Dirty Data: Is the Sensor Malfunctioning?


Sensors provide an amazing connection to the physical world, but extracting usable data isn't so simple. In fact, many first-time IoT designers are unprepared for how messy a sensor’s data can be. Every day the IoT motion-sensor company MbientLab struggles to tactfully teach its customers that the mountain of data they are seeing is not because the sensors are faulty. Instead, the system d... » read more

Will Cowboys Or Collaborators Shape The Self-Driving Future?


You may have noticed the bloom is ever so slightly off the autonomous vehicle rose. This is likely due to some combination of a generalized malaise and growing cynicism directed at Silicon Valley in general (where of course much work on AVs continues apace) and a growing list of highly publicized self-driving incidents that surely make PR teams groan. Exhibit A from this week was the California... » read more

Dodging The Next Generation Of Car Thieves


The complexity of vehicle electronics is growing and brings with it more opportunities for hackers to penetrate the car’s defenses. More connections bring in multiple network topologies, which may or may not be secure. As they are all intertwined and interconnected, any connection to get into the vehicle’s electronics is a potential point of attack for hackers. For example, jamming RFID sig... » read more

eFPGAs Offer Practical Solution For Embedded Vision Applications


Video applications, such as surveillance, object detection and motion analysis, rely on 360° embedded vision and high-resolution fish-eye cameras lenses with a wide-angle field of view (FOV). These systems have up to six real-time camera streams processing together frame by frame. Each frame is corrected for distortion and other image artifacts, adjusted for exposure and white balance, then st... » read more

High Neural Inferencing Throughput At Batch=1


Microsoft presented the following slide as part of their Brainwave presentation at Hot Chips this summer: In existing inferencing solutions, high throughput (and high % utilization of the hardware) is possible for large batch sizes: this means that instead of processing say one image at a time, the inferencing engine processes say 10 or 50 images in parallel. This minimizes the number of... » read more

Autonomous Vehicle Design Begins To Change Direction


Tools that are commonly used in semiconductor design are starting to be applied at the system level for assisted and autonomous vehicles, setting the stage for more complex simulated scenarios and electronic system design. Simulation is well understood for designing automotive ICs, but now it also is being used to design vehicle architectures and sensors, as well as for sensor miniaturizatio... » read more

Inferencing In Hardware


Cheng Wang, senior vice president of engineering at Flex Logix, examines shifting neural network models, how many multiply-accumulates are needed for different applications, and why programmable neural inferencing will be required for years to come. https://youtu.be/jb7qYU2nhoo         See other tech talk videos here. » read more

FPGA Graduates To First-Tier Status


Robert Blake, president and CEO of Achronix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about fundamental shifts in compute architectures and why AI, machine learning and various vertical applications are driving demand for discrete and embedded FPGAs. SE: What’s changing in the FPGA market? Blake: Our big focus is developing the next-generation architecture. We started this projec... » read more

Affordable Design With Wireless Microcontrollers


Today, we are at the peak of technology product availability with the releases of the new iPhone models, Alexa-enabled devices, and more. In the coming days, there will be numerous international consumer OEMs preparing new offerings as we approach the holiday selling season. Along with the smartphones, voice assistant enabled smart speakers and deep learning wireless security cameras, many devi... » read more

Collaborative IC Design Mandates Integrated Data Management


Due to complexity and multi-domain expertise, custom IC design typically requires a team to successfully design and verify the project. Often, specific blocks are assigned to team members based on analog, digital, MEMS, RF expertise, across multiple geographies, and separate verification team members focus on block and system validation. This means that unstructured design files with multiple c... » read more

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