Supporting Academic Institutions – A Corporate Responsibility?


Innovation is rooted in collaboration, and there’s no better example—when done correctly—than the partnership between the various academic institutes or between the industry and academia. It’s a symbiotic relationship: Companies get access to leading research, ideas and creativity, while universities and research consortia get access to proven technologies, methodologies and experienced... » read more

Automotive Startup Activity Swelling


According to AngelList, there are at least 6,600 automotive startups, with a $4.6 million average valuation. 475 of those are electric vehicle startups with a $5 million average valuation. Indeed, the electrification of vehicles and move towards autonomous driving is having a huge impact, the likes of which the automotive industry has never seen. This is causing the car manufacturers and Tie... » read more

Bluetooth Mesh Drives Security For Automotive Applications


The use of Bluetooth technology continues to grow beyond mobile into rapidly expanding IoT and automotive applications. Consumers have grown to expect hands-free calling via Bluetooth, however, as the technology moves to other use cases such as tire pressure monitors or door lock connectivity, security becomes a key challenge to automotive SoC designers. Bluetooth-enabled devices have been a... » read more

Self-Driving Cars At CES: The Future Of Transportation Is Here


CES 2018 attendees will get a new kind of tech demo in just a few weeks. When they hail Lyft to take them from the Las Vegas Convention Center across town, it will be a fully automated point-to-point vehicle getting them there. While we marvel now, today’s novelty will be tomorrow’s norm, though questions about the safety of autonomous driving persist. For the CES demo, a backup pilot wi... » read more

The Importance Of Metal Stack Compatibility For Semi IP


Architects and front end designers usually leave the back end to the physical designers: they know there can be different numbers of metal layers, but may not realize the characteristics of each metal layer may vary layer by layer as well and that different chips use different metal stack ups to optimize for their requirements. This slide from IDF14 shows a simple summary of the breadth of v... » read more

Sensors Drive IoT Intelligent Systems


Back in 1980, it is believed that the first intelligent electronic sensor was proposed (by S. Middelhoek and J.B. Angell). Their idea was to combine a MEMS sensor, an analog-to-digital convertor, and a processor to analyze the analog data generated by the sensor. But, as many great electronics ideas, the technology to put this all together on a CMOS IC was not nearly ready at that time. Toda... » read more

Thwarting Side-Channel Attacks With DPA-Protected Software Libraries


All physical electronic systems routinely leak information about the internal process of computing via fluctuating levels of power consumption and electro-magnetic emissions. Much like the early days of safecracking, electronic side-channel attacks (SCA) eschew a brute force approach to extracting keys and other secret information from a device or system. Moreover, SCA conducted against elec... » read more

Eye-Catching Innovations In Display Subsystems


The mobile devices we hold in our hands today are nothing short of astonishing in what they deliver and how seamlessly they deliver it, and it’s not just geolocation and context-mapping applications that have made these devices so transformational. Hand in hand with processor and bandwidth improvements have come leaps in display capabilities, which means new entertainment and information appl... » read more

Automotive Opps Drive Change For Systems Companies


Without a doubt, the tremendous amount of activity surrounding the opportunities in today and tomorrow’s vehicles is mind-boggling but absolutely exciting. When big shifts occur such as the one we are seeing in automotive, that equates to big opportunities for companies that get it right with a certain application, at the right time. It means partnering with the right ecosystem partners, f... » read more

How To Sleep Easier If You Test Auto ICs For A Living


Last month, I looked at the product definition process of automotive ICs, using the $7 billion microcontroller market as an illustration of design exploration to optimize performance, features, die size and product cost. Now I’d like to look at the back end of the process — the final IC testing that’s still critical no matter how sound the upfront work in defining a featuring set and aptl... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →