transportation department, according to the Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily. While traditional taxis are still allowed at the airport, passengers reported longer wait times and frequent refusals of service by taxi drivers. The raid-hail ban, aimed at ensuring smooth traffic flow during the Spring Festival travel rush, soon faced criticism and legal scrutiny for its suddenness and potential violations of antitrust laws. The situation underscores the ongoing debate over the role of ride-hailing services during peak travel seasons, with some Chinese cities like Shanghai frowning upon them while others have embraced them. In the early hours of February 4, the Shanghai government decided to reverse the ban, and ride-hailing cars were back in the airport area. 

One last thing

Lingyan, a panda living in a zoo in Henan province, could have been the first panda to get suspended on China’s TikTok for … twerking. The zoo hosted a livestream session on January 31, but it was suddenly suspended by the algorithm when Lingyan climbed on top of a dome and started shaking his butt. I don’t know if this means the algorithm is too good at recognizing twerking or too bad at telling pandas from humans.

A panda standing on top of a play den and twerking.

LUANCHUAN ZHUHAI WILDLIFE PARK VIA DOUYIN
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Feb 7 2024
Why China is betting big on chiplets

For the past couple of years, US sanctions have had the Chinese semiconductor industry locked in a stranglehold. While Chinese companies can still manufacture chips for today’s uses, they are not allowed to import certain chipmaking technologies, making it almost impossible for them to produce more advanced products.

There is a workaround, however. A relatively new technology known as chiplets is now offering China a way to circumvent these export bans, build a degree of self-reliance, and keep pace with other countries, particularly the US. 

In the past year, both the Chinese government and venture capitalists have been focused on propping up the domestic chiplet industry. Academic researchers are being incentivized to solve the cutting-edge issues involved in chiplet manufacturing, while some chiplet startups, like Polar Bear Tech, have already produced their first products.

In contrast to traditional chips, which integrate all components on a single piece of silicon, chiplets take a modular approach. Each chiplet has a dedicated function, like data processing or storage; they are then connected to become one system. Since each chiplet is smaller and more specialized, it’s cheaper to manufacture and less likely to malfunction. At the same time, individual chiplets in a system can be swapped out for newer, better versions to improve performance, while other functional components stay the same.

Because of their potential to support continued growth in the post–Moore’s Law era, MIT Technology Review chose chiplets as one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. Powerful companies in the chip sector, like AMD, Intel, and Apple, have already used the technology in their products. 

For those companies, chiplets are one of several ways that the semiconductor industry could keep increasing the computing power of chips despite their physical limits. But for Chinese chip companies, they could reduce the time and costs needed to develop more powerful chips domestically and supply growing, vital technology sectors like AI. And to turn that potential into reality, these companies need to invest in the chip-packaging technologies that connect chiplets into one device.

“Developing the kinds of advanced packaging technologies required to leverage chiplet design is undoubtedly on China’s to-do list,” says Cameron McKnight-MacNeil, a process analyst at the semiconductor intelligence firm TechInsights. “China is known to have some of the fundamental underlying technologies for chiplet deployment.”

A shortcut to higher-performance chips

The US government has used export blacklists to restrict China’s semiconductor industry development for several years. One such sanction, imposed in October 2022, banned selling to China any technology that can be used to build 14-nanometer-generation chips (a relatively advanced but not cutting-edge class) as well as more advanced ones.

For years, the Chinese government has looked for ways to overcome the resulting bottleneck in chipmaking, but breakthroughs in areas like lithography—the process of using light to transfer a design pattern onto the silicon base material—could take decades to pull off. Today, China still lags in chip-manufacturing capability relative to companies in Taiwan, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. “Although we’ve now seen [China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation] produce seven-nanometer chips, we suspect that production is expensive and low yield,” says McKnight-MacNeil.

Chiplet technology, however, promises a way to get around the restriction. By separating the functions of a chip into multiple chiplet modules, it reduces the difficulty of making each individual part. If China can’t buy or make a single piece of a powerful chip, it could connect some less-advanced chiplets that it does have the ability to make. Together, they could potentially achieve a similar level of computing power to the chips that the US is blocking China from accessing, if not more.

But this approach to chipmaking poses a bigger challenge for another sector of the semiconductor industry: packaging, which is the process that assembles multiple components of a chip and tests the finished device’s performance. Making sure multiple chiplets can work together requires more sophisticated packaging techniques than those involved in a traditional single-piece chip. The technology used in this process is called advanced packaging. 

This is an easier lift for China. Today, Chinese companies are already responsible for 38% of the chip packaging worldwide. Companies in Taiwan and Singapore still control the more advanced technologies, but it’s less difficult to catch up on this front.

“Packaging is less standardized, somewhat less automated. It relies a lot more on skilled technicians,” says Harish Krishnaswamy, a professor at Columbia University who studies telecommunications and chip design. And since labor cost is still significantly cheaper in China than in the West, “I don’t think it’ll take decades [for China to catch up],” he says. 

Money is flowing into the chiplet industry

Like anything else in the semiconductor industry, developing chiplets costs money. But pushed by a sense of urgency to develop the domestic chip industry rapidly, the Chinese government and other investors have already started investing in chiplet researchers and startups.

