Blog Review: Oct. 9

In a video, Cadence’s Tom Hackett continues his introduction to finite element analysis (FEA) and the important role it can play in electronics deign.

Mentor’s Colin Walls considers dynamic memory allocation in real-time operating systems and the problems of non-deterministic behavior and ill-defined failure modes.

Synopsys’ Taylor Armerding contends that ethical hackers are a necessary part of security, key aspects of hacking for the greater good, and why penetration testing alone isn’t enough.

ANSYS’ Sandeep Sovani finds public opinion on autonomous cars to be largely positive, but with concerns about security and safety and some big differences depending on age and country

Arm’s Nigel Stephens shares the latest architecture changes introduced in Armv8.6-A, including more efficient processing for neural nets and machine learning as well as security features.

VLSI Research’s Julian West checks out the market for chillers and heat exchangers, finding the growth of dry etch processing steps pushing the semi equipment component to a much higher CAGR than the rest of the critical subsystems market.

A Rambus writer points to chiplets as a way to reduce complexity and increase yield over the traditional monolithic SoC scaling approach and why interconnects are necessary for that to happen.

Applied Materials’ Niranjan Khasgiwale argues that it’s time to integrate metrology into process systems and chambers to control on-wafer and process results.

Plus, check out the blogs highlighted in the latest IoT, Security & Automotive and Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletters:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling contends that full autonomy and more efficient electric vehicles are just part of the big picture.

Flex Logix’s Geoff Tate demonstrates techniques for getting a good balance between inference throughput, accuracy, and ease of use.

Mentor’s Piyush Karkare explains the concept of enabling a closed-loop behavioral representation of a vehicle’s software and hardware systems for continuous validation throughout the product lifecycle.

Synopsys’ Gordon Cooper looks at how embedded vision processors are evolving to incorporate the latest academic research.

ClioSoft’s Srinath Anantharaman describes how to master the black art of project management.

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling finds machine learning developers are putting a much friendlier face on the technology these days.

Mentor’s Jay Jahangiri describes how a hierarchical DFT solves many of the biggest challenges in DFT, pattern generation, and diagnosis for today’s large SoCs.

proteanTec’s Noam Brousard explains how in-chip monitoring can help optimize performance and address failures before they occur.

YieldHub’s Marie Ryan points to some unusual ways that manufacturing schedules can be derailed.