The Week In Review: IoT


Mergers & Acquisitions Qualcomm reported that the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 expired on Monday, April 3, clearing the chip design company’s proposed $47 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors, at least in the eyes of U.S. antitrust regulators. Qualcomm expects to close the transaction, which will create an Internet of Things powerhouse, b... » read more

Pushing Batteries Too Far?


Reports of battery fires in consumer devices are not abating. The culprit in almost all cases is the lithium-ion battery. In some cases, this is a manufacturing issue, where predictable intervals of failure can point to a breach in the membrane separating the anode and cathode or a metal particle contaminant that causes a short circuit. Those kinds of flaws are well understood, based upon ho... » read more

Visual Design Diff


A document, whether it is stored as a simple text file or as a word processor formatted file, is often a living entity that is constantly evolving. A user may create a first draft, revise it multiple times, have other team members review it and make alterations, and refine it over time to keep up with new information and requirements. What has changed since the last revision becomes very import... » read more

The Software Side Of Self-Driving


Just as the overall system complexity is causing ripples through the automotive supply chain so too is managing the system complexity, with software in particular. With so much new technology, and so many new ideas to keep track of, it would seem a huge undertaking by the automotive OEMs. In the midst of making decisions about the usual incremental improvements, the system architecture decis... » read more

Self-Driving Cars Rattle Supply Chain


Automotive compute workloads are consolidating as carmakers push toward autonomous vehicles, but the changes necessary to make this all work are causing huge disruptions in an industry that has fine-tuned its supply chain over more than a century. Consolidation is essential for a variety of reasons, including efficiency of the computations, complexity management, and lower deployment costs. ... » read more

What The Chevy Bolt Really Means For The Electric Vehicle Market


CES and the North American Auto Show are fading from view. As expected, both events generated media coverage about jockeying among traditional tier 1/2 suppliers and tech companies for supremacy in the new auto supply chain, being turned upside down by the pursuit of autonomous vehicles, electrified powertrains and the like. And while there were some interesting early 2017 announcements (Amazon... » read more

LiDAR Completes Sensing Triumvirate


Fully autonomous vehicles of the future will depend on a combination of different sensing technologies – advanced vision systems, radar, and light imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR). Of the three, LiDAR is now the costliest part of that equation, and there are worldwide efforts to bring down those costs. Mechanical LiDAR units are currently available, priced in the hundreds of dollars... » read more

Security: Losses Outpace Gains


Paul Kocher, chief scientist in [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus'"] Cryptography Research Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the new threats to security, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how to engineer a secure system. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we with security? It seems that rather than getting better, thing... » read more

The Evolution Of Side-Channel Attacks


A side-channel attack can perhaps best be defined as any attack based on information gained from the physical implementation of a cryptosystem, rather than brute force or theoretical weaknesses in the algorithms. Put simply, all physical electronic systems routinely leak information about their internal process of computing via their power consumption or electromagnetic emanations. This mean... » read more

Conflicting Goals In Data Centers


Two conflicting goals are emerging inside of data centers—speed at any cost, and the ability to extend hardware well beyond its expected lifetime to amortize that cost. Layered across both of those are concerns about how to move data back and forth more efficiently, how to secure it, and how to best integrate different generations of technology. But these widely different goals have create... » read more

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