In July 2023, the National Nature Science Foundation of China, the top state fund for fundamental research, announced its plan to fund 17 to 30 chiplet research projects involving design, manufacturing, packaging, and more. It plans to give out $4 million to $6.5 million of research funding in the next four years, the organization says, and the goal is to increase chip performance by “one to two magnitudes.”

This fund is more focused on academic research, but some local governments are also ready to invest in industrial opportunities in chiplets. Wuxi, a medium-sized city in eastern China, is positioning itself to be the hub of chiplet production—a “Chiplet Valley.” Last year, Wuxi’s government officials proposed establishing a $14 million fund to bring chiplet companies to the city, and it has already attracted a handful of domestic companies.

At the same time, a slew of Chinese startups that positioned themselves to work in the chiplet field have received venture backing. 

Polar Bear Tech, a Chinese startup developing universal and specialized chiplets, received over $14 million in investment in 2023. It released its first chiplet-based AI chip, the “Qiming 930,” in February 2023. Several other startups, like Chiplego, Calculet, and Kiwimoore, have also received millions of dollars to make specialized chiplets for cars or multimodal artificial-intelligence models. 

Challenges remain

There are trade-offs in opting for a chiplet approach. While it often lowers costs and improves customizability, having multiple components in a chip means more connections are needed. If one of them goes wrong, the whole chip can fail, so a high level of compatibility between modules is crucial. Connecting or stacking several chiplets also means that the system consumes more power and may heat up faster. That could undermine performance or even damage the chip itself. 

To avoid those problems, different companies designing chiplets must adhere to the same protocols and technical standards. Globally, major companies came together in 2022 to propose Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), an open standard on how to connect chiplets. 

But all players want more influence for themselves, so some Chinese entities have come up with their own chiplet standards. In fact, different research alliances have proposed at least two Chinese chiplet standards as alternatives to UCIe in 2023, and a third standard that came out in January 2024 zoomed in on data transmission instead of physical connections.

Without a universal standard recognized by everyone in the industry, chiplets won’t be able to achieve the level of customizability that the technology promises. And their downsides could make companies around the world go back to traditional one-piece chips.

For China, embracing chiplet technology won’t be enough to solve other problems, like the difficulty of obtaining or making lithography machines.

Combining several less-advanced chips might give a performance boost to China’s chip technologies and stand in for the advanced ones that it can’t access, but it won’t be able to produce a chip that’s far ahead of existing top-line products. And as the US government constantly updates and expands its semiconductor sanctions, the chiplet technologies could become subject to restrictions too.

In October 2023, when the US Commerce Department amended its earlier sanction on the Chinese semiconductor industry, it included some new language and a few mentions of chiplets. The amendment added new parameters determining what technology is banned from being sold to China, and some of those additions seem tailored to measuring how advanced chiplets are. 

While chip factories around the world are not restricted from producing less-advanced chips for China, the Commerce Department’s document also asked them to assess whether these products could become a part of a more powerful integrated chip, putting more pressure on them to verify that their products don’t end up being a component in something that they would have been banned from exporting to China.

With all the practical and political obstacles, the development of chiplets will still take some time, no matter how much political will and investment is poured into the sector. 

It may be a shortcut for the Chinese semiconductor industry to make stronger chips, but it won’t be the magic solution to the US-China technology war.

Correction: The story has been updated to clarify the classification of 14-nanometer chips.

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Jan 18 2024
Start with data to build a better supply chain

In business, the acceleration of change means enterprises have to live in the future, not the present. Having the tools and technologies to enable forward-thinking and underpin digital transformation is key to survival. Supply chain procurement leaders are tasked with improving operational efficiencies and keeping an eye on the bottom line. For Raimundo Martinez, global digital solutions manager of procurement and supply chain at bp, the journey toward building a better supply chain starts with data.

“So, today, everybody talks about AI, ML, and all these tools,” says Martinez. “But to be honest with you, I think your journey really starts a little bit earlier. I think when we go out and think about this advanced technology, which obviously, have their place, I think in the beginning, what you really need to focus is in your foundational [layer], and that is your data.”

In that vein, all of bp’s data has been migrated to the cloud and its multiple procurement departments have been consolidated into a single global procurement organization. Having a centralized, single data source can reduce complexities and avoid data discrepancies. The biggest challenge to changes like data centralization and procurement reorganization is not technical, Martinez says, but human. Bringing another tool or new process into the fold can cause some to push back. Making sure that employees understand the value of these changes and the solutions they can offer is imperative for business leaders.

Honesty toward both employees and end users—where an enterprise keeps track of its logistics, inventory, and processes—can be a costly investment. For a digital transformation journey of bp’s scale, an investment in supply chain visibility is an investment in customer trust and business reputability.

“They feel part of it. They’re more willing to give you feedback. They’re also willing to give you a little bit more leeway. If you say that the tool is going to be, or some feature is going to be delayed a month, for example, but you don’t give the reasons and they don’t have that transparency and visibility into what is driving that delay, people just lose faith in your tool,” says Martinez.

Looking to the future, Martinez stresses the importance of a strong data foundation as a precursor to taking advantage of emerging technologies like AI and machine learning that can work to create a semi-autonomous supply chain.

“Moving a supply chain from a transactional item to a much more strategic item with the leverage of this technology, I think, that, to me, is the ultimate vision for the supply chain,” says Martinez.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Infosys Cobalt.

