Hi there,
Summer is finally here, as measured by my wonderful sunburn from hiking yesterday. The views were worth it though. Today I can finally bring you some original content: my overview of the semiconductor industry. The article is Part 1 in the series, with the next part covering the reasons for the current shortage.
📃 Contents:
⭐Highlight: Football League Data
👔 Business: EY debating a split?
🤖Automation: New Self-Driving
✍🏻Blog: Understanding the Semiconductor Industry
Have a great week!
⭐Highlight: Football League Data
I’ll admit I’m not a big football fan (soccer for the Americans), but I am excited about these cool visualizations of the premier league by John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times. In this Twitter thread he goes over some of his visualizations, showing how European football has changed over time.
My favorite graph is the concentration of financing in English football over time.
The geographical shift here is striking ,too.
English football was a ~flat landscape up until the early 1980s. Title winners from the north, south, east, midlands.
Today it’s bimodal. Heaps of money and talent in London and the north-west. Everyone else fighting over scraps. https://t.co/fke8OdTqZv
👔 Business: EY debating a split?
Although it is brought as a novelty by some media, splits of audit and consulting practices aren’t a new thing. EY is the latest to consider a split with rumor saying an IPO is also on the table. It would mean the end of the partner model. Here’s a brief introduction to what’s going on:
‘No decision has been made’: EY tries to calm staff over audit split
Leaders of the consulting giant have tried to reassure staff that their “wellbeing” will be central to any decisions made about splitting the firm into parts.
🤖Automation: New Self-Driving
Here’s a great article by MIT Technology Review discussing a new approach to self-driving cars. The approach basically revolves around “reinforcement learning”, which means that a human driver corrects the machine during a training phase after which it quickly learns to drive. The video in the article truly says it all.
The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere | MIT Technology Review
The mainstream approach to driverless cars is slow and difficult. These startups think going all-in on AI will get there faster.
✍🏻Blog: Understanding the Semiconductor Industry
And finally another article by yours truly, part 1 of my series on semiconductors. If you’re interested in the industry this will give you a high-level overview of how it works, what’s going on, and where it’s going. Next week we’ll take a look at the causes of the semiconductor shortage (spoiler: it’s not only the pandemic).
Understanding the semiconductor industry
You may have heard it before. There’s a silicon shortage, chip shortage, graphics card shortage, or whatever name it’s given. I’ve recently done extensive research into the issue for a
Understanding the semiconductor industry | by Thomas Konings | May, 2022 | Medium
You may have heard it before. There’s a silicon shortage, chip shortage, graphics card shortage, or whatever name it’s given. I’ve recently done extensive research into the issue for a supply chain…
Have a great week!