Tenstorrent $100M; Tesla steering investigation; Infineon’s 200mm SiC power fab; 6G rollout; National Cyber Workforce; Canon’s Wi-Fi advisory; Ivanti EPMM vulnerability; AI transformer models; China’s minor mode for smart devices; AI stroke detection; shape-shifting display; indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies’ FMCW-LiDAR platform.
Hyundai, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and others invested a combined $100 million in Canada-based Tenstorrent to accelerate the design and development of AI chiplets and machine-learning software and allow the integration of AI into future Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis vehicles, plus other future mobilities such as robotics and advanced air mobility (AAM).
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a “Preliminary Evaluation (PE) on 2023 model year Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles due to reports of inability to steer the vehicle and the loss of power steering.” Tesla also faces a fresh lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for falsely advertising the estimated driving ranges of its electric vehicles, according to CNBC.
Designing intellectual property (IP) for the automotive sector is similar to targeting aerospace or medical devices — human lives are at risk if something goes wrong, and the list of regulations is significant. In the case of ISO 26262, that includes a 12-part standard for automotive safety.
The Biden-Harris Administration announced the National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy (NCWES), aimed at filling hundreds of thousands of cyber job vacancies across the U.S. to ensure national security and boost leadership in the digital economy.
The rollout of 6G will open the door to significant changes and possibilities, but whether this technology lives up to the hype will require massive collaborative efforts, huge investments in infrastructure, and solving some problems for which there are no precedents.
Investors pumped $2.8 billion into 123 semiconductor companies, including investments for automotive sensors, ADAS solutions, all-optical RISC processors, biomarker identification tools, faster fully homomorphic encryption, and artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration processor IP.
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Infineon will build the world’s largest 200mm SiC (silicon carbide) power fab in Kulim, Malaysia, to support accelerating global growth in automotive and industrial applications such as solar, energy storage, and high-power EV charging. The company will invest an additional €5 billion euros (~$5.5B) in Kulim during a second construction phase for Module Three.
indie Semiconductor and SiLC Technologies partnered to deliver a purpose-built platform for next-generation sensing applications, including driver assistance, autonomous mobility, robotics and industrial automation, using frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems.
An acousto-optic modulator can be used to rapidly scan a large-area metasurface deflector, overcoming the limitations of 3D sensors with wide field of view metasurface-enhanced scanning lidar, according to researchers at Université Côte d’Azur and CRHEA.
Bosch opened a €65 million euro (~$71M) test center for chips and sensors in Penang, Malaysia, to meet global demand in the automotive and consumer goods sectors, with plans to invest a further €285 million euros (~$312M) at the site by the middle of the next decade.
The connectivity module market for telematics and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) applications is expected to grow from $2.9 billion in 2023 to U$6.1 billion in 2028 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16%, due to growing need for advanced connectivity and safety solutions, according to Yole. The report said Qualcomm may lead the automotive connectivity chipset market with its recent acquisition of Autotalks.
Airbus, BMW Group, and Quantinuum developed a hybrid quantum-classical workflow to speed up future research, focusing on the chemical reactions of catalysts in fuel cells. The team modeled the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) on the surface of a platinum-based catalyst and aim to make the process faster and more efficient to address industry challenges.
Researchers at TU Graz and the Helmholtz Center for Information Security found attackers can read data from the memory of CPUs by analyzing the processor’s energy consumption, using a method called Collide+Power.
Draper joined the Intel Foundry Services (IFS) U.S. Military, Aerospace and Government (USMAG) Alliance and will adopt IFS’ leading-edge processes to use with Draper’s security IP and precision, ensuring military, aerospace, and government customers meet national security requirements.
Synopsys launched an application security posture management (ASPM) solution, enabling “security and development teams to simplify, align, and streamline their application security testing across projects, teams, and application security testing (AST) tools.”
Canon advised that “sensitive information on Wi-Fi connection settings stored in the memories of inkjet printers may not be deleted by the usual initialization process,” allowing bad actors to extract the printer memory from discarded or recycled printers and use the Wi-Fi connection details to access the original owners’ resources, steal data, or launch other attacks.
A simple and effective attack method can cause large language models (LLMs) like Chat GPT to “generate objectionable behaviors at a high success rate,” according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, CyLab, and the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco.
