The Week In Review: Design


M&A ANSYS finalized its acquisition of OPTIS. Founded in 1989, OPTIS provided software for scientific simulation of light, human vision and physics-based visualization. The acquisition boosts the company's automotive simulation portfolio with radar, lidar and camera simulation. Terms were not disclosed. IP Arm debuted the Cortex-M35P processor. Aimed at IoT applications, the IP combine... » read more

Rules Of The Driverless Road


The growing disparity among states, countries and carmakers over autonomous driving is turning what should be a logical progression into chaos. Consider what's happening in California, which is determined to remain the leader in this tech revolution. The state last month relaxed its testing rules so that cars can be monitored remotely, with no driver actually present inside the car. I... » read more

Smart Farming Accelerates


Today I’m taking a brief, but related, detour from my usual automotive blog topics to discuss a bit of what’s happening related to autonomy but in the agricultural industry. This industry carries a market cap of $42.7 billion as a whole for the construction and agricultural machinery market, according to The New York Times, although still smaller than the semiconductor segment, with its ... » read more

Improving Security In Cars


When security researchers first demonstrated that they could hack a car over the internet to control its brakes and transmission, Chrysler had to recall 1.4 million vehicles to fix the software vulnerability. The infamous Jeep hack of 2015 was an expensive wake-up call for the automotive industry. So, what has changed since then? In today’s cars, software now controls everything from safet... » read more

Challenges At The Edge


By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling Edge computing is inching toward the mainstream as the tech industry begins grappling with the fact that far too much data will be generated by sensors to send everything back to the cloud for processing. The initial idea behind the IoT/IIoT, as well as other connected devices, was that simple sensors would relay raw data to the cloud for processing throug... » read more

Tech Talk: HW Security


Ben Levine, senior director of product management at Rambus, explains how to minimize the risk of attacks on chip hardware, why design for security is becoming more critical for connected devices, and strategies for making devices less vulnerable. https://youtu.be/twgHcdqvyjU » read more

Timing Signoff Methodology For eFPGA


An eFPGA is a hard IP block in an SoC. Most SoCs are made up of a collection of hard IP blocks (RAM, SerDes, PHYs…) and the remaining logic is constructed using Standard Cells. The timing signoff for an eFPGA’s interface with the rest of the chip is designed to leverage standard ASIC timing signoff flow for a hard-macro: as long as inputs/output to/from the eFPGA are all flopped, the int... » read more

Toward Autonomous Farming


While the automotive industry works diligently towards self-driving vehicles, it's possible the carrots you've eaten recently were semi-autonomously planted and harvested with Case IH equipment by Bolthouse Farms, one of the largest carrot growers in the United States. And the U.S. is hardly alone. Autonomous agriculture is coming everywhere, and it's happening much faster than autonomous ca... » read more

The Coming Golden Age For Automotive E/E Design Services And Consulting


By Andrew Macleod and Scott Majdecki The discipline of automotive E/E systems design is being transformed by trends like electrification and autonomous vehicles, which means there is a premium on methodologies like rapid platform (hardware/ software) prototyping, simulation and test, and electrical architecture optimization. Such methodologies hinge on advanced software design tools and the ... » read more

Preparing For AI


Suppose an autonomous car is coming up an on-ramp onto a bridge. The ramp is fine, but the bridge is icy, and there’s an overturned bus full of children blocking several lanes. Children are evacuating through the windows and milling around on the pavement. There isn’t time to stop, even with the better-than-human reaction time an autonomous car might have. Swerving to one side might send... » read more

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