Software-Defined Vehicles: The Automotive Revolution With Silicon At Its Heart


The automotive sector is undergoing immense change. The retirement of the internal combustion engine (ICE) in favor of electrified powertrains and a shift towards autonomy has provided carmakers the opportunity to reimagine and redefine the entire automotive experience: how a car looks, works, and behaves, from the tires up. But such change isn’t easy. An industry founded on the manufactur... » read more

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

Navigating The Intersection Of Safety And Security


Automotive IC safety and security continue to be hot topics across the industry, and one phrase you may often hear during discussion is: An automotive IC can be secure without needing to be safe, but an automotive IC cannot be safe without also being secure. Adding a bit of detail to that: An automotive IC which has an incomplete security architecture provides potential attack vectors w... » read more

Automotive Safety: Having The Right Product Portfolio In Place


Changes are happening in almost every aspect of automotive technology, although the main thrust can be encompassed in three megatrends. In the future, vehicles will be increasingly connected, and therefore cybersecurity protection is becoming more and more important. e-mobility will be a major contributor to CO2 reduction, resulting in the need for high-power semiconductors. And automated drivi... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, Mobility Automotive chip shortages will continue until 2025, according to reports in a Financial Times (FT) article. Demand for SiC power chips will remain high. Onsemi reportedly is already sold out of the power semiconductors. Archer Aviation’s Midnight eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) is listed in the Federal Register now by The U.S. Federal Aviation Administr... » read more

Enable Application Design Without Considering Device Configuration


The software-defined vehicle, which defines in-vehicle value through software, requires new applications to be deployed in a variety of vehicle models. To achieve this, developers need a solution that allows them to easily develop applications without considering device configuration in the ECU and to take maximum performance of the hardware. However, there are currently issues (figure 1). W... » read more

Automotive MEMS Accelerometer Design Verification: A Real Life Example


Standard Finite Element (FE) models, especially those that incorporate multiple physical domains, consist of detailed representations of a device that include a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF). The Degrees of Freedom in a design are the number of independent variables or parameters needed to describe the motion or state of the device. Generally, the larger the number of Degrees of Free... » read more

Heterogeneous Integration Issues And Developments


There are a slew of new developments in advanced packaging, from new materials, chiplets, and interconnect schemes, to challenges involving how to physically put chips in a package, metallization, thermal cycling, and parasitics in the interconnect path. Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries, talks about how this will change chip design and manufacturing, and how those changes are likely to unfol... » read more

Improving Chip Efficiency, Reliability, And Adaptability


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits' Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new models and approaches for ensuring the integrity and responsiveness of systems, and how this can be done within a given power budget and at various speeds. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are y... » read more

Making Electric Vehicles Go Further With New Materials


It’s no secret that vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are aggressively pursuing electric vehicle (EV) development. Among the headwinds they face in selling their technology to consumers are price and vehicle range. Not surprisingly, there is a direct correlation between the two — in 2021, for any EV under $40,000, the average vehicle range was 187 miles, while the lowest veh... » read more

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