The Race To Secure The Car


A shift is underway in the automotive industry to connect cars to each other and to a variety of communications infrastructure, adding many of the features that consumers now expect in mobile devices as well as some new ones that ultimately will lead to autonomous vehicles. But along with those changes are some nagging questions about just how safe that technology will be for consumers and othe... » read more

Will We Ever Have Just One Remote Control?


The concept of home automation powered by a single remote control has been discussed for decades — at least since the first airing of the Jetsons in 1962. And the tech world has been working fervently to deliver on the concept for just as long. In some respects, we've landed. But there's still much more to explore on the path to a seamless, secure and scalable whole-house connectivity solu... » read more

One-Time-Programmable Memories For IoT Security


Security in the IoT space is an issue of major concern. Hackers are attacking IoT devices across all layers of the infrastructure, from the application layer down to protocol, to the physical and deep into the IoT devices. I intend to focus on vulnerability prevention for IoT devices at the lowest level: memory structure and key storage. I conclude with indicating highly important features a... » read more

New Memory Approaches And Issues


New memory types and approaches are being developed and tested as DRAM and Moore's Law both run out of steam, adding greatly to the confusion of what comes next and how that will affect chip designs. What fits where in the memory hierarchy is becoming less clear as the semiconductor industry grapples with these changes. New architectures, such as [getkc id="202" kc_name="fan-outs"] and [getk... » read more

Industrial Electronics Gain Greater Manufacturing Flexibility With Embedded Memory


While IoT continues to capture the semiconductor industry’s collective imagination, not to be overlooked is the industrial electronics market. Just consider the wide swath industrial electronics cuts. It could be anything related to electrical equipment in an industrial setting, and includes everything from control systems, instrumentation, mechanicals and diagnostics to signal processing and... » read more

Battle Looms Over Mobile Payments


The lines are drawn. The sides are sizing each other up. Apple is on one side with secure element, and Google and Microsoft are on the other side with host card emulation. Both are mobile payment systems for smartphones that rely on near-field communication technology. Apple fired the first shot with SE, and Google soon replied with HCE. And now both sides are ramping up after months of dela... » read more

Thermal Damage To Chips Widens


Heat is becoming a much bigger problem for semiconductor and system design, fueled by higher density and the increasing use of complex chips in markets such as automotive, where reliability is measured in decade-long increments. In the past, heat typically was handled by mechanical engineers, who figured out where to put heat sinks, fans, or holes to funnel heat out of a chassis. But as more... » read more

In The Era Of Driverless Cars, OTP Will Rule


Visit any car dealership these days and prepare to be amazed by the amount of electronics that comes standard with each car. That’s about to get even more evident as we head into the era of the driverless car, otherwise known as the connected or autonomous car. Who isn’t ready to leave the driving to electronics? The typical driver won’t be all that interested to learn that embedded me... » read more

Sensors Enable ADAS


Under the hood, cars of today look nothing like those of a few decades ago. There are sophisticated safety and drivetrain monitoring features, software for interpreting and interacting with the outside world and modifying the inside environment, and a host of features that might have seemed impossible or even ridiculous in the past. And there's much more to come. Advanced driver assistance s... » read more

A Closer Look At One-Time Programmable Embedded Memory


Being the first month of the year, chip designers have probably reflected on 2015 and are thinking ahead to upcoming projects this year. They want to produce a product that reflects tomorrow’s needs for electronic devices that include low power, high performance and high security. Now, they’re thinking about embedded memory, a requirement for all electronic devices. It’s captured the atte... » read more

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