Full Transcript

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Laurel Ruma. And this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Our topic is building a better supply chain. AI can bring efficiencies to many aspects of an enterprise, including supply chain. And where better to start than internal procurement processes. With better data, better decisions can be made quicker, both internally and by customers and partners. And that is better for everyone.

Two words for you: automating transformation.

My guest is Raimundo Martinez, who is the global digital solutions manager of procurement and supply chain at bp.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Infosys Cobalt.
Welcome, Raimundo.

Raimundo Martinez: Hi, Laurel. Thanks for having me today.

Laurel: So, let’s start with providing some context to our conversation. bp has been on a digital transformation journey. What spurred it, and how is it going?

Raimundo: I think there’s many factors spurring digital transformation. But if I look at all of this, I think probably the key one is the rate of change in the world today and in the past. I think instead of slowing down, I think the rate of change is accelerating, and that makes business survivability the need to have quick access to the data to almost not live in today, but live in the future. And having tools and technologies that allow them to see what is coming up, what routes of action they can take, and then to enact those mitigation plans faster.

And I think that’s where the digital transformation is the key enabler of that. And I would say that’s on the business side. I think the other one is the people mindset change, and that ties into how things are going. I think things are going pretty good. Technology wise, I’ve seen a large number of tools and technologies adopted. But I think probably the most important thing is this mindset and the workforce and the adoption of agile. This rate of change that we just talked in the first part can only probably be achieved in tame when the whole workforce has this agile mindset to react to it.

Laurel: Well, supply chain procurement leaders are under pressure to improve operational efficiencies while keeping a careful eye on the bottom line. What is bp’s procurement control tower, and how has it helped with bp’s digital transformation?

Raimundo: Yeah, sure. In a nutshell, think about old as myriad of systems of record where you have your data and users having to go to all of those. So, our control tower, what it does, is consolidate all the data in a single platform. And what we have done is not just present the data, but truly configured the data in form of alerts. And the idea is to tell our user, “This is what’s important. This are the three things that you really need to take care now.” And not stopping there, but then saying, “Look, in order to take that action, we’re giving you a summary information so you don’t have to go to any other system to actually understand what is driving that alert.” But then on top of that, we’re integrating that platform with this system’s record so that request can complete it in seconds instead of in weeks.

So, that in a nutshell, it’s the control tower platform. And the way have helped… Again, we talk about tools and people. So, on the tool side, being able to demonstrate how this automation is done and the value of it and being able for other units to actually recycle the work that you have done, it accelerates and inspire other technical resources to take advantage of that. And then on the user side, one of the effects that have, again, this idea of the ability mindset, everything that we’ve done in the tool development is agile. So, bringing the users into that journey have actually helped us to also accelerate that aspect of our digital transformation.

Laurel: On that topic of workplace agility. In 2020, bp began a reorganization that consolidated its procurement departments into that single global procurement organization. What were the challenges that resulted from this reorganization?

Raimundo: Yeah. To give you a more context on that. So, if you think about bp being this really large global organizations divided in business units, before the organizations, every one of these business units have their own procurement departments, which handle literally billions of dollars that’s how big they were. And in that business, they have the ERP systems, your contract repository, your process and process deviation. But you only manage the portfolio to that. Once you integrate all of those organizations into a single one, now your responsibility become across some of those multiple business units, that has your data in all of these business systems.

So, if you want to create a report, then it’s really complicated because you have to not only go to these different systems, but the taxonomy of the data is different. So, an example, some business will call their territory, North America, the other one will call it east and west coast. So, if you want a report for a new business owner, it becomes really, really hard, and also the reports might not be as complete as they are. So, that really calls for some tools that we need to put in place to support that. And on top of that, the volume of requests now is so greater that just changing and adding steps to process aren’t going to be enough. You really need to look into automation to satisfy this higher demand.

Laurel: Well, speaking of automation, it can leverage existing technology and build efficiencies. So, what is the role of advanced technologies, like AI, machine learning and advanced analytics in the approach to your ongoing transformation?

Raimundo: So, today, everybody talks about AI, ML, and all these tools. But to be honest with you, I think your journey really starts a little bit earlier. I think when we go out and think about this advanced technology, which obviously, have their place, I think in the beginning, what you really need to focus is in your foundational, and that is your data. So, you ask about the role of the cloud. So, for bp, what we have done is all of the data used to reside in multiple different sites out there. So, what we have done is all the data now has been migrated to the cloud. And then what the cloud also allows is to do transformations in place that help us really homogenize, what I just described before, North America, South America, then you can create another column and say, okay, now call it, whatever, United States, or however you want to call it.

So, all of this data transformation happened in a single spot. And what that does is also allow our users that need this data to go to a single source of truth and not be pulling data from multiple systems. An example of the chaos that that creates is somebody will be pulling invoice and data from Spence, somebody will pull in PayData. So, then you already have data discrepancy on the reporting. And having a centralized tool where everybody goes for the data reduces so much complexity on the system.

Laurel: And speaking about that kind of complexity, it’s clear that multiple procurement systems made it difficult to maintain quality compliance as well, and as well as production tracking in bp supply chain. So, what are some of the most challenging aspects of realizing this new vision with a centralized one-stop platform?

