Intel processor advisory; Nvidia’s HBM3e superchip; Renesas, Sequans deal; energy consumption attack; MIPI, ASA agreement; Winbond wins ISO/SAE 21434; BMW EVs; UK EV inquiry; robotaxi vote; AI Cyber Challenge; K-12 cyber plan; acoustic keyboard attacks; Keysight’s 6G initiative; ONN for AI processing
Intel issued an advisory of a potential security vulnerability in some of its processors. The company recommends updating to the latest firmware version.
NVIDIA unveiled its GH200 Grace Hopper platform, based on 144 Arm Neoverse cores and 282GB of HBM3e memory. Meanwhile, Chinese internet companies including Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba ordered about $5 billion worth of A800 processors from NVIDIA, to be delivered this year.
Renesas will acquire Sequans in order to gain access to wide-area network technology.
Samsung extended its collaboration with Intel in a deal to integrate its vRAN (virtualized radio access networks) 3.0 software with Intel’s Xeon processors with vRAN Boost.
Attackers can read data from a CPU’s memory by analyzing energy consumption, resulting in a novel attack named Collide+Power, according to researchers at Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security.
The electrification of vehicles is fueling demand for silicon carbide power ICs, but it also is creating challenges in finding and identifying defects in those chips.
Quick links to more news: Automotive, Security and Privacy, Pervasive Computing and AI, Research and Events.
Tesla faces a patent-infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas Austin Division for technology related to its charging stations and optimization software solutions, such as autonomous control.
The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCle) Consortium formed the Automotive Working Group, beginning the development of protocol enhancements for runtime health monitoring and repair. The consortium also released the UCle 1.1 specification with enhancements for automotive usage, including predictive failure analysis and health monitoring.
The Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance and the Automotive SerDes Alliance (ASA) entered a liaison agreement, creating a pathway so implementers can use MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (MIPI CSI-2) directly or natively with the ASA Motion Link (ASA-ML) physical layer (PHY) interface. Supporting specifications, such as MIPI Camera Service Extensions (MIPI CSE), also will be available.
Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) is 25 years old, but it may be the memory of choice for leading-edge designs and in automotive applications. MRAM appears to be gaining traction at the most advanced nodes, because of recent improvements and because markets require solutions for which MRAM may be uniquely qualified.
Winbond’s TrustME W77Q Secure Flash family is the first to receive ISO/SAE 21434 international standard certification. Entitled “Road vehicles – cybersecurity engineering,” the standard applies to manufactured road vehicles and cybersecurity-related subcomponents, including IC components. Compliance with UNECE R155 is necessary to obtain EU-Type approval and vehicle approval through GSR.
Infineon released two embedded power ICs, integrating a gate driver, microcontroller, communication interface, and power supply on a single chip. They are ISO 26262 (ASIL B) compliant, offer flash sizes of up to 256 kB, and support temperature ranges up to 175°C. Some variants have built-in cybersecurity in a 7mm² TQFP package. The company also released six automotive MOSFETs in high power packages.
BMW released a bulletproof i7 Protection EV, which also protects occupants explosives attacks. It has a range of up to 321 miles.
Fig. 1: BMW i7 Protection. Source: BMW
The U.K. Environment and Climate Change Committee launched an inquiry into electric vehicles (EVs) ahead of the 2030 and 2035 phase-out dates of new petrol and diesel vehicles. Areas of interest include the EV market, user experience, end-of-life disposal, national and regional infrastructure and charging issues, and international perspectives.
Driverless robotaxi services Cruise and Waymo gained approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to operate at all hours throughout San Francisco. The vote followed a meeting to address safety issues such as “erratic behavior that resulted in unmanned vehicles blocking traffic, including emergency vehicles.” The autonomous vehicles (AVs) have allegedly caused many traffic incidents since their launch, when they operated at restricted hours.
General Motors will expand its “vehicle-to-home (V2H)” bi-directional charging technology across its retail portfolio of Ultium-based electric vehicles by model year 2026.”
Hyundai and Georgia Tech announced an ongoing partnership aimed at “research and applications to support the future of sustainable mobility, hydrogen economy, workforce development, smart cities” and more. Previously, Hyundai invested $5.54 billion in an electric vehicle and battery plant in Bryan County, Georgia, and created a $120,000 STEM scholarship at Georgia Tech.
In India, Hyundai will introduce five specialized SUV models, including the compact SUV EXTER launched in July, and increase its electric vehicle (EV) charging stations to 439 by 2027. Kia will produce small EVs for the Indian market starting in 2025, then gradually offer other EV models and Purpose Built Vehicles (PBVs), plus develop an EV charging infrastructure.
Motiv released its Argo Series electric truck built on top of the company’s next-generation powertrain, with a 150 to 200-mile range. The lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) battery is designed to support medium-duty applications, including box trucks, step vans, shuttle buses, and refrigerated or vocational vehicles.
Fig. 2: Motiv’s Argo electric truck. Source: Argo
Siemens and China-based Lishen Battery partnered to advance the global battery industry. Lishen will leverage Siemens’ Xcelerator software to establish a technology center equipped with advanced capabilities for full data traceability and connectivity throughout product research, development, and manufacturing processes.
Korea-based Mobis secured an extensive order for Battery System Assembly from Volkswagen to be integrated into the automaker’s next-generation electric vehicle platform. Mobis plans to produce the BAS at a new automobile plant in Spain, subject to approval.
Electric bus maker Proterra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing market headwinds impacting its ability to scale. The company’s future focus will be EV battery technology.
