Tracking Automotive’s Rapidly Shifting Ecosystem


The automotive ecosystem is becoming much harder to navigate as automakers, Tier 1s and IP vendors redefine their relationships based upon shifting value caused by an rapidly expanding amount of increasingly interdependent and complex electronic content. Predictions of massive change started almost a decade ago with a number of pilot programs around autonomous vehicles. But those shifts real... » read more

More Multiply-Accumulate Operations Everywhere


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to build programmable edge inferencing chips, embedded FPGAs, where the markets are developing for both, and how the picture will change over the next few years. SE: What do you have to think about when you're designing a programmable inferencing chip? Tate: With a traditional FPGA architecture you ha... » read more

Building Security IntoThe DevOps Life Cycle


The primary goal when breaking the build in the CI/CD DevOps life cycle is to treat security issues with the same level of importance as quality and business requirements. If quality or security tests fail, the continuous integration server breaks the build. When the build breaks, the CI/CD pipeline also breaks. Based on the reason for the broken build, appropriate activities such as archite... » read more

Software-Defined Hardware Gains Ground — Again


The traditional approach of running generic software on x86-based CPUs is running out of steam for many applications due to the slowdown of Moore’s Law and the concurrent exponential growth in software application complexity and scale. In this environment, the software and hardware are disparate due the dominance of the x86 architecture. “The need for and advent of the hardware accelerat... » read more

How Much Power Will AI Chips Use?


AI and machine learning have voracious appetites when it comes to power. On the training side, they will fully utilize every available processing element in a highly parallelized array of processors and accelerators. And on the inferencing side they, will continue to optimize algorithms to maximize performance for whatever task a system is designed to do. But as with cars, mileage varies gre... » read more

The BSIMM Turns 10


The Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) is a data-driven model developed through the analysis of software security initiatives (SSIs), also known as application/product security programs. BSIMM10 represents the latest evolution of this detailed and sophisticated “measuring stick” for SSIs. Our analysis of real-world data from 122 organizations in eight industry verticals uncovered t... » read more

Banking On FPGA Prototyping


Juergen Jaeger, product management director at Cadence, explains how FPGA prototyping can improve efficiency and reduce design costs, what the development costs are for various phases of the design flow, how that changes across different markets such as automotive and 5G, and why software is now the biggest knob to turn for reducing cost and time to market. » read more

A New Breed Of Engineer


The industry loves to move in straight lines. Each generation of silicon is more-or-less a linear extrapolation of what came before. There are many reasons for this – products continue to evolve within the industry, adding new or higher performance interfaces, risk levels are lower when the minimum amount is changed for any chip spin, existing software is more likely to run with only minor mo... » read more

Is There Finally A Silver Bullet For Software?


As I am in Nuremberg for the annual embedded world conference, the overall mood here seemed a bit muted and slow on day one. There are rumors of 200 exhibitors of the roughly 1100 having pulled out due to the global health situation—we are all asked not to shake hands and smile instead—and the rainy weather doesn't help much either. With the weather turning to snow on day two, the attendanc... » read more

The Cost Of Programmability


Nothing comes for free, and that is certainly true for the programmable elements in an SoC. But without them we are left with very specific devices that can only be used for one fixed application and cannot be updated. Few complex devices are created that do not have many layers of programmability, but the sizing of those capabilities is becoming more important than in the past. There are... » read more

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