The Rise and Fall of Synthesis Bugs in Safety-Critical FPGAs


For standards IEC 61508 / ISO 26262 / EN 50128 / DO-254. FPGAs are the dominant hardware platform in low-volume, safety-critical applications, including aerospace, and nuclear power plants. Modern FPGAs allow for the implementation of high performance designs with integrated safety mechanisms. This is driving adoption in additional industries, including automotive. Functional safety standard... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Cadence unveiled deep neural-network accelerator (DNA) AI processor IP, Tensilica DNA 100, targeted at on-device neural network inference applications. The processor is scalable from 0.5 TMAC (Tera multiply-accumulate) to 12 TMACs, or 100s of TMACs with multiple processors stacked, and the company claims it delivers up to 4.7X better performance and up to 2.3X more performance p... » read more

Demystifying EDA Support For ISO 26262 Tool Qualification


My new, mid-size car is equipped with many advanced driver-assistance systems. To be honest, it’s taking me time to get used to some of them, as, for example, lane-centering assist that seamlessly takes control of my steering wheel. However, I cannot wait to get my hands off a fully autonomous vehicle and be able to take a nap while 7nm chips run machine learning and other artificial intellig... » 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

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Cadence and National Instruments are teaming up with the aim of improving the semiconductor development and test process. The two companies are jointly working on common transistor models to ensure consistent simulation behavior between NI AWR Microwave Office circuit design software and the Cadence Spectre simulation platform. Cadence also launched the Virtuoso RF Solution for ... » read more

Making Sense Of Safety Standards


If you’re involved in the design or verification of safety-critical electronics, you’ve probably heard about some of the standards that apply to such development projects. If not, then you’re probably puzzled when you read about TÜV SÜD certifying that an EDA tool satisfies functional safety standards ISO 26262 (TCL3/ASIL D), IEC 61508 (T2/SIL 3) and EN 50128 (T2/SIL 3). The industry ha... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Arm unveiled a new suite of IP focused on machine learning for edge devices. Currently dubbed Project Trillium, it includes the Arm ML processor, the second-generation Arm Object Detection (OD) processor, and open-source Arm NN software. The ML processor provides more than 4.6 TOPs in mobile environments with efficiency of 3 TOPs/W. People detection is a focus of the OD processo... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Storage Western Digital uncorked disk drives based upon microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology. MAMR technology is one of two energy-assisted technologies the company has under development, the other being heat-assisted magnetic recording. Of the two, Western Digital said only MAMR has achieved the reliability required in data centers. The company noted that densities of its MAMR dev... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


IoT The first test drive to showcase intelligent traffic was held in Europe this week. NXP, Siemens, Honda, Cohda Wireless, TÜV Süd, and Automobile Clubs AvD and ANWB are all working within the Intelligent Transport Systems Corridor that runs between Austria, German and the Netherlands. IP Open-Silicon rolled out memory controller IP for the Hybrid Memory Cube 2.0 standard. The 3D stacke... » read more

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