Blog Review: Dec. 20

Mentor’s Andrew Macleod points out five things that need to happen for autonomous and electric cars to move from R&D and test cases to mass-produced, commercially viable vehicles.

Synopsys’ Iain Singleton provides some tips on tackling large designs with formal and how the assume-guarantee technique helps split them without masking bugs.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan shares updates from the latest RISC-V workshop, with a focus on new chip designs featuring the open source ISA.

Intel’s Ron Wilson notes that as 5G attempts to overcome multiple competing challenges, it is becoming something very different from today’s cellular network.

Plus, NI’s James Kimery looks back on 5G developments through the year.

Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff notes that blockchain technology isn’t just for Bitcoin anymore with a look at where it’s going next.

In a blog for Ansys, Masoud Ghasemian of UC Riverside uses CFD to see whether air pollution can be curbed by roadside vegetation.

Arm’s Roberto Lopez Mendez gives a crash course on implementing indoor navigation using Unity and the Google ARCore SDK with today’s smart phones.

Nvidia’s Jamie Beckett checks out how ophthalmologists are using AI to detect advanced macular degeneration and other eye diseases earlier.

Synopsys’ Amit Sethi breaks down the year in security, with a record number of vulnerabilities, the dubious honor of the worst breach, and how not to respond to attacks.

Mentor’s Matthew Ballance shows an example of how Portable Stimulus raises the level of abstraction at which test intent can be captured.

In a video, Cadence’s Vivek Nandakumar explains the behavioral differences between Loosely Timed and Approximately Timed TLM 2.0 models.

Happy holidays! For more good reading, check out the blogs featured in the recent Manufacturing & Process Technology and Low Power-High Performance newsletters:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling argues that future progress increasingly will require a mix of different materials and disciplines, but silicon will remain a key component.

Executive Editor Mark LaPedus peers into the future with AI, neural nets and quantum computing.

Applied Materials’ Mike Rosa examines the state of 5G technology, what needs to be done and why the confluence of this technology with AI marks an inflection point.

Lam Research’s Larry Zhao explains why interconnects are becoming the performance bottleneck in advanced-node chips.

KLA-Tencor’s Andrew Cross zeroes in on how to manage hotspots at 7/5nm and beyond.

SEMI’s Cherry Sun observes that global industry cooperation continues to grow.

GlobalFoundries’ Mark Granger questions how far existing technology can be extended when it comes to self-driving cars.

Editor in Chief Ed Sperling contends that analog engineers finally may get some empathy from the digital side.

Synopsys’ Biswanath Tayenjam and Licinio Sousa explain how hardware inline encryption in eMMC and UFS works and why it’s important.

Rambus’ Niraj Mathur observes that while PCIe 4.0 took a long time to get here, there are big benefits ahead.

Mentor’s Ron Squiers looks at co-modeling technology, its impact on verification and validation, and what are the best tradeoffs.

Helic’s Magdy Abadir argues that most of the commercial electromagnetic solvers and extraction engines are not suitable for analyzing EM crosstalk in a typical SoC design.