Led by DARPA, the Biden-Harris Administration launched the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), offering about $20 million in prizes for U.S. competitors to identify and fix software vulnerabilities using artificial intelligence (AI). Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI will lend expertise and make technology available for this challenge.
In a wide-ranging effort to combat K-12 cyberattacks, the White House convened school administrators, educators, and private companies to discuss best practices and new resources to strengthen schools’ cybersecurity. Amazon Web Services (AWS) committed $20 million to a K-12 cyber grant program and free security training to K-12 staff. Google updated its K-12 Cybersecurity Guidebook. And Cloudflare, PowerSchool, and D2L offered various resources. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education formed a Government Coordinating Council (GCC) and released the K-12 Digital Infrastructure Brief co-authored by CISA.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced grants of $374.9 million for the 2023 fiscal year State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLCGP). The program provides $1 billion in funding over four years to help regional governments develop capabilities to detect, protect against, and respond to cyber threats.
A deep learning model aimed at acoustic side-channel attacks on keyboards achieved 95% accuracy when trained on keyboard strokes recorded using a microphone and 93% when trained on Zoom recordings, enabling it to steal passwords and other sensitive data typed during a voice or video call, according to researchers at several British universities.
An attacker can plant the equivalent of an idea in a victim’s CPU and coax it into executing certain commands to retrieve information, according to researchers at ETH Zurich. The research was based on AMD chips, and the company assigned CVE-2023-20569 to the vulnerability. AMD “believes this vulnerability is only potentially exploitable locally, such as via downloaded malware, and recommends customers employ security best practices.”
RV-CURE is a RISC-V capability architecture that implements full-system support for full memory safety, according to researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Arm Research.
REED is a chiplet-based fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) accelerator design, enabling scalability and offering high throughput, according to researchers at Graz University of Technology and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.
CISA issued multiple alerts including industrial control systems (ICS) advisories related to Schneider Electric and Hitachi Energy, security updates, and a known vulnerability concerning Zyxel P660HN-T1A Routers Command Injection Vulnerability. The agency also released its Cybersecurity Strategic Plan.
Synopsys collaborated with NowSecure and Secure Code Warrior to expand its Software Integrity Group’s portfolio of application security testing (AST) solutions.
Google failed to get a $5 billion lawsuit dismissed in U.S. District Court Northern District of California. The suit concerns “surreptitious interception and collection of personal and sensitive user data while users are in private browsing mode.” The judge noted, “Because Google never explicitly told users that it does so, the Court cannot find as a matter of law that users explicitly consented to the at-issue data collection.”
Meta asked a court in Norway to stop a daily fine of 1 million crowns (~US$98,500) set by the country’s data regulator, Datatilsynet, over privacy breaches. The regulator said Meta can’t “harvest user data in Norway and use it to target advertisement.” Meta said it had addressed the issue. Meanwhile, Oxford University researchers found no evidence that Facebook’s worldwide penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm.
Keysight enabled University of Stuttgart to conduct research to develop new integrated circuits (IC) for 6G technology with the new Keysight 6G Vector Component Analysis (VCA) solution, enabling researchers to characterize sub-terahertz amplifiers and other components in active transceiver front-ends, laying the foundation for next-generation ultra-high data rate, energy-efficient radio systems.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is forcing fundamental shifts in data center chips and in the tools used to design them, but it also is creating gaps between the speed at which that technology advances and the demands from customers.
Annual HBM bit supply is expected to increase by 105% by 2024, according to TrendForce, as “2023 to 2024 will be pivotal years for AI development, triggering substantial demand for AI training chips and thereby boosting HBM utilization.” But as the focus pivots to inferencing, the annual growth rate for AI training chips and HBM is expected to drop slightly. “As an increasing number of chips adopting HBM3 hit the market, demand in 2024 will heavily lean toward HBM3 and eclipse HBM2e with a projected share of 60%.”
Open AI launched its GPTBot web crawler to improve the accuracy of AI models, as well as their general capabilities and safety. The company provided code so administrators can disallow the bot from accessing a website.
An in-depth measurement study done with a commercial multi-user augmented reality (AR) application, Cloud Anchor, showed 5G-mmWave doesn’t provide substantial performance benefits over long term evolution (LTE) networks. However, a follow-up study using the “Just a Line” application showed “the underlying wireless network has minimal impact, and the application design plays a very important role in optimizing the overall end-to-end user performance,” according to researchers at Northeastern University.
An optical neural network (ONN) with 400 lasers integrated on a photonic chip area of 1 square centimeter could “perform computations up to 100 times more powerfully and efficiently than existing processors inside machine-learning computer systems,” showing “potential to overcome the electronic bottlenecks for the kind of computing architecture needed to run AI systems in the future,” according to researchers at USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
University of Zurich and ETH Zurich researchers developed analog circuits enabling learning in mixed-signal neuromorphic spiking neural networks (SNNs), with tristate stability and weight discretization circuits.
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) researchers at UC San Diego developed new deep learning models to continue improving efforts for early wildfire detection.
UC San Diego researchers produced a thin-film solid-state electrolyte called lithium phosphorus oxynitride (LiPON), which has potential for wearables and other compact electronic devices.
MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute used machine learning to create a computational model that can analyze the sequence of about 400 genes and use that information to predict where a given tumor originated in the body, accurately classifying over 40% of tumors of unknown origin. The model enabled “a 2.2-fold increase in the number of patients who could have been eligible for a genomically guided, targeted treatment, based on where their cancer originated.”
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