Raimundo: Yeah, we have a good list in there. So, let me break it into maybe technical and people, because I think people is something that we should talk about it. So, technical. I think one of the biggest things in technical is working with your technical team to find the right architecture. This is how your vision fits into our architecture, which will create less, let’s say, confusion and complexity into your architecture. And the other side of the technical challenge is finding the right tools. I’ll give you an example for our project. Initially, I thought, okay, RPA [robotic process automation] will be the technology to do this. So, we run a pilot RPA. And obviously, RPA has incredible applications out there. But at this point, RPA really wasn’t the tool for us given the changes that could happen on the screens from the system that we’re using. So, then we decided instead of going to RPA, going to API.

So, that’s an example of a challenge of finding exactly the right tool that you have. But to be honest with you, I think the biggest challenge is not technical, but human. Like I mentioned before, people are immersed in the sea of change that is going on, and here you come with yet another tool. So, even the tool you’re giving them might be a lot more efficient, people still want to cling to what they know. So, if they say, “Look, if I have to spend another two hours extracting data, putting Excel, collating and running a report…” Some people may rather do that than go to a platform where all of that is done for them. So, I think change management is key in these transformations to make sure that they’re able to sell or make people understand what the value of the tool is, and overcome that challenge, which is human normal aversion to change. And especially when you’re immersed on this really, really sea of change that was already going as a result of the reorganization.

Laurel: Yeah. People are hard, and tech can be easy. So, just to clarify, RPA is the robotic process automation in this context, correct?

Raimundo: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Sorry about the pretty layered… Yeah.

Laurel: No, no. There’s lots of acronyms going around.

So, inversely, we’re just discussing the challenges, what are the positive outcomes from making this transformation? And could you give us an example or a use case of how that updated platform boosted efficiency across existing processes?

Raimundo: Absolutely. Just quick generic. So, generic things is you find yourself a lot in this cycle of that data. The users look at the applications that said that data’s not correct, and they lose the appetite for using that, but the problem is they own the data, but the process to change the data is so cumbersome that people don’t really want to take ownership of that because they said, “Look, I have 20 things to do. The least in my list is updating that data.”

So, we’re in this cycle of trying to put tools out for the user, the data is not correct, but we’re not the ones who own the data. So, the specific example of how we broke that cycle is using automation. So, to give you an example, before we create automation, if you needed to change any contract data, you have to find what the contract is, then you have to go to a tool like Salesforce and create a case. That case goes to our global business support team, and then they have to read the case, open the system of record, make the change. And that could take between days or weeks. Meantime, the user is like, “Well, I requested this thing, and it hasn’t even happened.”

So, what we did is leverage internal technology. We already had a large investment on Microsoft, as you can imagine. And we said, look, “From Power BI, you can look at your contract, you can click on the record you want to change. Power App comes up and tells you what do you want to do.” Say, I want to change the contract owner, for example. It opens a window, says, “Who’s the new person you want to put in?” And as soon as you submit it, literally, within less than a second, the API goes to the system of record, change the owner, creates an email that notifies everybody who is an stakeholder in that contract, which then increases visibility to changes across the organization.

And at the same time, it leaves you an audit trail. So, if somebody wants to challenge that, you know exactly what happened. So, that has been an incredible outcome of reducing cycle time from days and weeks to merely seconds, at the same time, increasing communication and visibility into the data. That has been proved one of the greatest achievements that we have.

Laurel: Well, I think you’ve really outlined this challenge. So, investing in supply chain visibility can be costly, but often bolsters trust and reputability among customers. What’s the role of transparency and visibility in a digital transformation journey of this size?

Raimundo: I keep talking about agile, and I think that’s one of the tenets. And what I will add to transparent visibility, I would add actually honesty. I think it’s very, very easy to learn from success. Everybody wants to tout the great things that they have done, but people may a little bit less inclined to speak out about their mistakes. I’ll just give you an example of our situation with RPA. We don’t feel bad about it. We feel that the more we share that knowledge with the technical teams, the much more value it has because then people will learn from that again and not commit the same mistake obviously.

But I think also what honesty do in this visibility is when you bring your users into the development team, you have that visibility. They feel part of it. They’re more willing to give you feedback. And also, they’re also willing to give you a little bit more leeway. If you say that the tool is going to be, or some feature is going to be delayed a month, for example, but you don’t give the reasons and they don’t have that transparency and visibility into what is driving that delay, people just lose faith in your tool.

Where I think the more open, the more visible you are, but also, again, with honesty, is you have a product that is so much more well received and that everybody feels part of the tool. It’s something that in every training, at the end of the training, I just say, “By the way, this is not my tool. This is your tool. And the more engaged you are with us, the much better outcome you’re going to have.” And that’s just achieved through transparency and visibility.

Laurel: So, for other large organizations looking to create a centralized platform to improve supply chain visibility, what are some of the key best practices that you’ve found that leadership can adopt to achieve the smoothest transition?

Raimundo: So, I probably think about three things. I think, one, the leadership needs to really, really do is understand the project. And when I say, understand the project, is really understanding the technical complexity, the human aspect of it, because I think that’s where your leadership has a lot of role to play. They’re able to influence their teams on this project that you’re trying to… And then they really need to understand also what are the risks associated with this project. And also that these could be a very lengthy journey. Hopefully, obviously, there’ll be results and milestones along, but they need to feel comfortable with also this agile mentality that we’re going to do features, fail, adapt, and they really need to be part of that journey.

