Sensors, Sensors Everywhere


Here’s a statement that will surprise no one: autonomous driving was once again a big theme last month at SAE World Congress in Detroit. This is the case at nearly any automotive or tech show these days. There were dozens of displays related to self-driving tech on the exhibit floor, a fact captured in the various social media feeds and news coverage of the event. Mentor was part of this s... » read more

Verification And The IoT


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what impact the IoT will have on the design cycle, with Christopher Lawless, director of external customer acceleration in [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"]'s Software Services Group; David Lacey, design and verification technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Jim Hogan, managing partner at Vista Ventures; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group d... » read more

A Cost-Effective Model-Based Approach For Developing ISO 26262 Compliant Automotive Safety-Related Applications


Automotive manufacturers and their suppliers increasingly need to follow the objectives of ISO 26262 as it is now state-of-the art and as it is the case that an ever increasing number of active and passive safety systems are developed within cars. This has increased the need to define a safe system development process. This paper proposes a model-based approach including automatic and certified... » read more

Quality Issues Widen


As the amount of semiconductor content in cars, medical and industrial applications increases, so does the concern about how long these devices will function properly—and what exactly that means. Quality is frequently a fuzzy concept. In mobile phones, problems have ranged from bad antenna placement, which resulted in batteries draining too quickly, to features that take too long to load. ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Legal Synopsys filed suit against Ubiquiti Networks and its project leader for "circumventing technological measures that effectively control access to Synopsys' software." The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, claims that Ubiquiti used counterfeit keys obtained or created with tools from hacker websites to circumvent Synopsys' License Key system. Ubiquiti, based in San Jose, d... » read more

Big Data On Wheels


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling All kinds of chips are going into driver-assisted and autonomous cars. On one side are arrays of sensors, which are generating huge amounts of data about everything from lane position and proximity to other cars to unexpected objects in the road. On the other side are the chips required to process that data at blazing speed. As the market for PCs and mobil... » read more

Dealing With Unintended Behavior


Functional verification was already tough enough, but having to identify behaviors that were never defined or intended opens up the search space beyond what existing tools are capable of handling. However, while you may not be able to eliminate unintended behaviors, a design team is not helpless. There are several steps that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of these problems getting int... » read more

Fault Simulation Reborn


Fault simulation, one of the oldest tools in the EDA industry toolbox, is receiving a serious facelift after it almost faded from existence. In the early days, fault simulation was used to grade the quality of manufacturing test vectors. That task was replaced almost entirely by [getkc id="173" comment="scan test"] and automatic test pattern generation (ATPG). Today, functional safety is cau... » read more

Devices Threatened By Analog Content?


As the amount of analog content in connected devices explodes, ensuring that the analog portion works properly has taken on a new level of urgency. Analog circuitry is required for interpreting the physical world and for moving data to other parts of the system, while digital circuitry is the fastest way to process it. So a sensor that gives a faulty reading in a car moving at high speed or ... » read more

How Formal Reduces Fault Analysis For ISO 26262


The ISO 26262 standard defines straightforward metrics for evaluating the “safeness” of a design by defining safety goals, safety mechanisms, and fault metrics. However, determining those metrics is difficult. Unlike simulation where it is never known if the design has been simulated enough or given enough input, formal verification conclusively determines if faults are safe or not, making ... » read more

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