Blog Review: May 4

Ready for a scuba-diving robot? Also in this week’s top picks, Ansys’ Justin Nescott highlights the latest, strange discovery about water plus the race to Mars.

From depositing a check via smartphone to the throwaway culture of smartphones themselves, letting convenience trump security is dangerous, warns Cadence’s Paul McLellan.

Synopsys’ Robert Vamosi looks at the sad demise of Hitomi, a Japanese X-ray telescope that disintegrated in orbit after bad data in a software update package made it unstable.

From jellybeans to mouse bites, Mentor’s John McMillan takes a light-hearted look at some PCB design slang.

Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff questions how to build a smart home that doesn’t require constant Internet connectivity.

Lam CEO Martin Anstice chats with Jim Cramer about the increasing importance of technology inflections and the end markets that are driving development.

ARM’s Eoin McCann and Xen’s Lars Kurth share highlights from the Xen Project Hackathon.

NXP’s Lars Reger focuses on using vehicle-to-everything technology to make city traffic safer.

Mentor’s Tom Fitzpatrick reviews some of UVM’s key concepts and the value brought by its flexibility.

Can neural networks map to embedded systems? Cadence’s Christine Young listens in on the upsides and downsides.

The automotive SoC market is expected to grow at 6.7% CAGR between 2014 to 2019, says Synopsys’ Michael Posner, and USB plays a big role in it.

Plus, check out the featured blogs from last week’s System-Level Design newsletter:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling contends that the frenzy of M&A activity in the semiconductor industry could backfire.

eSilicon’s Mike Gianfagna questions who will get a boost from the IoT market.

Aldec’s Henry Chan digs into creating an anatomically correct model for poking and prodding.

ARM’s Ronan Synnott explains how to build and debug code for a mix of processor cores.

Agnisys’ Anupam Bakshi observes that while more registers equate to more functionality and configurability, more isn’t always better.

OneSpin Systems’ Dave Kelf contends that formal can’t be left to a specialized few because success depends on the entire project team.

Synopsys’ Malte Doerper examines the role of virtual prototypes in risk management.

Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister points to emulation highlights from the recent CDNLive conference.

Mentor Graphics’ Nicolas Williams points to the unique design requirements when sending an ADC into space.