The second biggest, I think, most important thing is having the right team. And in that, I think I’ve been super fortunate. We have a great partnership with Infosys. I’ve got one of the engineers named Sai. What the Infosys team and my technical team says is, “Look, do not shortchange yourself on the ideas that you bring from the business side.” A lot of times, we might think about something as impossible. They really encourage me to come up with almost crazy ideas. Just come with everything that you can think about. And they’re really, really incredible of delivering all the resources to bring in a solution to that. We almost end up using each other’s phrases. So, having a team that is really passionate about change, about being honest, about working together is the key to delivery. And finally, data foundation. I think that we get so stuck looking at the shiny tools out there that seem like science fiction and they’ll be great, and we forget that the outcome of those technologies are only as good as the data that we are supporting.

And data, a lot of times, it seem as like the, I don’t know, I don’t want to call it ugly sister, the ugly person in the room. But it’s really people… They’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to deal with that. I just want to do AI.” Well, your AI is not going to give you what you want if it doesn’t understand where you’re at. So, data foundation is key. Having the perfect team and technology partners and understanding the project length, the risk and being really engaged will be, for me, the key items there.

Laurel: That’s certainly helpful. So, looking ahead, what technologies or trends do you foresee will enable greater efficiencies across supply chain and operations?

Raimundo: It’s not like a broken record, bet. I really think that technologies that look at our data and help us clean the data, foresee what items we’re going to have with the data, how we can really have a data set that is really, really powerful, that is easy, and it has reflects exactly our situation, it’s the key for then the next step, which is all of these amazing technologies. If I think about our vision, for the platform is to create a semi-autonomous supply chain. And the vision is imagine having, again, first, the right data, and now what you have is AI/ML and all these models that look at that internal data, compare that with external factors.

And what it does is instead of presenting us alerts, we’ll go to the next level, and it, basically, presents scenarios. And say, “Look, based on the data that I see on the market, what you have had in your history, these are the three things that can happen, these are the plans that the tool recommends, and this is how you interact or affect that change.” So, moving a supply chain from a transactional item to a much more strategic item with the leverage of this technology, I think, that, to me, is the ultimate vision for supply chain.

Laurel: Well, Raimundo, thank you so much for joining us today on the Business Lab. This has been very enlightening.

Raimundo: Thank you. I’ve been a pleasure. And I wish everybody a great journey out there. It’s definitely a very exciting moment right now.

Laurel: Thank you.

That was Raimundo Martinez, who is a global digital solutions manager, procurement and supply chain at bp, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review.

That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Laurel Ruma. I’m the director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print, on the web and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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Dec 29 2023
We need a moonshot for computing

In its final weeks, the Obama administration released a report that rippled through the federal science and technology community. Titled Ensuring Long-Term US Leadership in Semiconductors, it warned that as conventional ways of building chips brushed up against the laws of physics, the United States was at risk of losing its edge in the chip industry. Five and a half years later, in 2022, Congress and the White House collaborated to address that possibility by passing the CHIPS and Science Act—a bold venture patterned after the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the Human Genome Project. Over the course of three administrations, the US government has begun to organize itself for the next era of computing.

Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has gone so far as to directly compare the passage of CHIPS to President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 call to land a man on the moon. In doing so, she was evoking a US tradition of organizing the national innovation ecosystem to meet an audacious technological objective—one that the private sector alone could not reach. Before JFK’s announcement, there were organizational challenges and disagreement over the best path forward to ensure national competitiveness in space. Such is the pattern of technological ambitions left to their own timelines. 

Setting national policy for technological development involves making trade-offs and grappling with unknown future issues. How does a government account for technological uncertainty? What will the nature of its interaction with the private sector be? And does it make more sense to focus on boosting competitiveness in the near term or to place big bets on potential breakthroughs? 

The CHIPS and Science Act designated $39 billion for bringing chip factories, or “fabs,” and their key suppliers back to the United States, with an additional $11 billion committed to microelectronics R&D. At the center of the R&D program would be the National Semiconductor Technology Center, or NSTC—envisioned as a national “center of excellence” that would bring the best of the innovation ecosystem together to invent the next generation of microelectronics.  

In the year and a half since, CHIPS programs and offices have been stood up, and chip fabrication facilities in Arizona, Texas, and Ohio have broken ground. But it is the CHIPS R&D program that has an opportunity to shape the future of the field. Ultimately, there is a choice to make in terms of national R&D goals: the US can adopt a conservative strategy that aims to preserve its lead for the next five years, or it can orient itself toward genuine computing moonshots. The way the NSTC is organized, and the technology programs it chooses to pursue, will determine whether the United States plays it safe or goes “all in.” 

Welcome to the day of reckoning

In 1965, the late Intel founder Gordon Moore famously predicted that the path forward for computing involved cramming more transistors, or tiny switches, onto flat silicon wafers. Extrapolating from the birth of the integrated circuit seven years earlier, Moore forecast that transistor count would double regularly while the cost per transistor fell. But Moore was not merely making a prediction. He was also prescribing a technological strategy (sometimes called “transistor scaling”): shrink transistors and pack them closer and closer together, and chips become faster and cheaper. This approach not only led to the rise of a $600 billion semiconductor industry but ushered the world into the digital age. 

