Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing

Security
Ninety-one percent of commercial applications contain outdated or abandoned open-source components —a security threat, says Synopsys in its recently released report 2020 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA). In the fifth annual edition of the report, Synopsys’ research team in its Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC) found that 99% of the 1,250 commercial codebases reviewed had open-source code in them, with 75% of the codebases having a vulnerability, 49% had a high-risk vulnerability. The team looked at codebases from 17 industries, nine of those industries had open source in 100% of their codebases. The four main findings, according to a press release, are:

• Open-source adoption continues to soar. (36%).
• Outdated and “abandoned” open-source components are pervasive.
• The use of vulnerable open-source components is trending upward again.
• Open-source license conflicts continue to put intellectual property at risk.

5G
China-based chipmaker Picocom is licensing Arteris IP’s network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP for a 5G New Radio (5G NR) small cell baseband SoC.

Edge, cloud, data center
The NVIDIA’s new A100 GPU is targeting data centers and AI at the same time. The partitioning feature on the 7nm processor will enable data centers to slice the workloads and keep the servers busy. Based on NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture with sparsity for AI, the GPU also has third generation Tensor Cores with TF32 that NVIDIA says speeds up AI training and inference by up to 20x. The GPU has seven independent instances for inferencing tasks and NVLink interconnect to enable putting multiple GPUs together. The chip is in full production and is now shipping in the NVIDIA DGX A100, a 5-petaflops server.

Synopsys unveiled its DesignWare IP for developing SoCs for high-end cloud computing, AI accelerators, networking and storage applications on TSMC’s 5nm process technology.

Nokia will collaborate with Microsoft on the SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) initiative, a Linux-based open-source operating system for network switch operations. SONiC, which breaks monolithic switch software into multiple containerized components, has been “production-hardened in the data centers of some of the largest cloud-service providers,” according to a press release.

AI, machine learning
Looking for a few good AI ideas: The United States Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) is calling for ideas on how AI can be used to maintain its aeronautic vehicle stock, reported NextGov. The request for information, due on June 8^th, says JAIC is “seeking information on how an interested partner(s) could contribute to a large-scale data, artificial intelligence (AI) development, and systems integration project.”

Intel Labs is working with University of Pennsylvania on harnessing AI to identify brain tumors while preserving privacy — a technique called federated learning. Also Intel Capital is investing $132 million in tech startups working on artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous computing and chip design. The companies joining Intel Capital’s portfolio are Anodot, Astera Labs, Axonne, Hypersonix, KFBIO, Lilt, MemVerge, ProPlus Electronics, Retrace, Spectrum Materials and Xsight Labs, according to a press release.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) made its Amazon Kendra natural language enterprise search service more widely available. The service uses machine learning to index and pull data across company data silos to answer natural language search queries. AWS also updated the machine learning on its Amazon MACie, which can find and protect and send out alerts on an organization’s sensitive data stored in Amazon S3 buckets.

Automotive
NXP, hypervisor company OpenSynergy, embedded systems ACTIA and Mobica have demonstrated a hypervisor-based telematics control unit (TCU) reference platform for automobiles, using NXP’s i.MX 8QuadXPlus SoC. OpenSynergy provided a virtualization platform COQOS Hypervisor SDK that runs on ACTIA’s telematics reference hardware. Mobica put the whole thing together. TCUs are used for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. The hypervisor makes it possible to partition the domains to run on separate virtual machines. “TCUs are expected to play a key role in autonomous Driving,” says OpenSynergy in a press release. “The automotive industry increasingly looks toward the use of hypervisors.”

NXP also announced it added Bluetooth 5.0 long-range capabilities and expanded Bluetooth advertising channels to new devices within its KW3x family of MCUs, aimed at automotive and industrial markets. The range is increases to a mile.

IoT
Arm has renamed its ArmTechCon event Arm DevSummit and is taking it virtual on October 5-9, 2020.The conference focus is expanding on technical, hands-on training and insights for software developers and hardware designers. The Call for Papers is now open.

Coherent Logix, the maker of HyperX architecture for processors for C-programmable embedded systems, is adapting Kandou’s Glasswing SerDes IP into low-power processors. The IP provides 500 gigabits per second of bi-directional throughput.

Startup Aspinity, which specializes in power-efficient analog edge processing, is joining Infineon Technologies to develop battery-operated always-on sensing products for consumer and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

San Francisco-based Puloli Inc. is offering access to its private narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) network in the upper 700 MHz A Block band via Qualcomm’s 9205 LTE Modem. Targeted customers are smart cities and utilities. The company is calling it a NB-IoT Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). “Private IoT networks based on 5G/LTE IoT standards are rapidly gaining momentum as they offer secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective IoT solutions,” says Puloli press release. Yet The Japan’s NTT DoCoMo telecom shut down its NB-IoT, DISH is shutting down its NB-IoT network to focus on its 5G wireless network.

Job, Event and Webinar Boards
Find industry jobs and upcoming virtual conferences and webinars all in one place on Semiconductor Engineering, including what GUC says about HBM reliability monitoring.

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