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

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

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

Making Sure A Heterogeneous Design Will Work


An explosion of various types of processors and localized memories on a chip or in a package is making it much more difficult to verify and test these devices, and to sign off with confidence. In addition to timing and clock domain crossing issues, which are becoming much more difficult to deal with in complex chips, some of the new devices are including AI, machine learning or deep learning... » read more

AI Chip Architectures Race To The Edge


As machine-learning apps start showing up in endpoint devices and along the network edge of the IoT, the accelerators that make AI possible may look more like FPGA and SoC modules than current data-center-bound chips from Intel or Nvidia. Artificial intelligence and machine learning need powerful chips for computing answers (inference) from large data sets (training). Most AI chips—both tr... » read more

Are Devices Getting More Secure?


Adding security into chip design is becoming more prevalent as more devices are connected to the Internet, but it's not clear whether that is enough to offset an explosion in connected "things." Security concerns have been growing for the past half-decade, starting with a rash of high-profile attacks on retail establishments, hotel membership clubs, and Equifax, one of the three top credit-c... » read more

October ’18 Startup Funding: IoT, Security, Auto


Billions were raised in October for Internet of Things, cybersecurity, automotive electronics, and related technology startups. Automotive October fundings rolled in on the automotive side for Israel’s VayaVision ($8 million) and South Korea-based SOS LAB ($6 million Series A), which are developing products for autonomous vehicles. Silicon Mobility ($10 million Series B), a French startup... » read more

AI Begins To Reshape Chip Design


Artificial intelligence is beginning to impact semiconductor design as architects begin leveraging its capabilities to improve performance and reduce power, setting the stage for a number of foundational shifts in how chips are developed, manufactured and updated in the future. AI—and machine learning and deep learning subsets—can be used to greatly improve the functional control and pow... » read more

Connected Cars: From Chip To City


As the automotive industry moves closer to autonomous vehicles, ecosystem players are focusing on the infrastructure pieces needed to make autonomous technology a reality for the first adopters, which are most likely commercial fleets. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I or v2i) is a communications model that allows vehicles to share information with the components that support a country's hi... » read more

Quantum Random Numbers Future-Proof Encryption


It may be a decade or more before quantum computers become common enough that we'll find out whether "post-quantum cryptography" will stand up to genuine quantum computers. In the meantime, some quantum researchers are peeling off specific functions and turning them into products or companies so that it's possible to take advantage of the potential of quantum computers without actually havin... » read more

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