How Many Test Miles Make A Vehicle Safe?


The road to reliable safety testing of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is shifting left. Standards groups are beginning to publish functional safety standards that could make it possible to verify what a machine-learning AV pilot application will do in a traffic situation even before hardware or software is released from validation testing. This kind of approach has been possible for some time in ... » read more

Faster Commoditization In Cars


Sensors are at the heart of assisted and autonomous driving, but even before these devices hit the road the average selling prices of these components will have to fall far enough to be affordable to a mass audience. Achieving economies of scale is what has made the semiconductor industry successful over the past half century. It has enabled semiconductors to proliferate and for electronics ... » read more

LiDAR Completes Sensing Triumvirate


Fully autonomous vehicles of the future will depend on a combination of different sensing technologies – advanced vision systems, radar, and light imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR). Of the three, LiDAR is now the costliest part of that equation, and there are worldwide efforts to bring down those costs. Mechanical LiDAR units are currently available, priced in the hundreds of dollars... » read more

USDOT Smart City Challenge: Columbus Drives Future of Automotive Semiconductor Development


The Smart City Challenge will be an accelerant of automotive semiconductor innovation. The U.S. Department of Transportation has chosen Columbus as the winner of the Smart City Challenge, entitling Ohio’s capital city to $40 million U.S. government funding, along with $10M from Paul Allen’s Vulcan investment firm, and $90M that Columbus raised from private partners, to create a fully integr... » read more

Designing For Automotive


As cars include an increasing amount of electronics and electronics subsystems, the number of design challenges involving reliability, cost and power are on the rise. “Reliability tops the list of concerns for the design team because when you put these electronics in, you must know if they are going to operate efficiently by themselves," said Aveek Sarkar, vice president of product enginee... » read more

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