Functional Safety Implementation Goes Mainstream


Electronics engineers are being thrust into the automotive market like never before. The move to electrify automobiles, along with the advent of self-driving cars, means that silicon designers will be designing ever more sophisticated automotive ICs. But cars aren’t like most other electronic systems; it’s imperative that they cause no harm should they fail. This brings us to the realm o... » read more

Who’s Watching The Supply Chain?


Every company developing chips at the most advanced process nodes these days is using different architectures and heterogeneous processing and memory elements. There simply is no other way to get the kind of power/performance improvements needed to justify the expense of moving to a new process node. So while they will reap the benefits of traditional scaling, that alone is no longer enough. ... » read more

Shrinking AV’s 1 Billion Test Miles


There is still no answer to how many miles an autonomous vehicle needs to drive before it's proven safe. But some AV developers and test companies are hoping to ease the burden a bit with automation that makes millions of real and simulated miles of road testing simpler to implement, supported by standards that make it easier to create and trade simulation scenarios. The goal is to reduce th... » read more

Testing Against Changing Standards In Automotive


The infusion of more semiconductor content into cars is raising the bar on reliability and changing the way chips are designed, verified and tested, but it also is raising a lot of questions about whether companies are on the right track at any point in time. Concerns about liability are rampant with autonomous and assisted driving, so standards are being rolled out well in advance of the te... » read more

The Growing Impact Of Portable Stimulus


It has been a year since Accellera's Portable Test and Stimulus Specification became a standard. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact it has had, and the future direction of it, with Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification Systems; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Tom Fitzpatrick, strategic verification architect for Mentor, a Siemen... » read more

Best Practices for Traceability of Functional Safety Requirements In Automotive IP & SoCs


Automotive functional safety systems continue to incorporate complex features to meet wide range of consumer demands. Developing functional safety systems, including all the components such as the system-on-chip (SoC) and IP, hinges on the ability to meet the stringent automotive functional safety requirements such as definition, implementation, verification, and validation. Functional safety S... » read more

Autonomous Vehicles Are Reshaping The Tech World


The effort to build cars that can drive themselves is reshaping the automotive industry and its supply chain, impacting everything from who defines safety to how to ensure quality and reliability. Automakers, which hardly knew the names of their silicon suppliers a couple of years ago, are now banding together in small groups to share the costs and solve technical challenges that are well be... » read more

Is Your Functional Safety An Afterthought?


Imagine the air bag in your car not inflating during a collision or deploying without a crash during driving! These are two of the failure modes associated with the air bag in your car, none of which you as a driver have any control over. The severity of both these failures is of course very high, but which one would you rate as a higher hazard? The probability of getting into an accident is lo... » read more

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

Using Better Data To Shorten Test Time


The combination of machine learning plus more sensors embedded into IC manufacturing equipment is creating new possibilities for more targeted testing and faster throughput for fabs and OSATs. The goal is to improve quality and reduce the cost of manufacturing complex chips, where time spent in manufacturing is ballooning at the most advanced nodes. As the number of transistors on a die incr... » read more

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