Author's Latest Posts


Propelling Autonomous Vehicles Safely And Securely


Last month, when asked about how important it was that Apple not miss out on the opportunities within automotive, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg, “There is a major disruption looming there not only for self-driving cars but also the electrification piece. If you’ve driven an all-electric car, it’s actually a marvelous experience, and it’s a marvelous experience not to stop at the... » 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

The Darker Side Of Machine Learning


Machine learning can be used for many purposes, but not all of them are good—or intentional. While much of the work underway is focused on the development of machine learning algorithms, how to train these systems and how to make them run faster and do more, there is a darker side to this technology. Some of that involves groups looking at what else machine learning can be used for. So... » read more

System Bits: July 3


VW emissions tests cheat code found A team of researchers from UC San Diego, Ruhr University along with an independent researcher has uncovered the mechanism that Volkswagen used to circumvent U.S. and European emission tests over a period of at least six years before the EPA put the company on notice in 2015 for violating the Clean Air Act. The researchers found the code that allowed onboa... » read more

System Bits: June 27


Entangling photons for bug-proof communication With the increasing processing power of computers, conventional encryption of data is becoming increasingly insecure, reminded Fraunhofer researchers that are proposing one solution is coding with entangled photons. The team is developing a quantum coding source that allows the transport of entangled photons from satellites, expected to be an impo... » read more

System Bits: June 20


The case against general-purpose processors With a large number of emerging applications such as implantables, wearables, printed electronics, and IoT have ultra-low area and power constraints, and these applications relying on ultra-low-power general purpose microcontrollers and microprocessors, there are drawbacks, researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota rem... » read more

Modeling On-Chip Variation At 10/7nm


Simulation, a workhorse tool for semiconductor design, is running out of steam at 10/7nm. It is falling behind on chips with huge gate counts and an enormous number of possible interactions between all the different functions that are being crammed onto a die. At simulation's root is some form of SPICE, which has served as its underpinnings ever since SPICE was first published 44 years ago. ... » read more

System Bits: June 13


Nimble-fingered robots enabled by deep learning Grabbing awkwardly shaped items that humans regularly pick up daily is not so easy for robots, as they don’t know where to apply grip. To overcome this, UC Berkeley researchers have a built a robot that can pick up and move unfamiliar, real-world objects with a 99% success rate. Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, postdoctoral researcher Jeff M... » read more

ESD Guns, Transients And Testing…Oh My!


With the pervasiveness of power management techniques like clock gating and power gating, transient power is on the rise, accompanied by the requirement to closely examine a system for such phenomenon as electrostatic discharge. I was interested to recently learn more about ESD testing, some of which is done with software tools, but much is still done in the lab with prototypes of the end d... » read more

Transient Power Problems Rising


Transient power is becoming much more problematic at 10/7nm, adding yet another level of complexity for design teams already wrestling with power issues caused by leakage, a variety of power management techniques to control dynamic power, and leakage current. At each new node there is less headroom for engineering teams to address these problems, and more likelihood that what they do in one ... » read more

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