Ever insightful, Moore did not expect that transistor scaling would last forever. He referred to the point when this miniaturization process would reach its physical limits as the “day of reckoning.” The chip industry is now very close to reaching that day, if it is not there already. Costs are skyrocketing and technical challenges are mounting. Industry road maps suggest that we may have only about 10 to 15 years before transistor scaling reaches its physical limits—and it may stop being profitable even before that. 

To keep chips advancing in the near term, the semiconductor industry has adopted a two-part strategy. On the one hand, it is building “accelerator” chips tailored for specific applications (such as AI inference and training) to speed computation. On the other, firms are building hardware from smaller functional components—called “chiplets”—to reduce costs and improve customizability. These chiplets can be arranged side by side or stacked on top of one another. The 3D approach could be an especially powerful means of improving speeds. 

This two-part strategy will help over the next 10 years or so, but it has long-term limits. For one thing, it continues to rely on the same transistor-building method that is currently reaching the end of the line. And even with 3D integration, we will continue to grapple with energy-hungry communication bottlenecks. It is unclear how long this approach will enable chipmakers to produce cheaper and more capable computers.  

Building an institutional home for moonshots

The clear alternative is to develop alternatives to conventional computing. There is no shortage of candidates, including quantum computing; neuromorphic computing, which mimics the operation of the brain in hardware; and reversible computing, which has the potential to push the energy efficiency of computing to its physical limits. And there are plenty of novel materials and devices that could be used to build future computers, such as silicon photonics, magnetic materials,and superconductor electronics. These possibilities could even be combined to form hybrid computing systems.

None of these potential technologies are new: researchers have been working on them for many years, and quantum computing is certainly making progress in the private sector. But only Washington brings the convening power and R&D dollars to help these novel systems achieve scale. Traditionally, breakthroughs in microelectronics have emerged piecemeal, but realizing new approaches to computation requires building an entirely new computing “stack”—from the hardware level up to the algorithms and software. This requires an approach that can rally the entire innovation ecosystem around clear objectives to tackle multiple technical problems in tandem and provide the kind of support needed to “de-risk” otherwise risky ventures.

Does it make more sense to focus on boosting competitiveness in the near term or to place big bets on potential breakthroughs?

The NSTC can drive these efforts. To be successful, it would do well to follow DARPA’s lead by focusing on moonshot programs. Its research program will need to be insulated from outside pressures. It also needs to foster visionaries, including program managers from industry and academia, and back them with a large in-house technical staff. 

The center’s investment fund also needs to be thoughtfully managed, drawing on best practices from existing blue-chip deep-tech investment funds, such as ensuring transparency through due-diligence practices and offering entrepreneurs access to tools, facilities, and training. 

It is still early days for the NSTC: the road to success may be long and winding. But this is a crucial moment for US leadership in computing and microelectronics. As we chart the path forward for the NSTC and other R&D priorities, we’ll need to think critically about what kinds of institutions we’ll need to get us there. We may not get another chance to get it right.

Brady Helwig is an associate director for economy and PJ Maykish is a senior advisor at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a private foundation focused on making recommendations to strengthen long-term US competitiveness.

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Dec 22 2023
Recapturing early-internet whimsy with HTML

Websites weren’t always slick digital experiences. 

There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of Times New Roman text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built entirely from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code and a desire to be on the internet. 

Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. Anchored in the concept of “HTML Energy,” a term coined by artists Laurel Schwulst and Elliott Cost, the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics. It focuses on the tactile process of coding in HTML, exploring how the language invites self-expression and empowers individuals to claim their share of the web. Taking shape in small Discord channels and digital magazines, among other spaces, the HTML Energy movement is about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences. 

Today, the majority of the internet is optimized for social engagement, e-commerce, and streaming. Most internet traffic is concentrated in a small number of sites, all of which are owned by the same handful of companies. From lengthy ads to aggressive cookie settings, minor obstacles and nuisances are baked in. Users are constantly reminded that their access to the internet is conditional on the monetary interests of a few. The situation with X (formerly known as Twitter) perfectly encapsulates this state of internet ownership: it only took one executive to spark a mass exodus from the platform and to fragment its long-lived communities.

However, despite the monopolistic landscape of Big Tech, one fundamental reality continues to justify the internet’s democratic reputation: anyone can publish a website for free with HTML. With an abundance of real estate, the web technically has space for everyone. It’s just a matter of traffic. 

When I spoke to different members of the HTML Energy community, all consistently returned to one basic message: Everything on the web boils down to HTML. HTML is the backbone of any website. It’s the only thing needed for a website to run. While popular web development languages today use abridged commands that hide technical complexity through what’s known as data abstraction, HTML is granular, and previous coding knowledge is not a prerequisite. 

As Cost explains, it is precisely how forgiving HTML is that gives eager individuals an opportunity to self-publish on the web. With HTML, a site will still load even if a line of code is missing. The HTML Energy movement embraces these possibilities: learning via trial and error is welcomed, and creative experimentation is encouraged. 

Since the rise of site-building tools like Wix, the intricate and sometimes clunky experience of hard-coding fonts or pixel spacing into a site has been replaced by templates and conventions of user experience design. As mainstream digital experiences trend toward a homogeneous visual language, the human touch gets lost in the many layers of abstraction. Site creators grow more distant from their sites, and the web becomes more transactional.

