Enabling Integrated ADAS Domain Controllers With Automotive IP


Traditionally, the electronic control units (ECUs) for individual Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) applications have been placed throughout the car. The latest automotive architecture will integrate ECUs for multiple ADAS applications into centralized domains to combine multiple ADAS functions. The new class of integrated domain controller ECUs utilize data transferred from the car’s ... » read more

5 Big Under-The-Hood Engineering Challenges In Building Autonomous Vehicles


Stories about autonomous vehicles are regular fare in the tech news cycle and usually include forecasts about the eventual ascendancy of self-driving cars. The Boston Consulting Group, for example, says that by 2035, 25% of all cars will have partial or full autonomy, with total global sales growing from near-zero levels in 2015 to $42 billion in 2025 and ~ $77 billion by 2035. In short few ye... » read more

Foundries Accelerate Auto Efforts


Foundries are ramping up their efforts in automotive chip production in preparation for a surge in semiconductors used in assisted and autonomous driving. All of the major foundry vendors are scrambling to assemble the pieces and expand their process portfolios for automotive customers. The foundries are seeing a growing demand from automotive IC customers amid the push toward advanced drive... » read more

Optimization Challenges For 10nm And 7nm


Optimization used to be a simple timing against area tradeoff but not anymore. As we go to each new node, the tradeoffs become more complicated involving additional aspects of the design that used to be dealt with in isolation. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Krishna Balachandran, director of product management for low power products at [getentity id="22032" ... » read more

Lawyers, Insurance And Self-Driving Cars


Self-driving cars are drawing semiconductor companies into legal and regulatory issues for the first time, adding a new level of scrutiny on cutting-edge chip technology. It also opens up a whole new field for legal interpretation, case law, and regulation. While most liability cases in the past never crossed below the system vendor/supplier level, that could change with autonomous vehic... » read more

The Big Race


An estimated 74.39 million automobiles are forecast to be sold this year, according to Statista. That's up about 2.8% over 2015, which on the surface doesn't look like fabulous growth. What isn't apparent in the numbers, though, is the amount and type of semiconductor content. Electronic control units, which are primarily driven by MCUs, increasingly are being replaced by SoCs. Automotive co... » read more

The Road To Electronics Consolidation In The Vehicle


I’ve been at Mentor for more than six months as the director of automotive marketing. It’s an exciting technology space with many great stories to tell, most stemming from the fact that the automotive industry is being disrupted like never before. Indeed, I’ve heard it said more than once that there will be more change in the next 5 to 10 years than there has been since the days of Henry ... » read more

Sensors Enable ADAS


Under the hood, cars of today look nothing like those of a few decades ago. There are sophisticated safety and drivetrain monitoring features, software for interpreting and interacting with the outside world and modifying the inside environment, and a host of features that might have seemed impossible or even ridiculous in the past. And there's much more to come. Advanced driver assistance s... » read more

Making Cars Smarter


The fuel injection control unit has come a long way since 1983 when Ford Motor Co. first included a 16-bit Intel microcontroller-based fuel injection system in its 4-cylinder Escort. Today, some high end vehicles contain more than 100 microprocessors, which is mind boggling in comparison to that Escort that contained just one. To be sure, the automotive industry is a unique animal. Compared ... » read more

The Wild West Of Automotive


Automotive is considered one of the great new markets for EDA and IP. Electronic complexity is increasing rapidly, product update cycles are decreasing, and new standards mean that many of the old ways of doing development are no longer possible. Such change creates opportunity, along with a certain degreed of confusion. As the number of discrete systems increases, so do costs. Electronics c... » read more

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