How To Make Autonomous Vehicles Reliable


The number of unknowns in automotive chips, subsystems and entire vehicles is growing as higher levels of driver assistance are deployed, sparking new concerns and approaches about how to improve reliability of these systems. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) will need to detect objects, animals and people, and they will be used for parking assistance, night vision and collision avoi... » read more

Introduction To DO-254


For almost two decades, avionics system manufacturers have only had to adhere to DO-178 for the development of airborne software. RTCA/DO-178A was recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1985 for the development of airborne software, but RTCA/DO-254 was only recognized by the FAA in 2005 for the development of airborne electronic hardware (AEH). Developers of AEH are now face... » read more

IP And FinFETs At Advanced Nodes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IP and finFETs at advanced nodes with Warren Savage, president and CEO of IPextreme; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of engineering and product support at Ansys-Apache; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing at Sonics, and Bernard Murphy, CTO of Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: It’s harder for a fabless semiconductor ... » read more

New Approaches For Reliability


The definition of reliability hasn’t budged since the invention of the IC, but how to achieve it is starting to change. In safety-critical systems, as well as in markets such as aerospace, demands for reliability are so rigorous that they often require redundant circuitry—and for good reason. A PanAmSat malfunction in 1998 caused by tin whisker growth wiped out pagers for 45 million use... » read more

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