But the HTML Energy movement calls on people to reexamine our relationship with technology. Crafting a site using HTML allows programmers to explore what a website can be. Unlike their corporate counterparts, people creating sites on their own don’t answer to shareholders. They don’t have the pressure to create profitable experiences, so their creations can take an endless variety of forms. 

Common types of HTML Energy sites include digital gardens, where elements change with the seasons; interactive poetry generators, where inputs from the user give rise to new meaning; and personal sites that share intimate details about their creators’ lives. In an internet that is increasingly consumerist, HTML Energy sites offer a gentle reminder that websites can be meditative experiences. 

The HTML Energy community advocates understanding HTML for what it quite literally is: a language. And it celebrates the way the rudimentary character of that language demands intention from the user. As an amalgamation of minuscule and intricate creative decisions, a site constructed using only HTML is a form of self-­expression. Viewing a site’s source code is as important as navigating its interface. There are often Easter eggs hidden in that code, such as cheeky messages or citations taken from other HTML sites. In many ways, an HTML site captures something of the creator’s identity: what did that individual choose to build, and how?

This fascination with different applications of HTML is also seen in physical community gatherings sometimes called “freewrites,” where members of the movement get together to write code. Sunday Sites and Fruitful School are among the websites that organize these gatherings, often integrating educational elements into their sessions to empower more people to join the movement. Meanwhile, sites like HTML Review showcase some of its products in the format of a literary magazine. 

PROJECT 1

Terrarium of Many Sceneries

Ji Kim’s Terrarium of Many Sceneries collages snippets of footage from an old iPhone. As visitors scroll through the site, images overlap and embedded audio clips play. When users click any image, a small description of when and where it was taken appears, alongside more accompanying media. 
Kim’s site is designed to mimic the sporadic, layered nature of memory. It is a digital experience that is intentionally fragmented and overwhelming—like trying to remember a family trip taken years ago. 

PROJECT 2

A Room with a Window

Shelby Wilson’s A Room with a Window is a site that allows for only one interaction: opening and closing a set of window shades. The site intentionally conflates physical and digital spaces: Wilson plays with the idea of a browser as a portal to a place with physical boundaries and edges, but also maintains surrealist components (the room doesn’t get darker when the blinds close) and randomized elements (the color of the room changes on each visit) to highlight the digital form.

PROJECT 3

HTML Garden

Spencer Chang’s site imagines what a garden might look like on the internet. Several “plants” made of native HTML elements grow, and the passage of time is acknowledged and noticeable upon each visit—seasons change, plants sprout and bloom. There’s no explicit action called for—just observation.

PROJECT 4

Prose Play

Katherine Yang’s Prose Play is an interactive poem that encourages users to input different words into a pre-set sentence structure. Framing words as variables, the site explores the interactivity of the internet. It puts the literary theory of the “Death of the Author”—the idea that the meaning of a text is not determined by the author’s intention but by the reader’s interpretation—in the context of code. 

PROJECT 5

Erich Friedman

Erich Friedman’s site is a personal encyclopedia of his life, with archives of everything from movie ratings to reviews of mini-golf courses across central Florida. Organized into the categories of Math Stuff, Puzzle Stuff, Personal Stuff, and Professional Stuff, the site is simple in structure. It uses basic HTML to showcase Friedman’s eclectic interests over the past decade, including a list of fun facts for every number from 0 to 9,999 and collections of math and trivia problems. The site does not drive any specific action. It merely stands as an exhaustive, candid portrait of Erich Friedman, occupying a small piece of the web. 

PROJECT 6

Museum of Screens

Toulou TouMou’s Museum of Screens is a site that houses browser games created by game enthusiasts. In order to interact with the games on display, users have to navigate the digital space like a physical museum visualized in ASCII graphics. There are actual visiting hours, with a “rest day” chosen at random. 
Created to give due credit to amateur developers during the era of Flash games, TouMou’s museum aims to highlight the importance of acknowledging authorship and the rich history of independent games. 

There is no centralized source for HTML Energy sites: serendipity makes them finding them feel special, like happening upon a piece of street art behind a parking lot. They’re not designed for discovery, nor are they optimized for any particular action. They simply engage with a visitor on the visitor’s terms, offering a portrait of their creator. If sites like Google or Facebook are the supermarkets and shopping malls where you buy your necessities, HTML Energy sites are like the hidden gardens you happen upon, unmarked on any map. 

Tiffany Ng is a freelance writer exploring the relationship between art, tech, and culture.

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Dec 12 2023
Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition

Brain organoids, clumps of human brain cells grown in a dish, can be hooked up to an electronic chip and carry out simple computational tasks, a new study shows. 

Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, known as Brainoware, to an AI tool. They found that this hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition. The work, published today in Nature Electronics, could one day lead to new kinds of bio-computers that are more efficient than conventional computers.

Scientists have been trying to build computers based on advanced biological systems for decades. Guo says that such computers could overcome some challenges of silicon-based computers, such as bottlenecks in data processing. 

Conventional computers are much better than brains in dealing with numbers, but human brains are better at processing complex information while using relatively little energy. “This is a first demonstration of using brain organoids [for computing],” says Guo. “It’s exciting to see the possibilities of organoids for biocomputing in the future.”     

