Blog Review: Feb. 8

Cadence’s Sanjeet Kumar points to key changes and optimizations that are done for USB3 Gen T compared to USB3 Gen X tunneling in order to minimize tunnel overhead and maximize USB3 throughput.

Siemens EDA’s Harry Foster considers the effectiveness of IC and ASIC verification by looking at schedule overruns, number of required spins, and classification of functional bugs.

Synopsys’ Chris Clark warns that while automotive over-the-air update capabilities provide worthwhile security benefits and bottom-line savings, poor implementation or bad software development practices could lead to costly mistakes.

Ansys’ Pepi Maksimovic points to four ways simulation can help reduce e-waste such as selecting materials with lower environmental footprints and electromagnetic simulation to make dielectrics thinner while still providing the necessary electrical insulation.

Renesas’ Graeme Clark digs into the Event Link Controller (ELC), a peripheral which allows for direct linking of peripherals in hardware, so an event such as a timer timing out or an I/O port changing state can be used to trigger the start of an ADC conversion cycle, trigger a timer to start counting, or to capture the time of the event.

Coventor’s Gerold Schropfer looks at the MEMS technologies that will be needed to build the highly interactive user interface required for the metaverse.

SEMI’s Ashley Huang finds that the automotive industry is poised to drive huge growth momentum for the entire semiconductor industry as the importance of electronics and software rises with electrification and self-driving.

A Rambus writer points to the top seven most significant specification advances made in the transition from DDR4 to DDR5 DIMMs, along with some new signal integrity design challenges.

Arm’s Jumana Mundichipparakkal provides a guide to optimizing application performance on the Arm Neoverse V1 platform.

Memory blogger Ron Neale considers the current state of phase-change memories and chalcogenide material-based switching devices and argues for further research and development.

Nvidia’s Angie Lee checks out how large language models use unsupervised learning to recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate text and other content.

Western Digital’s Thomas Ebrahimi warns that a lack of high-quality, publicly available data about the internal workings of lithium-ion batteries could be holding back innovation.

Intel’s Mona Vij expects confidential computing and end-to-end data protection to become a pervasive technology over the next several years at HPC applications move to the cloud.

Plus, check out the blogs featured in the latest Automotive, Security & Pervasive Computing and Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletters:

Executive Editor Ann Mutschler finds that despite lingering supply chain challenges, there is plenty of new technology development across the automotive ecosystem.

Synopsys’ Dana Neustadter and Jerry Lotto look at enforcing encryption on an Ethernet network at the hardware level.

Rambus’ Bart Stevens encourages security-by-design for government, data center, and cloud with a hardware root of trust.

Siemens’ Jacob Wiltgen shows how to manage lifecycle data within a requirements-driven workflow.

Riscure’s Marc Witteman examines new differential fault analysis research that shows faster extraction of a secret key under more complex conditions.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan argues that keeping a car from being hacked involves more than just the vehicle.

Flex Logix’s Geoff Tate says it’s possible for FPGAs to be small, low-power, and cost-effective.

Onto Innovation’s Wei Zhao examines gallium nitride’s advantages over silicon, such as increased electron mobility, heat resistance, and lower energy consumption.

Nordson’s Daniel Chir and Johnson Toh describe a plasma process that lowers the risk of overtreatment or heat related issues in lead frames.

Teradyne’s David Vondran and Rodrigo Carrillo-Ramirez identify three things that will need to happen to make millimeter wave profitable and viable.

Advantest’s Adir Zonta shows how to increase test capacity without expanding engineering facilities.