Blog Review: July 19

Synopsys’ Prishkrit Abrol provides a detailed explanation of how the USB Type-C connector works.

Mentor’s Ricardo Anguiano examines how the RISC-V ecosystem is expanding and latest developments in the open source toolchain.

Cadence’s Gopi Krishnamurthy explains the lane margining requirements of the PCIe 4.0 specification.

ARM’s Chet Babla unravels some claims about Narrowband IoT, Cat-M1, and cellular LPWA, noting that there is no one-size-fits-all connectivity solution for IoT.

Applied’s Ganesh Hegde examines the concept of Industry 4.0 and how smart manufacturing can be applied to the fab environment.

SynthWorks’ Jim Lewis, chair of the IEEE 1076 VHDL working group, provides a peek at what’s new in VHDL-2017, from interfaces to the assert API.

Marvell’s George Hervey points to the networking challenges that come with the explosion of data centers and cloud infrastructure.

Intel’s Jennifer Goforth Gregory warns of the potential for bias in AI decision making and the consequences.

Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff points to major growth for contactless pay-as-you-go transit cards in London.

NXP’s Birgit Ahlborn argues that collaboration will be a necessary part of the new automotive industry.

Cadence’s Meera Collier argues for advocates, not just mentors, as a vital part of beginning a career.

Mentor’s Colin Walls examines different approaches to debugging embedded software.

Synopsys’ Ralf Huuck notes that while the MISRA guidelines for developing safe and secure software started out in automotive, it has applications in an array of domains.

And don’t miss the blogs highlighted in last week’s Low Power-High Performance newsletter:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling finds that sending most of the data to the cloud isn’t a sustainable strategy.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler contends that foundries must provide the basis for predicting reliability because every manufacturing process is different.

Mentor’s Guillaume Boillet points to emulation as an essential tool for trustable power analysis.

Rambus’ John Eble explains how the scaling of memory bandwidth and capacity keeps system performance improving.

ARM’s Phil Burr finds a new wave of entrepreneurs flourishing amid industry consolidation.

Synopsys’ Rich Collins argues that both RISC and DSP functionality are needed to meet the expanding demands of edge devices.