Startup Funding: September 2021


Startups focused on data center chips had a big month in September. A new emergent from stealth promises to accelerate big data analytics, and startups proving CXL connectivity and high-performance RISC-V chiplets also drew funding. On the other end of the spectrum, NB-IoT and edge AI designers saw investment while a company providing on-chip monitoring can predict when chips will fail. Plus, c... » read more

Overview Of Medical Chip Challenges


Medical devices are adopting, and increasingly adapting, a variety of semiconductor technologies to provide new functions and capabilities in smaller form factors. In doing so, they are leveraging increasing processing capabilities, lower power, and new types of sensors to propel health care forward. Many different chip types have been used in medical devices for years, many of them develope... » read more

Long-Haul Trucking With Fewer Drivers


The trucking industry is betting heavily on increasing levels of autonomy and electrification to reduce the cost of moving goods and to overcome persistent problems. The economics of autonomous driving are compelling, not least of which is an almost perpetual shortage of qualified drivers. But there also are a number of technical hurdles to making this work. On top of the challenges facing t... » read more

Will Automotive Ethernet Win?


As internal combustion engines are replaced by electric motors, and mechanical linkages increasingly replaced by electronic messaging, an in-vehicle network is needed to facilitate communication. Ethernet, amended for automotive and other time-sensitive applications, appears to be the network of choice. But is that choice a done deal? And will Ethernet replace all other in-car networks? The ... » read more

Grappling With Smart City Security Issues


Security concerns are rising as cities seek to modernize services by connecting them to the internet and to each other, creating a widening attack surface that is a potential target for everything from disruption of services to ransomware demands. The goal of smart cities is to apply technology and intelligence to a variety of services to enable independent operation, real-time response, as ... » read more

Why TinyML Is Such A Big Deal


While machine-learning (ML) development activity most visibly focuses on high-power solutions in the cloud or medium-powered solutions at the edge, there is another collection of activity aimed at implementing machine learning on severely resource-constrained systems. Known as TinyML, it’s both a concept and an organization — and it has acquired significant momentum over the last year or... » read more

Always On, Always At Risk


Always-on devices are everywhere, and each of them is a potential target for hackers. While many people associate always-on devices with smart speakers such as an Amazon Alexa or Google Home, or a connected security camera, that's only one component in a system. There's a broader infrastructure behind those devices. So even if you power down a digital assistant/smart speaker, everything it's... » read more

Automotive Lidar Technologies Battle It Out


Lidar is likely to be added to the list of sensors that future cars will use to help with navigation and safety, but most likely it won't be the large rotating mirror assembly on the top of vehicles. Newer solid-state radar technologies are being researched and developed, although it’s not yet clear which of these will win. “The benefits of lidar technology are well known dating back to ... » read more

Auto Displays: Bigger, Brighter, More Numerous


Displays are rapidly becoming more critical to the central brains in automobiles, accelerating the adoption and evolution of this technology to handle multiple types of audio, visual, and other data traffic coming into and flowing throughout the vehicle. These changes are having a broad impact on the entire design-through-manufacturing flow for display chip architectures. In the past, these ... » read more

Will PAYGO Shake Up How We Pay for Chips?


System builders are used to buying integrated circuits on a simple transactional basis — the chip has a price, and that’s what you pay. But some application spaces may have a wide variety of capabilities that need hardware support, and each feature may not be used for every instance. Traditionally, one would design different chips for different feature mixes and price points. But a new p... » read more

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