Getting To Automotive Grade


Given the amount of activity surrounding automotive semiconductor design today design teams want to know how to approach designs for a market they may not yet be intimately familiar with. EDA vendors are very quickly ramping tools and services to help them get there. One of these is Mentor, A Siemens Business, which has actually been working in this market segment for two decades. Andrew ... » read more

Cracking The Auto IC Market


The market for automotive electronics is booming, and it has set off a global scramble among established chipmakers and startups. What's becoming clear, though, is that not everyone understands just how different automotive is from the mobile market. Mobile is still the highest-volume market for semiconductors, but the growth has flattened. In contrast, the value of the automotive electronic... » read more

Physical Verification For Silicon Photonics: Don’t Panic!


Silicon photonics augments traditional electrical signals in integrated circuits (ICs) with light transmission to speed up data transfer and reduce power consumption. According to MarketsandMarkets, the overall silicon photonics market is worth approximately $774.1M in 2018, and is expected to reach $1,988.2M by 2023, at a CAGR of 20.8% between 2018 and 2023  [1]. Cloud computing is one market... » read more

A Primer On Last-Level Cache Memory For SoC Designs


System-on-chip (SoC) architects have a new memory technology, last level cache (LLC), to help overcome the design obstacles of bandwidth, latency and power consumption in megachips for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), machine learning, and data-center applications. LLC is a standalone memory that inserts cache between functional blocks and external memory to ease conflicting requireme... » read more

Build In Functional Safety Early


In the automotive world, recalls for electronics affect about five percent of the vehicles on the road. That means 5 out of every 100 vehicles today have a problem with their electronics. If we want to see more autonomous driving vehicles, that number must be improved. There needs be more robustness in the development process. Making cars safer today is Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADA... » read more

Finding Security Holes In Hardware


At least three major security holes in processors were identified by Google's Project Zero over the past year, with more expected to roll out in coming months. Now the question is what to do about them. Since the beginning of the PC era, two requirements for hardware were backward compatibility and improvements in performance with each new version of processors. No one wants to replace their... » read more

IIoT Edge Is A Moving Target


Edge computing happens in an industrial IoT (IIoT) system wherever it needs to happen. The business needs for an IIoT system—or one layer of that system—will determine when and where the computing happens. This conclusion, from an introductory report written by the IoT testing organization the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), helps explain why no one consistently can say what edge... » read more

Deriving Configuration Time For eFPGAs


Part 1 of this blog post described how to configure an eFPGA, using Achronix’s Speedcore eFPGA as an example. It explained why each instance of the eFPGA in an ASIC or SoC design must be configured after the system powers up due to its nonvolatile SRAM technology to store configuration bits. This post will detail how the configuration time is derived, once again using Speedcore eFPGA as th... » read more

Flexible, Energy-Efficient Neural Network Processing At 16nm


At Hot Chips 30, held in August in Silicon Valley, Harvard University (Paul Whatmough, SK Lee, S Xi, U Gupta, L Pentecost, M Donato, HC Hseuh, Professor Brooks and Professor Gu) made a presentation on “SMIV: A 16nm SoC with Efficient and Flexible DNN Acceleration for Intelligent IOT Devices. ” (Their complete presentation is available now on the Hot Chips website for attendees and will be p... » read more

How To Efficiently Achieve ASIL-D Compliance Using NoC Technology


Increasing layers of electronics and software are being added to vehicles, from infotainment to engine, brakes, and various sensors for ADAS and autonomous driving. To address the increasing use of electronics in automobiles, the ISO 26262 Functional Safety for Road Vehicles standard was developed. This standard is intended to ensure that the electronics are designed to specified levels in o... » read more

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