Blog Review: Oct. 28

Get up to date on the latest USB 3.1 happenings with Synopsys’ Eric Huang, including the first laptops shipping with the Type C connector, the importance of USB safety, and price cuts on chips from Intel and ASMedia.

The connected car is ready to hit the mass market, according to automakers, but customer adoption has been slow. Mentor’s John Day takes a look at a report from the TU-Detroit conference in June that suggests some of the reasons why.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan shares some of his view about patents in the semiconductor and EDA space and concludes that they don’t work when the industry is based on thousands of small incremental improvements.

Determinism is a fundamental construct in hardware but as ARM’s Jason Andrews points out, the real world doesn’t follow in such an idealistic manner and that creates problems for benchmarking.

Would you rather get picked up by a modular, self-driving pod that hooks up with others to make a bus, or take a ride on a sky taxi? This week, it’s all about getting around in the top tech picks from Ansys’ Justin Nescott. Plus, prosthesis with an artificial skin to reproduce the sensations of touch.

Lower-cost multi-die packaging, novel uses of high-speed serial transceivers, and even non-electrical interconnect: Altera’s Ron Wilson investigates the options that are opening new possibilities for partitioning system cores across multiple dice.

Digging into recent ReRAM research, Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff finds that two commercially promising types of memristors have now been created, and how the two types of switching mechanisms can be bridged. Plus, do you want to own a memory chip that’s orbited the earth?

Stella Lux, a solar powered car built by students from the Eindhoven University of Technology, drove off with a gold at the World Solar Championships in Australia. NXP’s Martijn van der Linden presents two of the car’s technologies that could show up on the road soon.

Halloween is coming up, but one thing you shouldn’t be afraid of is UVM, says Aldec’s Sunil Sahoo. Especially since a free webinar on UVM for hardware designers is now available.

And there’s plenty more reading with the featured blogs from last week’s Manufacturing, Design & Test newsletter:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling argues that the success of China’s technology investments will hinge on what other governments allow, which may never be clear.

Executive Editor Mark LaPedus sits down with Nanoco’s CEO to talk about the latest advancements in LCD TVs.

Mentor Graphics’ David Abercrombie digs into what affects the double patterning coloring process and what you need to know to make it work better.

Imec fellow Francky Catthoor, writing a guest blog for KLA-Tencor, contends that chip research and the chip industry are in no danger of hitting a wall.

Applied Materials’ Max McDaniels looks at new thin-film encapsulation technology.

Semico Research’s Joanne Itow notes that the outlook for semiconductor growth is down for 2015 and 2016, but that could change quickly.

SEMI’s Clark Tseng finds six projects in the works in China in preparation for the IoT.