Building A Safety Verification Flow


Sal Alvarez, senior manager of application engineering at Synopsys, explains how safety verification differs from functional verification, what changes with failure mode effects analysis, and how to determine and verify the effectiveness of safety features. » read more

Auto Outlook: Down But Not Out


For years, automotive has been an engine of growth in the semiconductor industry, although the market is expected to decline in 2020. Several types of chips are used in automobiles, such as analog, memory, microcontrollers, processors and RF. But the automotive IC business still represents a small percentage of the overall semiconductor market. It pales in comparison to the smartphone chip m... » read more

The Ins And Outs Of Silicon Carbide


John Palmour, CTO at Cree, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about silicon carbide, how it compares to silicon, what's different from a design and packaging standpoint, and where it's being used. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: SiC is well-understood in power electronics and RF, but is the main advantage the ability to run devices hotter than silicon, or is ... » read more

Designing Resilient Electronics


Electronic systems in automobiles, airplanes and other industrial applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, required to perform an expanding list of functions while also becoming smaller and lighter. As a result, pressure is growing to design extremely high-performance chips with lower energy consumption and less sensitivity to harsh environmental conditions. If this ... » read more

Test Is Becoming A Horizontal Process


Semiconductor test, once a discrete part of a well-orchestrated series of manufacturing steps, is looking more like a process that extends from the early concept stage in design to the end of life of whatever system that chip ultimately is used for. This has important ramifications for safety-critical markets in general, and the semiconductor industry in particular. Both worlds have been inc... » read more

Grading Chips For Longer Lifetimes


Figuring out how to grade chips is becoming much more difficult as these chips are used in applications where they are supposed to last for decades rather than just a couple of years. During manufacturing, semiconductors typically are run through a battery of tests involving performance and power, and then priced accordingly. But that is no longer a straightforward process for several reason... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — health An injectable biosensor may someday help measure signs of influenza. DARPA (the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and digital health startup Profusa announced a study that uses Profusa’s Lumee Oxygen Platform to find ways to identify flu outbreaks, biological attacks and pandemics as much as three weeks earlier than curre... » read more

Automating Failure Mode Analysis For Automotive Safety


By Chuck Battikha and Doug Smith If you’ve ever had to create a Failure Modes, Effects and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA), you know how difficult and painstaking a task it can be. But FMEDAs are essential in ensuring that your SoCs satisfy ISO 26262 functional safety analysis requirements for automotive designs and for demonstrating that your design is indeed safe. Because of the intens... » read more

The Criticality Of The E/E Architecture


Modern vehicles are highly sophisticated systems incorporating electrical, electronic, software and mechanical components. Mechanical systems are giving way to advanced software and electronic devices, driving automakers to innovate and differentiate their vehicles via the electric and electronic (E/E) architecture. Future architectures need to be scalable across vehicle platforms, flexible to ... » read more

Banking On FPGA Prototyping


Juergen Jaeger, product management director at Cadence, explains how FPGA prototyping can improve efficiency and reduce design costs, what the development costs are for various phases of the design flow, how that changes across different markets such as automotive and 5G, and why software is now the biggest knob to turn for reducing cost and time to market. » read more

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