Big Changes Ahead For Connected Vehicles


Carmakers are reworking their electronic architectures so they can tap into a growing number of external services and internal options, similar to the way a data center taps into various services over its internal network. In the past, this has been largely confined to internal services such as on-board Internet connectivity, and external traffic routing and music. The current vision is to g... » read more

The Case For FPGAs In Cars


Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) thrive in rapidly evolving new markets before being replaced by hard-wired ASICs, but in automotive that crossover is likely to happen significantly later than in the past. Historically, FPGAs have held temporary positions until volumes increased enough to cost-reduce the FPGAs out in favor of a hardened version. With automobiles, there are so many chan... » read more

System-on-Chip Architecture For Autonomous Driving Systems In Electric Vehicles


English inventor Thomas Parker introduced the first production electric car in 1884. Slower speeds and shorter ranges limited the electric cars of that era. By the early-to-mid 20th century, gas-powered cars were cheaper to operate, able to travel further and faster than their electric counterparts, and quickly rose to dominance. Since the early 2000s, Tesla has been a pioneer in reviving the e... » read more

Securing ADAS At The Chip Level


The advent of ADAS, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, is making a dramatic impact on new vehicles. It provides many helpful functions such as automotive night vision, forward collision warnings, collision avoidance, and lane departure warnings. In order to operate, ADAS requires the computerization of most of the functions of the vehicle. This results in from 50 to over 100 electronic control... » read more

The Good And Bad Of Auto IC Updates


Keeping automobiles updated enough to avoid problems is becoming increasingly difficult as more complex electronics are added into vehicles, and as the lifetimes of those devices are extended to a decade or more. Modern vehicles are full of electronics. In fact, the value of electronic devices used in modern vehicles is expected to double in the next 10 years, growing to $469 billion by 2030... » read more

Orchestrating An Efficient ISO 26262 Fault Campaign


The primary objective of a fault campaign is to understand whether the safety architecture sufficiently prevents random failures from violating ISO 26262 safety requirements for both commercial and passenger automobiles. To complete fault injection, faults are injected and propagated in the design to validate the functional correctness of the safety mechanisms and to classify each fault. Fault ... » read more

One-On-One: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Cadence, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the impact of massive increases in data across a variety of industries, the growing need for computational software, and the potential implications of U.S.-China relations. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What do you see as the biggest change for the chip industry? Tan: We're in our fifth g... » read more

Automotive Chip Shortages: An Assembly Perspective


Since March 2020, the pandemic has brought on scarcity in odd goods like toilet paper, baking flour and exercise equipment. The latest casualty is the auto industry as car production across the world has been hobbled by chip shortages. While much has been written about the role of semiconductor suppliers, foundries, wafer fab equipment, fires, and snowstorms in the chip shortages, we should als... » read more

Adding Value With Unit Level Traceability (ULT) In Automotive Packaging


Automotive product traceability has existed in one form or another for several decades. Traceability generally refers to tracking and tracing each component that comprises every subsystem in a car. Traditionally, this has been achieved with direct part marking on mechanical or electronic components, using 1D or 2D barcodes or radio-frequency identification (RFID). Since vehicle recalls are cost... » read more

Achieving Automotive Safety With Security


Security researchers have demonstrated extensively how cybersecurity attacks can have disastrous consequences in automobiles. A successful car hack in an automotive control system such as the drive train or brakes could affect an entire fleet of vehicles and put many lives in danger. Moreover, car owners' privacy and the protection of intellectual properties (IPs) and other assets of car manufa... » read more

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