Faster Commoditization In Cars


Sensors are at the heart of assisted and autonomous driving, but even before these devices hit the road the average selling prices of these components will have to fall far enough to be affordable to a mass audience. Achieving economies of scale is what has made the semiconductor industry successful over the past half century. It has enabled semiconductors to proliferate and for electronics ... » read more

Security For Embedded Electronics


The embedded systems market is expected to enjoy steady growth in the near future—provided those systems can be adequately secured. One of the biggest challenges for embedded devices and systems, especially those employed in the [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"], is adequately protecting them from increasingly sophisticated hacking. This is a new tool for criminal enterprises, a... » read more

Securing Smart Homes


One year after Mirai malware hijacked more than 100,000 connected devices for its botnet and launched a denial of service attack — which briefly blocked access to popular sites such as Netflix, PayPal, Amazon and Twitter — [getkc id="76" kc_name="IoT"] device makers are just beginning to get smarter about home security. Security concerns reach deeper into the home than just the Internet ... » read more

Automotive Defect Recall?


Automotive recalls can be devastating financially and a nightmare for an automaker’s reputation. Tracking down the cause of a defect means working through the electronic system wheel of failure, checking everything from wiring and connections, software, to the hardware. A key component to preventing defects is a rigorous requirement specification and management process, especially for meeting... » read more

Which Verification Engine?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of verification with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director of marketing for emulation at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"]; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for product management at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solut... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A PLDA is divesting its Reflex CES brand. The FPGA board maker will become wholly managed by its own management and investment teams. In 2015, Reflex CES took over the hardware businesses of PLDA, including FPGA-based boards and the System-on-Module product lines. Tools Mentor uncorked a new tool for in-system test and diagnosis of automotive ICs. Tessent MissionMode provides infrast... » read more

Four Steps To Verifying An SSD Controller With Emulation


By Ben Whitehead and Paul Morrison Datacenters, cloud computing, the IoT, and all things electronic demand that huge amounts of data and information are stored securely and accessible anywhere at any time. This requirement is driving the adoption of new storage technologies. The capacity, size and performance of solid state drives (SSDs) make it a very interesting technology. It offers h... » read more

Evolution Of The MCU


Microcontrollers are taking on a variety of new and much more complex computing tasks, evolving from standalone chips to more highly integrated devices that can rival complex microprocessors. Microcontroller units (MCUs) are being designed into everything from assisted and autonomous driving to smart cards. They often are the central processing elements for a slew of connected devices that i... » read more

Move Data Or Process In Place?


Should data move to available processors or should processors be placed close to memory? That is a question the academic community has been looking at for decades. Moving data is one of the most expensive and power-consuming tasks, and is often the limiter to system performance. Within a chip, Moore's Law has enabled designers to physically move memory closer to processing, and that has rema... » read more

Dealing With Deadlocks


Deadlocks are becoming increasingly problematic as designs becoming more complex and heterogeneous. Rather than just integrating IP, the challenge is understanding all of the possible interactions and dependencies. That affects the choice of IP, how it is implemented in a design, and how it is verified. And it adds a whole bunch of unknowns into an already complex formula for return on inves... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →