Preparing For The Great Auto War


The internal combustion engine's days are numbered, and what comes next is going to cause one of the biggest upheavals in the history of business. Before semiconductors and electronics, it was the auto industry that defined economies of scale. In fact, the auto industry became the model on which the entire electronics industry was built. It always was assumed that the mainframe, minicomputer... » read more

The Last Mile


The race to autonomous driving is looking a lot less like a race these days. German automakers pushed the likely date for Level 5 autonomous driving back to 2032 from 2027, according to attendees at the International Congress for Automotive Electronics (ELIV) in Bonn last month. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is cost. The amount of processing needed to make the split-secon... » read more

Adjusting The Finish Line In Auto Electronics


There are two big hurdles in automotive electronics. One is developing autonomous vehicles, and the other is the electrification of those vehicles. In both cases, the development time may be a lot longer and more costly than anyone expected, and the impact may be much more far-reaching than the initial effort would suggest. For automakers, the key question in all of this is how they will dif... » read more

Getting Granular On The Edge


Imagine a plane flying at 30,000 feet. Two things are visible—clouds and land. In the processing world, that land mass is the edge, and as the plane begins to descend the edge begins to take on a more distinct shape and different features begin to appear. From the air, everyone can see just how large this market opportunity is. What they can't make out are the winning models for success. B... » read more

Who’s In Your Wallet?


Hacking a financial institution is a very big deal. Banks and credit card companies take their security very seriously because they literally have money to lose if something goes awry. What becomes clear, though, in reading the criminal complaint involving the Capital One hack, is that the weakest link isn't always the hardware or the software. It's the geeks who want to show off, or ... » read more

Security’s Very Strange Path To Success


Security at the chip level appears to be heading toward a more promising future. The reason is simple—more people are willing to pay for security than in the past. For the most part, security is like insurance. You don't know it's working until something goes wrong, and you don't necessarily even know right away if there has been a breach. Sometimes it takes years to show up, because it ca... » read more

Algorithms And Security


From a security standpoint, the best thing AI has going for it is that it's in a state of perpetual change. That also may be the worst thing. The problem, at least for now, is that no one knows for sure. What’s clear is that security is not a primary concern when it comes to designing and building AI systems. In many cases it’s not even an action item because architectures are constantly... » read more

Road Not Fully Constructed


There is a growing consensus in the semiconductor industry that SAE Level 3 and Level 4 autonomy will be full of unexpected hazards. At a number of recent conferences in Silicon Valley, experts from all parts of the semiconductor industry have voiced concern about those middle steps between assisted driving and full autonomy. This isn't the public position taken by carmakers and Tier 1s.... » read more

The 7nm Pileup


The number of 7nm designs is exploding. Cadence alone reports 80 new 7nm chips under design. So why now, and what does this all mean? First of all, 7nm appears to be the next 28nm. It's a major node, and it intersects with a number of broad trends that are happening across the industry, all of which involve AI in one way or another. The big question now is how many of them will survive long ... » read more

The Next Spoiler Alert


Speculative execution seemed like a good idea at the time. As the power/performance benefits of each node shrink began to dwindle, companies like Intel figured out ways to maintain processor speeds at the same or lower power. There were other approaches, as well. Speculative execution and branch prediction are roughly equivalent to pre-fetch in search, which has gotten so good that often the... » read more

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