CISA and the Norwegian National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NO) released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), due to “advanced persistent threat (APT) actors exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Ivanti EPMM, formerly known as MobileIron Core, to target a Norwegian government network.” Ivanti released two successive patches after finding threat actors can chain the “vulnerabilities to gain initial, privileged access to EPMM systems and execute uploaded files, such as webshells.”
CISA issued other alerts including Mozilla security updates and an industrial control systems advisory (ICS) concerning APSystems Altenergy Power Control.
MIT researchers developed PhotoGuard, a tool that disrupts the ability of an advanced generative model, such as DALL-E and Midjourney, to manipulate an image. The disruption technique uses perturbations, which are minuscule alterations in pixel values invisible to the human eye but detectable by computer models.
San Diego City Council authorized its police department to seek out a contract with Ubiquia to provide smart streetlight cameras and Flock Safety to provide automated license plate readers, aiming to help solve crime. If the technology is installed, the department said it wouldn’t record sound, doesn’t have facial recognition technology, and won’t be used for “immigration enforcement or to target groups solely based on attributes such as race, religion or social views.”
Endor Labs raised $70 million in series A funding to achieve application security without the “developer productivity tax,” claiming engineers spend over 50% of their time addressing security vulnerabilities.
Threat intelligence startup Cyble raised $24 million in Series B funding to amplify its AI-driven cybersecurity solutions.
The object detection required for machine vision applications such as autonomous driving, smart manufacturing, and surveillance applications depends on AI modeling. The goal now is to improve the models and simplify their development.
Sensors are becoming more intelligent, more complex, and much more useful as they are being integrated with other sensors in sensor fusion. New markets for sensors involve complex power management, radar, and increasing amounts of intelligence.
Cadence released the Xtensa LX8 processor, offering new capabilities to address the increasing system-level performance and AI requirements of processor-based SoC designs, driven by the ongoing push for pervasive intelligence at the edge in the automotive, consumer, and deeply embedded computing markets.
Renesas enabled customers to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code to develop and debug Renesas microcontrollers (MCUs) and microprocessors (MPUs), targeted at automotive, internet of things (IoT), industrial automation, home appliance, health, and other applications.
MLCommons developed Chakra, “an open and interoperable graph-based representation for standardizing AI/Machine Learning (ML) workload execution traces.” The tool’s execution traces represent key operations, such as computation, memory accesses, communication, control dependencies, timing, and resource constraints.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) wants smart device makers to introduce “minor mode” programs barring users under 18 from accessing the internet on mobile devices from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., according to NBC. CAC also planned age-based restrictions on how much children could use a device each day but said parents could opt out.
Japanese conglomerate Rakuten and OpenAI will collaborate to deliver conversational artificial intelligence (AI) experiences to consumers and businesses in Japan and worldwide, aiming to revolutionize the way consumers shop and enhance productivity for merchants and business partners.
China-based Tencent said its foundation AI model, Hunyuan, has been integrated with a range of products such as Tencent Cloud, Tencent Meeting, and Tencent Docs, according to CNA.
Coreweave secured a $2.3 billion debt facility, providing the readiness to scale as the company acquires cutting-edge technology for AI and model training purposes.
Foxconn will invest $600 million in India’s Karnataka state, $350 million to set up an iPhone casing component facility, and $250 million in a joint project with Applied Materials to make chip-making tools, according to CNA.
Infineon introduced a recyclable and biodegradable printed circuit board (PCB) substrate based on natural fibers and a halogen-free polymer, developed by UK start-up Jiva Materials, to help reduce the electronics industry’s carbon footprint.
Fig. 1: Infineon’s Soluboard disassembled. Source: Infineon
Infineon will supply SolarEdge with critical components for a range of smart energy products and the companies will collaborate on developing future technologies and cutting-edge solar products based on wide-bandgap (WBG) materials key for global green energy supplies.
Stanford University researchers boosted the brightness and efficiency of perovskite LEDs, or PeLEDs, commonly used in TVs and smartphone screens, but their enhancements caused the lights to fizzle out within minutes, demonstrating the tradeoffs that must be made.
University of Colorado Boulder engineers created a shape-shifting display made from a 10-by-10 grid of soft robotic “muscles” that can sense outside pressure and pop up to create patterns, precise enough to generate scrolling text, delivering a sense of touch in the digital age.
A wearable, conformable ultrasound breast patch (cUSBr-Patch) enables ultrasound breast tissue scanning and imaging, offering a noninvasive method for tracking real-time dynamic changes of soft tissue so tumors may be detected when still in early stages.
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