category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Don’t Toss That Gasoline Engine Just Yet
By Ed Sperling - 07 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

As auto makers race toward increasingly electrified vehicles, there is an entire after-market effort underway that was started decades ago, largely by hobbyists. And after decades of playing around with batteries and novel technologies, they've come to roughly the same conclusions as the owners of newer electric vehicles. There are definite advantages as well as some limitations, and the needle... » read more

The Cyber-Industrial Revolution
By Ed Sperling - 07 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Semiconductors won't save the world, but they certainly will help. In fact, it's arguable whether any significant progress will be made on such issues as global warming or future medical breakthroughs without the aid of ICs. After decades of struggling just to get chips to work at each new process node, the semiconductor industry is moving into a new phase. Processing is now almost ubiquitou... » read more

Making Everything Linux-Capable
By Ed Sperling - 04 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

It's not clear how the edge will play out or what will be the winning formula from a hardware standpoint. But for everything beyond the end device, and possibly even including the end device, a key prerequisite will be the ability to run Linux. That means at least one processor or core within the hardware will need to run 64-bit software. In addition, systems will need to have enough storage... » read more

Better Security, Lower Cost
By Ed Sperling - 10 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

For years, chipmakers have marginalized security in chips, relying instead on software solutions. Eventually that approach caught up with them, creating near panic in a scramble to plug weaknesses involving speculative execution and branch prediction, as well as the ability to read the data from chips with commercially available tools such as optical probes. There were several reasons for th... » read more

Designing The Next Big Things
By Ed Sperling - 05 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 0

The edge is a humongous opportunity for the semiconductor industry. The problem, despite its name, is that it's not a single thing. It will be comprised of thousands of different chips and systems, and very few will be sold in large volumes. The edge is the culmination of decades of improvement in power and performance, coupled with the architectural creativity that has exploded since the bene... » read more

The Great Auto Race Goes Internal
By Ed Sperling - 07 May, 2020 - Comments: 1

Carmakers have discovered a new competitive threat, and it's coming from within their own supply chain. In the past, OEMs leveraged their suppliers to compete against other OEMs, often tapping the same Tier 1 players as their competitors because there was enough differentiation in acceleration time, braking distance, cabin amenities and price to create distinctive brands. Porsche is known fo... » read more

Lane Departure Warnings For The Auto Industry
By Ed Sperling - 02 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

The automotive chip market is undergoing a series of subtle but significant shifts behind the scenes that could have major implications for the global automotive supply chain. After a few years of racing toward autonomous vehicles and setting in motion a frenzy of activity, some of the big auto makers have begun taking the design of key functions such as centralized logic in-house. There... » read more

An Industry Under Siege
By Ed Sperling - 05 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

The coronavirus is taking a big toll on the semiconductor industry's unquenchable thirst for new information. The longer it lasts, the more the industry will have to resort to technology — some new, some old — to continue moving forward. Over the past couple weeks, conferences and trade shows have been postponed or outright canceled. Synopsys, Cadence and Intel pulled out of DVCon at the... » read more

Millimeter Wave: A Bridge Too Far?
By Ed Sperling - 06 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 1

5G is here. It already is available in new mobile phones, and the infrastructure for extremely fast cellular communication is being built out at a rapid pace. The big question now is which parts of this technology will be successful, and there still is no consistency in those predictions. 5G comes in two flavors, sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave, and the sub-6 GHz version offers immediate perfo... » read more

The Evolution Of Pervasive Computing
By Ed Sperling - 09 Jan, 2020 - Comments: 0

The computing world has gone full circle toward pervasive computing. In fact, it has done so more than once, which from the outside may look like a more rapid spin cycle than a real change of direction. Dig deeper, though, and it's apparent that some fundamental changes are at work. This genesis of pervasive computing dates back to the introduction of the PC in 1981, prior to which all corpo... » read more

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