With Brainoware, Guo aimed to use actual brain cells to send and receive information. When the researchers applied electrical stimulation to the hybrid system they’d built, Brainoware responded to those signals, and changes occurred in its neural networks. According to the researchers, this result suggests that the hybrid system did process information, and could perhaps even perform computing tasks without supervision.

Guo and his colleagues then attempted to see if Brainoware could perform any useful tasks. In one test, they used Brainoware to try to solve mathematical equations. They also gave it a benchmark test for speech recognition, using 240 audio clips of eight people pronouncing Japanese vowels. The clips were converted into electrical signals and applied to the Brainoware system. This generated signals in the neural networks of the brain organoid, which were then fed into an AI tool for decoding.

The researchers found that the brain organoid–AI system could decode the signals from the audio recordings, which is a form of speech recognition, says Guo. “But the accuracy was low,” he says. Although the system improved with training, reaching an accuracy of about 78%, it was still less accurate than artificial neural networks, according to the study. 

Lena Smirnova, an assistant professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University,  points out that brain organoids do not have the ability to truly hear speech but simply exhibit “a reaction” to pulses of electrical stimulation from the audio clips. And the study did not demonstrate whether Brainoware can process and store information over the long term or learn multiple tasks. Generating brain cell cultures in a lab and maintaining them long enough to perform computations is also a huge undertaking.

Still, she adds, “it’s a really good demonstration that shows the capabilities of brain organoids.”

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Dec 1 2023
Sustainability starts with the data center

When asked why he targeted banks, notorious criminal Willie Sutton reportedly answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” Similarly, when thoughtful organizations target sustainability, they look to their data centers—because that’s where the carbon emissions are.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) attributes about 1.5% of total global electricity use to data centers and data transmission networks. This figure is much higher, however, in countries with booming data storage sectors: in Ireland, 18% of electricity consumption was attributable to data centers in 2022, and in Denmark, it is projected to reach 15% by 2030. And while there have been encouraging shifts toward green-energy sources and increased deployment of energy-efficient hardware and software, organizations need to accelerate their data center sustainability efforts to meet ambitious net-zero targets.

For data center operators, options for boosting sustainability include shifting energy sources, upgrading physical infrastructure and hardware, improving and automating workflows, and updating the software that manages data center storage. Hitachi Vantara estimates that emissions attributable to data storage infrastructure can be reduced as much as 96% by using a combination of these approaches.

Critics might counter that, though data center decarbonization is a worthy social goal, it also imposes expenses that a company focused on its bottom line can ill afford. This, however, is a shortsighted view.

Data center decarbonization initiatives can provide an impetus that enables organizations to modernize, optimize, and automate their data centers. This leads directly to improved performance of mission-critical applications, as well as a smaller, denser, more efficient data center footprint—which then creates savings via reduced energy costs. And modern data storage and management solutions, beyond supporting sustainability, also create a unified platform for innovation and new business models through advanced data analytics, machine learning, and AI.

Dave Pearson, research vice president at IDC, says, “Decarbonization and the more efficient energy utilization of the data center are supported by the same technologies that support data center modernization. Modernization has sustainability goals, but obviously it provides all kinds of business benefits, including enabling data analytics and better business processes.”

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This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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Nov 19 2023
2023 Global Cloud Ecosystem

The cloud, fundamentally a tool for cost and resource efficiency, has long enabled companies and countries to organize around digital-first principles. It is an established capability that improves the bottom line for enterprises. However, maturity lags, and global standards are sorely needed.

Cloud capabilities play a crucial role in accelerating the global economy’s next stage of digital transformation. Results from our 2023 Global Cloud Ecosystem survey of executives indicate there are two stages of cloud maturity globally: one where firms adopt cloud to achieve essential opex and capex cost reduction, and a second where firms link cloud investments to a positive business value. Respondents indicate the two are converging quickly.

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The key findings are as follows:

  • Cloud helps the top and bottom line globally. Cloud computing infrastructure investment will be more than 60% of all IT infrastructure spend worldwide in 2023, according to analyst firm IDC, as flexible cloud resources continue to define efficiency and productivity for technology decision-makers. More than eight out of 10 survey respondents report more cost efficiency due to cloud deployments. While establishing a link between cloud capabilities and top-line profitability is challenging, 82% say they are currently tracking cloud ROI, and 66% report positive ROI from cloud investments.
  • Cloud-centric organizations expect strong data governance (but don’t always get it). Strong data privacy protection and governance is essential to accelerate cloud adoption. Perceptions of national data sovereignty and privacy frameworks vary, underscoring the lack of global standards. Most respondents decline to say their countries are leaders in the space, but more than two-thirds say they keep pace.
  • All in for zero-trust. Public and hybrid cloud assets raise cybersecurity concerns. But cloud is required to grow AI and automation, which help secure digital assets with data cataloging, access, and visibility. Because of the risk associated with AI, the broad surface of the data it draws on, and the way AI generates change, the zero-trust user paradigm has gained wide acceptance across industries. Some 86%of the survey respondents use zero-trust architecture. However, one-third do not routinely identify and classify cloud assets.
  • Sustainability in the cloud. The cloud’s primary function—scaling up computing resources—is a key enabler that mitigates compliance issues such as security; privacy; and environment, social, and governance (ESG). More than half (54%) of respondents say they use cloud tools for ESG reporting and compliance, and a large number (51%) use cloud to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) compliance.

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This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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