Blog Review: Jan. 27

There’s an ocean of possibilities for transistors and interconnects at the 5nm node, says Cadence’s Paul McLellan – but will any of them be feasible in time?

How would you design R2-D2? Mentor’s Joe Hupcey III lays out what low power techniques he thinks the Star Wars droid might require.

It’s not all clear skies in the world of FinFETs, as Synopsys’ Graham Etchells continues his series with some important things to consider in FinFET layout.

Take a look back at the first commercially successful telegraph system in the latest short video from the Science Museum in London and ARM’s Neil Cooper.

Cadence’s Christine Young highlights the DesignCon keynote from Rambus’ Paul Kocher and the three assumptions he says are jeopardizing design security.

As in-vehicle services and applications proliferate, Mentor’s John Day digs into some of the key IEEE standards for connected cars.

In this week’s top tech picks, Ansys’ Justin Nescott finds a new way for robots to learn faster, but that they still aren’t very good at doing all the housework. So it’s a good thing there’s a self-cleaning window in the works.

Synopsys’ Hezi Saar discusses the transition from eMMC to Universal Flash Storage, and says UFS is gaining momentum.

In a guest blog for Aldec, FirstEDA’s Alex Grove highlights three ways to utilize FPGAs.

NXP’s Birgit Ahlborn gathers up notable moments from the company’s self-driving car event earlier this month.

For more good reading, check out the blogs featured in last week’s Manufacturing, Design & Test newsletter:

Editor in Chief Ed Sperling warns of delays, detours and lots more engineering work on the industry’s road ahead.

Executive Editor Mark LaPedus looks at what’s happening in artificial intelligence and questions whether today’s hardware can keep up.

Technical Editor Katherine Derbyshire shows why anamorphic lenses are so important to EUV and Quentin Tarantino.

Imec’s Jef Poortmans observes that it’s increasingly possible to stack technologies to produce smart systems.

Mentor Graphics’ Sierene Aymen and Hartmut Marquardt contend that eliminating the manual work required to verify the power intent of analog IPs is crucial for avoiding risks created by human error.

Applied Materials’ Max McDaniel reports on what technology was on display and what kinds of displays were being shown at CES.

Semico Research’s Jim Feldhan checks out a different side of CES with smarter cars and pet interaction technology.

SEMI’s Jamie Gerard concludes that many of SEMI’s priorities are a recognized part of the political agenda in Washington.