ADI Snaps Alif Semiconductor to Push AI into Physical Systems

What it means for hiring

ADI has paid 1.35 billion dollars for a company most people outside embedded had not heard of, and the logic is not the silicon. Alif's Ethos-class parts are not the only low-power AI microcontrollers on the market. What ADI has bought is a working toolchain for getting a model onto one, which is the part every analogue company has underestimated for a decade, and it now sits next to the widest sensing portfolio in the industry.

The hire this creates is specific and there are not many of them. It is the engineer who can take a model, quantise it to eight bits without losing the thing it was trained to detect, and fit it into a few hundred kilobytes of SRAM sitting beside an analogue front end they also understand. Embedded engineers who have never trained anything and machine learning engineers who have never seen a data sheet both fail this job. The other thing to watch is the retention cliff: a deal this size locks people in for a year or two, and the twelve to eighteen month mark is when the good ones start answering the phone.

Read the original at EE Times .