Interconnect Prominence In Fail-Operational Architectures


When we in the semiconductor world think about safety, we think about ISO 26262, FMEDA and safety mechanisms like redundancy, ECC and lock-step operation. Once we have that covered, any other aspect of safety is somebody else’s problem, right? Sadly no, for us at least. As we push towards higher levels of autonomy, SAE levels 3 and above, we’re integrating more functionality into our SoCs, ... » read more

Dude, Where’s My Autonomous Car?


Researchers forecast that by 2025 we’ll see approximately 8 million autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles on the road. Before merging onto roadways, autonomous cars will first have to progress through 6 levels of driver-assistance technology advancements. What exactly are these levels? And where are we now? The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines 6 levels of driving automatio... » read more

Three Tools Help Put Safe Vehicles On The Road


By Richard Pugh and Gabriele Pulini As the ultimate systems-of-systems, automated vehicles present an enormous verification task, requiring verification of complex sensing, computing, and actuating functions. This can be accomplished only by virtualizing the entire system: the vehicle and the environment it moves through. It also requires a combination of realistic scenario modeling, hard... » read more

Low Latency Networks: RoCE Or iWARP?


Today, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is primarily being utilized within high performance computing or cloud environments to reduce latency across the network. Enterprise customers will soon require low latency networking that RDMA offers so that they can address a variety of different applications, such as Oracle and SAP, and also implement software-defined storage using Windows Storage Sp... » read more

(R)evolution of the 56th Design Automation Conference Technical Program


The Design Automation Conference (DAC), which was founded in 1964, is the longest running and largest conference focused on the design and automation of electronic circuits and systems. And 2019 was a record year in terms of research paper submissions and accepted papers. In fact, this year DAC experienced an impressive 18 percent increase in submissions, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: DA... » read more

Multi-Layer Processing Boosts Inference Throughput/Watt


The focus in discussion of inference throughput is often on the computations required. For example, YOLOv3, a power real time object detection and recognition model, requires 227 BILLION MACs (multiply-accumulates) to process a single 2 Mega Pixel image! This is with the Winograd Transformation; it’s more than 300 Billion without it. And there is a lot of discussion of the large size ... » read more

Mine Cryptocurrencies Sooner, Part 2


Bitcoin has lost much of its allure due to the concentration of control of the world's Bitcoin mining resources by a few players in a few locations, as discussed in Part 1 of this blog. In response, the larger, global cryptocurrency community has started to develop alternative cryptocurrencies based on lessons learned from the Bitcoin experience. New cryptocurrencies such as Monero introduce... » read more

Combining SLAM And CNN For High-Performance Augmented Reality


Robotics and headsets or goggles are the most common hardware devices requiring AR/VR/mixed reality, and AR is coming to mobile phones, tablets, and automobiles as well. For hardware devices to see the world around them and add to that reality with inserted graphics or images, they need to determine their position in space and map the surrounding environment. Simultaneous localization and ma... » read more

Memory Architectures In AI: One Size Doesn’t Fit All


In the world of regular computing, we are used to certain ways of architecting for memory access to meet latency, bandwidth and power goals. These have evolved over many years to give us the multiple layers of caching and hardware cache-coherency management schemes which are now so familiar. Machine learning (ML) has introduced new complications in this area for multiple reasons. AI/ML chips ca... » read more

Speeding Up Electrical Vehicle Development With Designer-Centric Thermal And Electromagnetic Simulation And Analysis


By 2040, 54% of new car sales and 33% of the global car fleet is predicted to be electric [1]. More than six countries have announced a ban on internal-combustion engines. China is expected to be the largest market for electrical vehicles (EVs), which is driving automakers to make aggressive rollout plans for EVs. Some of the important trends driving EV development are getting more than 200 ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →