Qualcomm acquires Arriver Business; 5G Challenge; MS Azure Altra preview.
Automotive, mobility
Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Arriver Business from SSW Partners. Arriver’s Driver Assistance, Computer Vision, and Drive Policy assets will become part of the Snapdragon Ride Platform. SSW Partners, a New York-based investment partnership, has acquired all shares in Veoneer, retaining its Tier-1 supplier and integrator businesses.
Hyundai Motor Group gave Infineon Technologies a “Special Award for Supply Competence” for its flexibility in working with the automotive company to manage the supply of SiC parts for electric vehicle. “Infineon Korea and Infineon Headquarters have provided flexible and strategic cooperation to manage the difficult situation in the market. For example, by providing the silicon carbide (SiC) based power module HybridPACK CoolSiC Drive, Infineon demonstrated product quality and its ability to respond to new requirements,” according to a press release. Infineon increased capacity.
BMW Group licensed Arteris IP’s FlexNoC interconnect IP and Resilience Package IP for an automotive SoC accelerator chip that is being designed as part of the ZUSE-KI-mobil publicly funded project. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is partially funding the project, which aims to develop the chip for high-end deep-learning applications that will achieve high levels of energy efficiency, reliability, robustness, and security. BMW Group is serving as the coordinator and leader of the project.
STMicroelectronics released an automotive gate driver unit (GDU) that handles motor-control in 12V, 24V, or 48V systems. It has flexible input and output channels for use in conventional and hybrid/electric vehicles. The L9908 integrated automotive three-phase GDU controls 6 N-channel FETs for brushless motors. It is AEC-Q100 qualified with full ISO26262 compliance, ASIL-D systems ready.
ZeroAvia and ZEV Station sign a memorandum of understanding to create an airport hydrogen refueling system at California airports.
The team at California-based Saildrone is using Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Xcelerator as a Service portfolio to collaborate on uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs). Siemens just announced that its cloud-based version of Siemens’ NX product design and engineering software is available as part of Xcelerator as a Service and that the Software as a Service (SaaS) business is accelerating, passing $200M in cloud annual recurring revenue.
Tesla plans to make an electric self-driving taxi with no timeframe announced. The company reports it made 305,000 vehicles and delivered over 310,000 vehicles in Q1 2022.
Pervasive computing
The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS), which is part of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), is working with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to sponsor the 5G Challenge, to encourage an open 5G ecosystem. through open interfaces, interoperable components, and multi-vendor solutions. The 2022 prize is $3 million to contestants who submit hardware and/or software designs for one or more 5G network subsystems — the distributed unit (DU), centralized unit (CU), and/or radio unit (RU). “Increasing the resilience and security of our supply chain is at the heart of NTIA’s work to incentivize open and interoperable 5G networks and increase the diversity of suppliers in the 5G ecosystem,” said Alan Davidson, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information and NTIA administrator, in a press release.
Microsoft is previewing its Microsoft Azure Ampere Altra processors, which are Arm Neoverse-based.
KLA is now offering its PCB (printed circuit board) design-for-manufacturability analysis software, Frontline Cloud Services, in the cloud.
AMD will acquire the distributed services platform company Pensando for approximately $1.9 billion. The acquisition adds Pensando’s products, including its programmable packet processor , and its employees, including CEO Prem Jain and engineering team, to AMD’s Data Center Solutions Group. Pensando’s product and technology roadmaps will remain in place, with wider opportunities under AMD, according to a press release. “To build a leading-edge data center with the best performance, security, flexibility and lowest total cost of ownership requires a wide range of compute engines,” said Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. “All major cloud and OEM customers have adopted EPYC processors to power their data center offerings. Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level which expands our ability to offer leadership solutions for our cloud, enterprise and edge customers.” AMD expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of 2022, pending regulatory approval.
Startup Nemo’s Garden is using Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Xcelerator portfolio to make digital twins of its underwater prototype biospheres, a farming operation that is bearing fruit. The digital twin simulations help Nemo’s Garden keep designing and monitoring when in the past weather conditions, seasonality/short growing seasons, and limitations on diving and monitoring would lengthen the design and testing of the biosphere. The company is using a machine learning algorithm (trained by Siemens) to monitor the plant growth and environmental conditions within the domes. The biospheres have Siemens’ Industrial Edge computing devices that monitor the data from sensors year around and make it available in real time.
Flex Logix has signing licenses to develop over 32 ASICs/SoCs with its EFLX embedded FPGA (eFPGA) IP, architecture, and software. Customers include the Air Force Research Laboratory, Boeing, DARPA, Datang Telecom/MorningCore Technology, Renesas/Dialog, Sandia National Labs, SiFive, Socionext, and the U.S. Department of Defense. “Flex Logix’s eFPGA IP has moved far beyond a novel IP that had only seen silicon in validation and test chips five years ago,” said Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix. “We’ve seen a 71% CAGR on the number of licenses over the last 5 years through December 2021, with the majority of these licenses being used for production chips.” The modular EFLX can have arrays throughout the chip, be all-logic or be heavy-DSP, have RAM in an array, be rad hard if needed, and is available in 7, 12, 16, 22, 28 and 40 nm process nodes with more advanced nodes planned.
Intel unveiled its Blockscale ASIC for blockchain, to be available toward the end of Q3 2022. Features will include a dedicated secure hash algorithm-256 (SHA-256) ASIC processor, up to 580 GH/s hash rate operating and up to 26 J/TH power efficiency, on-chip temperature- and voltage-sensing capabilities, and support for up to 256 integrated circuits per chain.
Edge computing company ADLINK Technology says its Ampere Altra Developer Platform based on the COM-HPC Ampere Altra module is available. Ampere Altra, a 32/64/80-core COM-HPC based server type module, uses Arm Neoverse N1 platform. Use cases are for cloud-to-edge development communities in medical imaging and robotic surgery, stationary and mobile robotics, autonomous driving, test and measurement to multimedia broadcasting, among others.
Security
The Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) Hardware Security Program (HWS) member companies are looking for semiconductor research to fund in 2022. The SRC HWS put out a call to university research teams for 1-page white papers that describe a three-year security research project.
Keysight announced CyPerf 2.0, its subscription-based software for network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) to validate the performance and security of their products when they are deployed. The subscription uses zero trust security policies. “Today’s distributed cloud networks require that security devices, such as next generation firewalls, perform well within zero trust architectures,” said Ram Periakaruppan, vice president and general manager of Keysight’s Network Test and Security Solutions group in a press release. “CyPerf is the first purpose-built test tool that can validate the application performance and security efficacy of zero trust infrastructures for both individual components and end-to-end architectures. It offers customers a way to ensure the performance and security of their networks and applications in a zero trust environment giving them the confidence to accelerate innovation.”
VMWare issued security updates for multiple products. The VMware Security Advisory Advisories VMSA-2022-0011 and VMSA-2022-0012 involve authentication vulnerabilities.
Intel suspended operations in Russia, condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Citrix released a security updates for its hypervisor. The issue affects systems with Intel CPUs, where privileged code is allowed in a guest VM where it can crash the host to crash or make it unresponsive.
Tools
Advantest uncorked its new “Euclid” 3D Image Viewer for its Hadatomo photoacoustic microscopes, which are used to measure skin. The viewer can superimpose 2D data taken of melanin, vascular structure, and structure of skin and turn it into 3D. It can also create tomographic images.
Bruker launched a benchtop Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance (FT-NMR) tool for forensic narcotics analysis called the Fourier 80 CrimeLab. The CrimeLab uses NMR Narcotics Profiling module to create detailed reports on the types and quantities of substances in seized drug samples.
People, companies
Intel awarded its two top 2022 EPIC Supplier Program awards to 22 companies. Intel founded the program in 1987, but it has evolved to stand for EPIC performance means excellence, partnership, inclusion, and continuous improvement. ‘Outstanding’ is for the highest performance across all measures, the ‘Distinguished’ for consistently exceeding expectations.
Michal Siwinski has joined Arteris IP as chief marketing officer. He was previously at Cadence.
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