Taking Self-Driving Safety Standards Beyond ISO 26262


I participated in a couple of sessions at Arm TechCon this year, the first on how safety is evolving for platform-based architectures with a mix of safety-aware IP and the second on lessons learned in safety and particularly how the industry and standards are adapting to the larger challenges in self-driving, which obviously extend beyond the pure functional safety intent of ISO 26262. Here I w... » read more

Functional Safety Verification For AV SoC Designs Accelerated With Advanced Tools


Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be the culmination of dozens of highly complex systems, incorporating state-of-the-art technologies in electronics hardware, sensors, software, and more. Conceiving and designing these systems is certain to be one of the greatest challenges for today’s engineers. The only greater challenge will be convincing a wary public that these automated systems are safer d... » read more

A Trillion Security Risks


An explosion in IoT devices has significantly raised the security threat level for hardware and software, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Sometime over the next decade the number of connected devices is expected to hit the 1 trillion mark. Expecting all of them to be secure is impossible, particularly as the attack surface widens and the attack vectors become more sophisticated... » read more

Ensuring Functional Safety For Self-Driving Cars


There may be no hotter topic in electronics than chips for autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars have captured the public imagination and become a major area of investment. Both established automotive manufacturers and well-funded startups are producing vehicles with the highly complex chips needed to negotiate roads, deal with unpredictable humans and communicate with the cloud for machine le... » read more

November 2019 Startup Funding


During November, 16 tech startups raised private funding rounds of $100 million or more, together receiving $3.42 billion. Investors were drawn to many of the same technology fields that were popular in 2019 — automotive and mobility tech, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, platforms, semiconductors, and software. Analytics of multiple different types were big in ... » read more

Getting To Orbit And The Rocket Equation


The Apollo 12 mission recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Launching on November 14, 1969 and returning on November 24, it put humans on the Moon for the second time. I wrote about Apollo 11 (mostly about its guidance computer) earlier in the year in my post The First Computer on the Moon. Today's post is about the rocket equation, and how challenging it is to get into orbit around th... » read more

Accelerating ISO 26262 Compliance For Semiconductor Projects


In recent years, autonomous driving vehicles have become one of the hottest topics in the automotive world. Everyday consumers and electronics professionals are both fascinated by the promise and the risks of autonomous vehicles. Existing automotive semiconductor companies as well as new entrants are making significant investments in this area developing new high performance, feature rich and p... » read more

Eight Benefits Of Using An FPGA With An On-Chip High-Speed Network


Since the initial introduction of FPGAs decades ago, each new architecture has continued to employ a bit-wise routing structure. While this approach has been successful, the rise of high-speed communication standards has required ever increasing on-chip bus widths to be able to support these new data rates. A consequence of this limitation is that designers often spend much of their development... » read more

Fixed and Floating FMCW Radar Signal Processing with Tensilica DSPs


Automotive advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) applications increasingly demand radar modules with better capability and performance. These applications require sophisticated radar processing algorithms and powerful digital signal processors (DSPs) to run them. Because these embedded systems have limited power and cost budgets, the DSP’s instruction set architecture (ISA) needs to be eff... » read more

Multi-Patterning EUV Vs. High-NA EUV


Foundries are finally in production with EUV lithography at 7nm, but chip customers must now decide whether to implement their next designs using EUV-based multiple patterning at 5nm/3nm or wait for a new single-patterning EUV system at 3nm and beyond. This scenario revolves around ASML’s current extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool (NXE:3400C) versus a completely new EUV system with... » read more

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