Autonomous Vehicles: IC Design Flow Walk Through


Automotive applications, particularly those related to AI and computer vision, are a significant driver of the current semiconductor boom. Established companies are mostly thriving, it’s true, but perhaps more interesting are all the new faces in the game. As usual, Mentor CEO Wally Rhines is one of the great sense-makers of the all this activity. Wally has been making the rounds at variou... » read more

Data Converters For Automotive Applications


Sensor applications requiring data converters range from temperature sensors identifying different engine status to radar/LIDAR enabling Automotive Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Other applications involving data converters include wireless transceivers for communicating with other vehicles or with a fixed network. The data converter IP (analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog) provides an i... » read more

Chipping Away At Functional Safety Flaws In Automotive Electronics


Today’s automobiles are packed with electronics. From autonomous driving support and infotainment systems to mission-critical functions like braking, a car’s performance depends on the reliability of these electronics systems. While the semiconductors that lie at the heart of these systems have been not been a focus in the past, today their reliability is coming under closer scrutiny by bot... » read more

Open Throttle On Automotive Innovation


Like a race car accelerating out of a turn, the autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle market is expanding faster than a lot of people expected. IHS Markit, for example, reported earlier this year that more than 33 million autonomous vehicles will be sold globally in 2040. The growth rate, IHS Markit suggests, is going to be torrid since the first year of significant volume for autonomous vehic... » read more

Build In Functional Safety Early


In the automotive world, recalls for electronics affect about five percent of the vehicles on the road. That means 5 out of every 100 vehicles today have a problem with their electronics. If we want to see more autonomous driving vehicles, that number must be improved. There needs be more robustness in the development process. Making cars safer today is Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADA... » read more

Demystifying EDA Support For ISO 26262 Tool Qualification


My new, mid-size car is equipped with many advanced driver-assistance systems. To be honest, it’s taking me time to get used to some of them, as, for example, lane-centering assist that seamlessly takes control of my steering wheel. However, I cannot wait to get my hands off a fully autonomous vehicle and be able to take a nap while 7nm chips run machine learning and other artificial intellig... » read more

Effectively Fighting Fake Medical Products


Counterfeit goods have long existed. The worldwide ‘black market’ for brand-name items like purses and sunglasses is estimated to exceed $460B (Los Angeles Times, 2017). While fashion brands make up the majority of this illicit market, a very concerning trend is the rising amount of counterfeit medical products, including equipment, medicines, and vaccines. The World Health Organization ... » read more

Functional Safety: Art Or Science?


Nowadays, most hardware development projects deploy functional verification flows that include UVM-based constrained-random testbenches and formal verification. High design complexity, tough budget constraints, and short time to market are the norm, not the exception. Advanced verification is a necessity for many engineering teams. In our increasingly connected world, where billions of IoT devi... » read more

Debug Issues Grow At New Nodes


Debugging and testing chips is becoming more time-consuming, more complicated, and significantly more difficult at advanced nodes as well as in advanced packages. The main problem is that there are so many puzzle pieces, and so many different use cases and demands on those pieces, that it's difficult to keep track of all the changes and potential interactions. Some blocks are "on" sometimes,... » read more

Safety, The Non-Negotiable Requirement Driving Autonomous Vehicle SoC Designs


The automotive industry has set itself the goal of achieving autonomous driving and is accruing the building blocks to make that happen. The challenge is in architecting the next generation automotive SoCs which must deliver exploding performance while meeting requirements for real-time latency, end-to-end QoS, FuSa (ISO 26262) and security. These SoCs need to include heterogeneous architecture... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →