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

Data Center Power Poised To Rise


The big power-saving effort that kept U.S. data-center power consumption low for the past decade may not keep the lid on much longer. Faced with the possibility that data centers would consume a disastrously large percentage of the world's power supply, data center owners, and players in the computer, semiconductor, power and cooling industries ramped up effort to improve the efficiency of e... » read more

How To Test Autonomous Vehicles


By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling The race is on to develop ways of testing autonomous vehicles to prove they are safe under most road conditions, but this has turned out to be much more difficult than initially thought. The autonomous vehicle technology itself is still in various stages of development, with carmakers struggling to fine-tune AI algorithms that can guide robots on wheels th... » 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

Adding NoCs To FPGA SoCs


FPGA SoCs straddle the line between flexibility and performance by combining elements of both FPGAs and ASICs. But as they find a home in more safety- and mission-critical markets, they also are facing some of the same issues as standard SoCs, including the ability to move larger and larger amounts of data quickly throughout an increasingly complex device, and the difficulty in verifying and de... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys revealed a power analysis solution for early SoC design as well as signoff-accurate power and reliability closure. PrimePower has reliability as a major focus, expanding power and reliability signoff and ECO closure capabilities from physical awareness to cell electromigration effects. Supported power types include peak power, average power, clock network power, leakage power, a... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A MIPS has reportedly been acquired again, this time by AI startup Wave Computing. Wave focuses on data center-based neural network training using its parallel dataflow processing architecture. In March, the company signed on to use 64-bit multi-threaded processor cores from MIPS in future projects. Previously, MIPS was owned by Tallwood Venture Capital, which acquired MIPS from Imaginat... » read more

FPGAs Becoming More SoC-Like


FPGAs are blinged-out rockstars compared to their former selves. No longer just a collection of look-up tables (LUTs) and registers, FPGAs have moved well beyond into now being architectures for system exploration and vehicles for proving a design architecture for future ASICs. This family of devices now includes everything from basic programmable logic all the way up to complex SoC devices.... » read more

Ensuring Chip Reliability From The Inside


Monitoring activity and traffic is emerging as an essential ingredient in complex, heterogeneous chips used in automotive, industrial, and data center applications. This is particularly true in safety-critical applications such as automotive, where much depends on the system operating exactly right at all times. To make autonomous and assisted driving possible, a mechanism to ensure systems ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Synopsys uncorked ASIL B, C, and D ready versions of its DesignWare EV6x Embedded Vision Processors for automotive SoCs. An included Safety Enhancement Package provides hardware safety features, safety monitors, and lockstep capabilities for safety-critical designs. The processors integrate scalar, vector DSP, and CNN processing units for automotive systems that require deep lea... » read more

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