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

Verification As A Flow (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the transformation of verification from a tool to a flow with Vladislav Palfy, global manager application engineering for OneSpin Solutions; Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification Systems; Mark Olen, product marketing group manager for Mentor, A Siemens Business; Larry Melling, product management director, System & Verificati... » read more

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

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Siemens acquired Austemper Design Systems, which provides tools for functional safety and safety-critical designs. Founded in 2015, Texas-based Austemper adds state-of-the-art safety analysis, auto-correction and fault simulation technology to address random hardware faults, as well as correct and harden vulnerable areas, subsequently performing fault simulation to ensure the design is... » read more

Upcoming System Modeling Challenges


In the past, during the concept phase of a design, system models have typically lacked information regarding reliability. If at all, reliability was addressed late in the design phase shortly before tape out. As the functional safety aspect, and with it an extended device lifetime, gains more and more attention for certain applications, things have to change in the design processes. To ensure a... » read more

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