Competing V2V Technologies Emerge, Create Confusion


The battle over vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology has begun, as governments step back to see which of two main competing standards and lots of related technology are best suited for reducing accidents. V2V is an often-discussed wireless communication protocol that enables vehicles to communicate with each other, easing traffic congestion, avoiding accidents, and ultimately improvi... » read more

Designing And Securing Chips For Outer Space


Design considerations for hardware used in space go far beyond radiation hardening. These devices have to perform flawlessly for years, under extreme temperature variations, and potentially banged up by space junk or other particles floating in the void over its projected lifetime. Reliability in space adds a whole different set of design considerations. For example, while it's unlikely anyo... » read more

Cybersecurity Risks Of Automotive OTA


Modern vehicles increasingly resemble supercomputers on wheels, with many electronic control units (ECUs) networked together as increasingly sophisticated software is installed and updated. Similar to smartphones, vehicle OEMs will contact vehicle owners remotely about operating system updates that add new features and/or fixes, as well as software bugs and vulnerabilities. But all of this h... » read more

Indoor Gas Sensors Proliferate With Better Standards


The gas sensor market is rapidly expanding, driven by increased concerns about indoor air quality and better technology for detecting and measuring it. Indoor air quality sensing targets gases and concentrations that differ — with some overlap — from outside. But until the pandemic, which largely coincided with a flood of new research about what is toxic to people and animals, this has b... » read more

Why Better Mapping Technology Is Critical To Autonomous Vehicles


Autonomous cars find the way to their destination using a number of critical technologies, including some version of a global position system and a central brain to interpret that and other data. But many of those technologies are not reliable or accurate enough today, and may not be for years to come. There are numerous reports of vehicles missing their stop, or trucks being guided into all... » read more

Improving Reliability In Automobiles


Carmakers are turning to predictive and preventive maintenance to improve the safety and reliability of increasingly electrified vehicles, setting the stage for more internal and external sensors, and more intelligence to interpret and react to the data generated by those sensors. The number of chips inside of vehicles has been steadily rising, regardless of whether they are powered by elect... » read more

Weird Incidents Reveal L5 Challenges


A series of surprising, counterintuitive, and sometimes bizarre incidents reveal the challenges of achieving full Level 5 autonomy in self-driving vehicles, which are an increasingly common site in major cities. While it’s easy to dismiss such anecdotes as humorous glitches compared with the sobering accounts of autonomous tech-related injuries and fatalities, industry executives say these oc... » read more

Memory-Based Cyberattacks Become More Complex, Difficult To Detect


Memories are becoming entry points for cyber attacks, raising concerns about system-level security because memories are nearly ubiquitous in electronics and breaches are difficult to detect. There is no end in sight with hackers taking aim at almost every consumer, industrial, and commercial segment, and a growing number of those devices connected to the internet and to each other. According... » read more

AI Feeds Vision Processor, Image Sensor Boom


Vision systems are rapidly becoming ubiquitous, driven by big improvements in image sensors as well as new types of sensors. While the sensor itself often is developed using mature-node silicon, increasingly it is connected to vision processors developed at the most advanced process nodes. That allows for the highest performance per watt, and it also allows designs to incorporate AI accelera... » read more

Post-Quantum And Pre-Quantum Security Issues Grow


General-purpose quantum computers will be able to crack the codes that protect much of the world’s information, and while these machines don’t exist yet, security experts say governments and businesses are starting to prepare for encryption in a post-quantum world. The task is made all the more challenging because no one knows exactly how future quantum machines will work, or even which mat... » read more

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