Disaggregation And Smarter Chips Shift Liability For Security


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security on chips with Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist at Ansys; Jason Oberg, CTO and co-founder of Tortuga Logic; Pamela Norton, CEO and founder of Borsetta; Ron Perez, fellow and technical lead for security architecture at Intel; and Tim Whitfield, vice president of strategy at Arm. What follows are excerpts of that conversation,... » read more

Next Challenge: Known Good Systems


The leading edge of design is heading toward multi-die/multi-chiplet architectures, and an increasing number of mainstream designs likely will follow as processing moves closer to the edge. This doesn't mean every chipmaker will be designing leading-edge chips, of course. But more devices will have at least some leading-edge logic or will be connected over some advanced interconnect scheme t... » read more

Liability And Reliability


As systems vendors accelerate the development of their own architectures, semiconductor companies across the supply chain are getting a seat at the table for architecting the engines in those systems. Rather than competing for a socket, they are directly involved in strategizing the optimal solution that can make a systems vendor or OEM more competitive or far more efficient. That gives the dev... » read more

Addressing IC Security Threats Before And After They Emerge


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss different approaches to security with Warren Savage, research scientist in the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security at the University of Maryland; Neeraj Paliwal, vice president and general manager of Rambus Security; Luis Ancajas, marketing director for IoT security software solutions at Micron; Doug Suerich, product evangelist... » read more

Rethinking Car Design


The automotive industry is undergoing sweeping changes in both technology and business, and functional safety increasingly cuts across both of them. Every safety-critical industry has one or more functional safety standards, whether that is manufacturing, avionics or automotive. In automotive, it's a combination of [gettech id="31076" comment="ISO 26262"] and various ASIL levels, which are a... » read more

What Autonomy Level Is Your Car?


Over the past couple of months, you've probably heard semiconductor industry executives dropping numbers about the levels of autonomy for vehicles. And despite Tesla's highly touted autonomous capabilities, current models are just a Level 2. Or maybe it's a Level 3. If these numbered levels were meant to lessen the confusion, it's not clear the plan is working. Until last September, there we... » read more

IP Liability Changes Ahead?


Patent lawyers are keeping close tabs on a biotech patent infringement case that went before the Supreme Court this week because it could have a significant impact on IP content in other markets, including semiconductors. On Tuesday, attorneys for Life Technologies Corp. and Promega Corp., presented arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court involving an enzyme for amplifying DNA analysis. For ... » read more

Harder Than It Looks


First Apple scales back plans to develop its own vehicle. Then Intel creates its own automotive chip unit. This kind of two-step movement in the automotive electronics industry is becoming more common. NXP buys Freescale, then Qualcomm buys NXP. Harman buys Symphony Teleca and Red Bend Software, then Samsung buys Harman. All of these moves are proof points that innovation and fleet-foo... » read more

We’re All Beta Testers Now


There are two distinct camps forming around autonomous vehicles. One group wants to see self-driving cars on the road as quickly as possible because it will save more lives than if people are behind the wheel. Others are wary, insisting there is no way will this can or should happen in the next 10 to 15 years. Time will tell who's right. But what is clear is that the technology has far outst... » read more

Laws Don’t Apply Anymore


One of the nifty things about technology is that it's always new and always being refreshed. That creates problems, though. The speed with which technology is overhauled or changed out is so much faster than the social and legal infrastructure built to support and protect the people buying it, that the two worlds are now years, if not decades, out of sync. The first whiff of this came in 198... » read more