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

Make Your Own Energy


Regenerative braking and other forms of energy capture are becoming more popular and increasingly effective. What started as a way of increasing the range of electric or hybrid vehicles is now being applied to everything from green buildings to industrial robots. The automotive industry is still the main driver of this technology. The idea that braking can generate energy has been around for... » 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

Creating A Roadmap For Hardware Security


The U.S. Department of Defense and private industry consortiums are developing comprehensive and cohesive cybersecurity plans that will serve as blueprints for military, industrial and commercial systems. What is particularly noteworthy in all of these efforts is the focus on semiconductors. While software can be patched, vulnerabilities such as Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow need to be de... » read more

April’19 Startup Funding: Corporate Gushers


It was another rich month for startups, large and small. In April’s top 11 funding rounds, five were investments by big corporations or corporate venture capital funds—an investor consortium led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, PayPal, Ford Motor, NTT DoCoMo, and HAPSMobile, a joint venture of SoftBank Group and AeroVironment. Those 11 investments totaled $3.74 billion. Intel Capital was als... » 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

Improving Edge Inferencing


Cheng Wang, senior vice president of engineering at Flex Logix, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about how to improve the efficiency and speed of edge inferencing chips, what causes bottlenecks, and why AI chips are different from other types of semiconductors. » read more

112G XSR And LR SerDes PHYs


The virtuous cycle of increased computing power enabling new applications which demand more computing power continues unabated. Today, applications spanning AI, autonomous vehicles, video streaming, AR and VR all demand more bandwidth, lower latencies and higher speeds. In response, the SoCs powering the terabit routers and switches at the heart of the network must run even faster. The upgrade ... » read more

Addressing IC Reliability Issues Using Eldo


Advanced, short-geometry CMOS processes are subject to aging that causes major reliability issues that degrade the performance of integrated circuits (ICs) over time. Degradation effects causing aging are hot carrier injection (HCI) and negative bias temperature instability (NBTI), in addition to positive bias temperature instability (PBTI) and time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB). Below ... » read more

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