Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Power always has been a function of cost. The more power required, the more it costs to run a device, both in dollars and carbon footprint. This makes the breakthrough in fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory all the more noteworthy, and one that could have significant implications for the future of computing, from data centers to rechargeable batteries in automobiles, robot... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, Mobility The U.S. space agency NASA entered a $57.2 million contract with ICON to develop technology to build roads on the moon. ICON, a Texas-based 3D printing construction company, has been working with NASA and the U.S. Air Force on construction technologies that can use local materials to build infrastructure on Mars. NASA is working on advanced 3D printing construction systems... » read more

Cybersecurity Risks Of Automotive OTA


Modern vehicles increasingly resemble supercomputers on wheels, with many electronic control units (ECUs) networked together as increasingly sophisticated software is installed and updated. Similar to smartphones, vehicle OEMs will contact vehicle owners remotely about operating system updates that add new features and/or fixes, as well as software bugs and vulnerabilities. But all of this h... » read more

Why Better Mapping Technology Is Critical To Autonomous Vehicles


Autonomous cars find the way to their destination using a number of critical technologies, including some version of a global position system and a central brain to interpret that and other data. But many of those technologies are not reliable or accurate enough today, and may not be for years to come. There are numerous reports of vehicles missing their stop, or trucks being guided into all... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Saudi Arabia has launched an electric vehicle (EV) company called Ceer. The company is a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudia Arabia and Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.). SiMa.ai, a four-year-old startup that designs edge machine learning SoCs used in vision applications, is getting into the automotive assisted driving market. The com... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


This week saw more fallout from U.S. export controls: SK hynix may consider selling its memory chip production facilities in China if recently imposed controls make it too difficult to continue operations there, according to Nikkei Asia. "As a contingency plan, we are considering selling the fab, selling the equipment or transferring the equipment to South Korea," said Kevin Noh, SK hynix ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Cadence unveiled a new environment to automate and accelerate the complete design closure cycle from signoff optimization through routing, static timing analysis (STA), and extraction. The Certus Closure Solution allows concurrent, full-chip optimization through a massively parallel and distributed architecture and engine shared with Cadence’s Innovus Implementation System and the Tempus Timi... » read more

Bump Co-Planarity And Inconsistencies Cause Yield, Reliability Issues


Bumps are a key component in many advanced packages, but at nanoscale levels making sure all those bumps have a consistent height is an increasing challenge. Without co-planarity, surfaces may not properly adhere. That can reduce yield if the problem is not identified in packaging, or it can cause reliability problems in the field. Identifying those issues requires a variety of process steps... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Renesas announced its integrated development environment (IDE), which car companies can use to develop automotive software for electronic control units (ECUs) with multiple devices, but for which the hardware has not been specified yet. The IDE has co-simulation, debug and trace, high-speed simulation and distributed processing software over multiple SoCs and MCUs. The first develop... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


On Sunday, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the southeast region of Taiwan, causing devastation. TSMC officials reported “no known significant impact for now.” Market research firm TrendForce arrived at a similar conclusion based on its analysis of individual fabs. The Biden administration announced appointment of the leadership team charged with implementing the US CHIPS and Science Ac... » read more

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