New Security Approaches, New Threats


New and different approaches to security are gaining a foothold as the life expectancy for advanced chips increases, and as emerging technologies such as quantum computing threaten to crack even the most complex encryption schemes. These approaches include everything from homomorphic encryption, where data is processed without being decrypted, to different ways of sending and receiving data ... » read more

IP Safe Enough To Use In Cars


IP that is used for functional safety needs to respond to events that can happen, whether those are planned or random. Jody Defazio, vice president of IP quality and functional safety at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about ASIL compliance, what the different levels mean, and the impact of using chips developed at the most advanced process nodes in automotive applications. » read more

The Cyber-Industrial Revolution


Semiconductors won't save the world, but they certainly will help. In fact, it's arguable whether any significant progress will be made on such issues as global warming or future medical breakthroughs without the aid of ICs. After decades of struggling just to get chips to work at each new process node, the semiconductor industry is moving into a new phase. Processing is now almost ubiquitou... » read more

Learning ISO 26262 – 2nd Edition


You might think that when you get into a debate with a customer or a supplier about the exact interpretation of some aspect of ISO 26262, all you have to do is go to the standard, look it up, and there’s the answer you all need, plain as day. That would be ideal but often doesn’t reflect reality. To realize why, you have to understand the background to the standard. A short ISO 26262 o... » read more

How Will Future Cars Interact With Humans?


Future automobiles may come with a set of controls very different from what we’re used to now. Mechanical knobs and switches already are being replaced by touchscreens, but that's just the beginning. There are a multitude of other possible ways in which drivers can interact with their vehicles, and the list is growing as technology drives down the cost of this new human-machine interface (... » read more

Using ICs To Shrink Auto’s Carbon Footprint


A large portion of the burden for reducing greenhouse gases is being handed off to makers of automotive chips and systems, which are being tasked to make vehicles drive further using less energy and with zero emissions. The effort is critical in battling climate change. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the transportation sector represented 28.2% of 2018 greenhouse gas e... » read more

A New Method For Electrical Systems Design


Electrical system complexity is reaching a tipping point across industries, from modern passenger vehicles to sophisticated industrial machines that can now contain nearly 5,000 wiring harnesses. The electrical systems of these machines contain multiple networks, thousands of sensors and actuators, miles of wiring and tens of thousands of discrete components (figure 1). Designing these complex ... » read more

Safeguarding Automotive Electronics


Modern automobiles can have up to 100 Electronic Control Units (ECUs) depending on their class, make, and model, with the number of ECUs rising even higher in the case of electric vehicles. An ECU is an embedded system in the car’s electronics. They are used to control all the vehicle's functions, including engine, powertrain, transmission, brakes, suspension, dashboard, entertainment system ... » read more

Systematic Methodology To Solve Reset Challenges In Automotive SoCs


Modern automotive SoCs typically contain multiple asynchronous reset signals to ensure systematic functional recovery from unexpected situations and faults. This complex reset architecture leads to a new set of problems such as possible reset domain crossing (RDC) issues. The conventional clock domain and CDC verification methodologies cannot identify such critical bugs. In this paper, we prese... » read more

Reducing Risk And Increasing Efficiency For IEC61508 And ISO26262 Certified Safety Applications


This white paper introduces key dependability aspects for industrial and automotive customers who are designing and developing programmable electronic equipment for safety applications using Xilinx FPGA and SoC devices. The main focus of this white paper is to explain how to create solutions with highly integrated, high-performance certifiable systems that target IEC 61508 / ISO 26262 norms. Th... » read more

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