Border Tax Shakeup


A border tax is the talk of the financial world. While this has clear implications for car manufacturers, where it's rather easy to tell where parts such an engine block or a braking system were manufactured, it's far less tangible when it comes to electronics in general, and semiconductors in particular. In a complex SoC, IP can be developed in more than one country, and multinational techn... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


CES mania At the upcoming CES in Las Vegas, Samsung Electronics will unveil the CH711, a new curved monitor based on quantum dot technology. Designed for gamers, the CH711 is available in 27- and 31.5-inch variations. The monitors feature a 1,800R curvature, an ultra-wide 178-degree viewing angle and a 2,560 x 1,440 WQHD resolution. [caption id="attachment_33488" align="alignleft" width="30... » read more

Aftermarket Autonomous Vehicle Race Heats Up


It’s not just car companies that are racing to build self-driving vehicles. An entire ecosystem is sprouting up around retrofitting existing vehicles with autonomous technology, despite the fact that the technology, infrastructure, regulatory and insurance issues are still not fully formed. Uber already is using self-driving taxis, accompanied by a human driver, in Pittsburgh, Pa. And many... » read more

The Real Value Of Digital Horsepower


Chipmakers and systems vendors are beginning to experiment with a slew of new ways to beef up performance and reduce power and area, now that shrinking features no longer guarantees those improvements. The number of new ideas introduced at industry conferences in the past few months is almost mind-boggling. Just on the CPU side there are new architectures that improve the amount of work that... » read more

System-Level Verification Tackles New Role


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advances in system-level verification with Larry Melling, product management director for the system verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Larry Lapides, vice president of sales for [getentity id="22036" e_name="Imperas”] and Jean-Marie Brunet, director of marketing for the emulation division of [getentity id="22017" e_nam... » 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 Challenge Of Updating Cars


News stories about automotive hacking are becoming more common, and so is the concern about how to curb this problem. Security has become a new layer of system design complexity, and it's being taken increasingly seriously in a market that until very recently largely ignored it. That attitude is changing rapidly though, particularly with the advent of autonomous and connected vehicles. Secu... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 6


Magnetic mass spectrometers The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) has developed a mass spectrometer, based on what the organization claims is the world’s highest field superconducting magnet. The instrument from National MagLab is called a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer boasts a 21 tesla magnet, which is ... » read more

Who’s Driving That Car?


In my May blog, I had written a short on the incident where supposedly, airliner's computer system had been compromised by a wayward security researcher from One World Labs. Chris Roberts was his name. Anyway, if you didn’t read about it, the long and short of it is that he hacked a simulator and not a jet. Nevertheless, the issues that raises have implications across the entire transportatio... » read more

Week 48: One Week Left For Early Registration


I have to admit, writing the weekly blog has made the countdown to DAC a lot more apparent than it would have been otherwise. When I began blogging last year, I thought the watched-pot-never-boils maxim might apply, that time would drag and I’d run out of things to say months before the opening keynote. Instead, I’m fairly stunned to have just four more blogs to write until “my DAC year�... » read more

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