The Growing Materials Challenge


By Katherine Derbyshire & Ed Sperling Materials have emerged as a growing challenge across the semiconductor supply chain, as chips continue to scale, or as they are utilized in new devices such as sensors for AI or machine learning systems. Engineered materials are no longer optional at advanced nodes. They are now a requirement, and the amount of new material content in chips contin... » read more

Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulation, Testing


Embedded electronics are showing up nearly everywhere these days, in cars, smart appliances, medical devices—even fighter jets. Making sure those real-time embedded systems will work correctly is the aim of hardware-in-the-loop simulation and testing, which puts the systems through their paces in a virtual environment. In effect, HIL simulation adds a mathematical representation of all fun... » read more

The Long Pause


Carmakers are leaping over each other to roll out cars that meet SAE Level 3 requirements, whereby under some conditions drivers can let go of the steering wheel. Getting to Level 5 will take a lot longer, and there is some debate about where and even whether Level 4 will ever happen (see Fig. 1). Fig. 1: Levels of autonomy. Source: Auto Alliance There are two big gaps that need to be a... » read more

Planning For A Digital Automotive Supply Chain


At the heart of the very cool intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) of tomorrow is sophisticated software with artificial intelligence and powerful silicon chips all working together. These technologies will transform the traditional automotive supply chain from a mechanical-driven world to a digital one, where the user experience, reliability, safety, and value are created from silicon and sof... » read more

Connecting Cars Reliably


Imagine motoring along through busy, urban traffic in your new connected car that is learning, getting smarter, safer and more reliable as it is driving. Such a car is constantly gathering and generating all kinds of data that is intermittently and opportunistically being uploaded to the cloud. As more cars on the road feature advanced wireless connectivity, this exciting future will become com... » read more

Tech Talk: ISO 26262 Drilldown


ArterisIP’s Kurt Shuler looks at what can go wrong in automotive design, what are the prerequisites for getting the attention of Tier 1 and OEMs, and what’s involved in automotive design at all levels. https://youtu.be/nnjAldn-nKU » read more

The Impact of AI On Autonomous Vehicles


Automotive systems designers initially used traditional embedded-vision algorithms in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). One of the key enablers of vehicle autonomy moving forward will be the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly those based upon deep-learning algorithms implemented on multi-layer convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These algorithms show... » read more

CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 2)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: AI, deep learning and mac... » read more

FPGAs Becoming More SoC-Like


FPGAs are blinged-out rockstars compared to their former selves. No longer just a collection of look-up tables (LUTs) and registers, FPGAs have moved well beyond into now being architectures for system exploration and vehicles for proving a design architecture for future ASICs. This family of devices now includes everything from basic programmable logic all the way up to complex SoC devices.... » read more

Ensuring Chip Reliability From The Inside


Monitoring activity and traffic is emerging as an essential ingredient in complex, heterogeneous chips used in automotive, industrial, and data center applications. This is particularly true in safety-critical applications such as automotive, where much depends on the system operating exactly right at all times. To make autonomous and assisted driving possible, a mechanism to ensure systems ... » read more

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