$15.5B DOE EV funding; Google Cloud, NVIDIA AI infrastructure; GF automotive tools; EU BEVs soar; Infamous Chisel mobile malware; ChatGPT Enterprise; AI-driven RTL-to-GDS from Cadence, Arm; Winbond, Mobiveil IP controller; IBM’s security monitor model.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $15.5 billion in funding and loans for retooling existing automotive factories for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and supporting local jobs, plus a notice of intent for $3.5 billion in funding to expand domestic manufacturing of batteries for EVs and the nation’s grid, and for battery materials and components that are currently imported.
The move is part of a sweeping overhaul of the automotive supply chain, which is becoming more complex and collaborative, changing longstanding relationships between automakers and their suppliers in ways that would have seemed unimaginable even a couple of years ago.
The silicon carbide (SiC) power devices market is projected to grow to US$8.9 billion in 2028, with a 31% annual growth rate from 2022 to 2028, driven by the Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) sector and especially the 800V electric vehicle (EV) segment, according to Yole. “The arrival of 8-inch SiC presents strategic opportunities, accompanied by impending challenges.”
At the Google Cloud Next conference, Google Cloud and NVIDIA announced new artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and software, making it easy to run AI supercomputers with Google’s A3 virtual machines (VMs) based on NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Google Cloud also introduced its artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator Cloud TPU v5e, tensor processing units with pods, allowing up to 256 chips to be interconnected with an aggregate bandwidth of more than 400 Tb/s and 100 petaOps of INT8 performance. It supports eight different virtual machine (VM) configurations, from one chip to more than 250 chips within a single slice, to serve a wide range of large language model (LLM) and generative AI model sizes.
Toyota suspended operations at 28 lines in all 14 plants in Japan on Aug. 29, then resumed the following day. Reuters reported the malfunction happened during a system update and affected a computer system processing orders for vehicle parts.
Tesla activated its 10,000-unit NVIDIA H100 GPU cluster to accelerate the training of its full self-driving (FSD) technology. The cluster has a “hot tier cache capacity beyond 200PB,” according to a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Bosch started production of 800V electric motors and inverters, based on silicon carbide (SiC) chips that increase efficiency by as much as 99% and support up to 35% more power density for the electric motor.
Ford Pro released a Series 2 AC Charging Station 80 amp for fleet operators and their drivers, featuring enhanced security with RFID technology, card control access, energy reports via management software, and temperature sensors.
Our Next Energy is testing its Aries II structural cell-to-pack single-chemistry battery, offering up to 350 miles of range, according to SAE. The 600-mile, dual-chemistry Gemini pack is due to go into production in 2025 or 2026. Both batteries start with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry.
STMicroelectronics will supply BorgWarner with third-generation 750V silicon carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs dice for the Viper-based power module used in BorgWarner’s traction inverter platforms for Volvo’s electric vehicles (EVs).
GlobalFoundries announced the 40ESF3 AutoPro175 to minimize automotive certification efforts and speed time-to-market, with a junction temperature of 175°C, and the 130BCDLite Gen2 ATV125 to allow for die shrink and higher conversion efficiency. The technology was created for products requiring up to 40V while meeting Auto Grade 1 qualification.
Volkswagen released its ninth generation Passat, a plug-in hybrid with an all-electric range of around 100 km (62 miles) and DC fast charging with a capacity of up to 50 kW.
Fig. 1: Volkswagen Passat Variant. Source: Volkswagen
In the E.U., new battery-electric vehicle (BEV) registrations soared by 60.6% in July, to 115,971 units. That represents 13.6% of the car market, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).
Canada, Australia, Spain, Thailand, and Hungary became the latest countries to reach a tipping point of 5% electric vehicle (EV) adoption. The U.S. reached 5% in 2021, China in 2018, and Norway was first in 2013.
PolyVerif is an open-source environment to accelerate autonomous vehicle validation and verification (V&V), according to researchers from multiple institutions.
ProSpeCT is a generic formal processor model that guarantees speculative and out-of-order execution cause no micro-architectural leaks, according to researchers at imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, CEA, and INRIA.
Remote direct memory introspection (RDMI) is a novel defense platform that couples two types of commodity programmable devices, according to researchers at Rice University, Duke University, and MIT.
Verification for security requires new practices in both the development and verification flows, but tools and methodologies to enable this are rudimentary today. Security is special in that it is pervasive throughout the development process, requiring both positive and negative verification.
The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned organizations about prompt injections when using large language models (LLMs) and said “more vulnerabilities or weaknesses will be discovered in the technologies that we haven’t foreseen yet.”
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the NSA, the FBI, and international partners published a joint Malware Analysis Report (MAR) on Infamous Chisel, a mobile malware targeting Android devices that is able to gain unauthorized access to compromised devices, scan files, monitor traffic, and periodically steal sensitive information.
CISA and the FBI released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to help detect and protect against QakBot, also known as Qbot, Quackbot, Pinkslipbot, and TA570, responsible for global malware infections such as a banking trojan delivered via phishing campaigns that targets election infrastructure and emergency services among others.
CISA issued numerous alerts indicators of compromise (IOCs) for a remote command injection vulnerability affecting Barracuda email security gateway (ESG) appliances, security updates for Mozilla and VMWare, a security advisory concerning Juniper’s Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved, and multiple industrial control systems (ICS) advisories.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released an initial public draft of a publication providing guidance for federal agencies and organizations to build a cybersecurity and privacy learning program and called for public comment through October 27, 2023.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) developed the SAFECOM Writing Guide for Standard Operating Guidelines (SOGs) “to support communities writing SOGs or instructions for incident response.”
X updated its privacy policy effective Sept. 29. Based on user consent, it may collect and use biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes, and may collect and use personal information such as employment and educational history.
Cadence collaborated with Arm to optimize its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven register transfer level to graphic data system (RTL-to-GDS) digital flow and delivered corresponding 5nm and 3nm RAKs for the Arm Neoverse V2 platform, enabling designers to get to market faster.
Winbond and Mobiveil collaborated on a new IP controller targeting applications including automotive, smart internet of things (IoT), and connectivity. Mobiveil adapted its HYPERRAM Controller to leverage Winbond’s HYPERRAM device, reaching speeds of up to 250MHz and supporting densities from 32Mb to 512Mb in x8/x16 modes.
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is now in effect. Global online platforms or search engines that have more than 45 million users (10% of the European population), such as Google, Bing, Facebook, and Amazon, must now follow tight rules and “should include information on any policies, procedures, measures, and tools used for the purpose of content moderation, including algorithmic decision-making and human review.”
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise, a paid business tier of its generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, allowing large-scale deployment with no usage caps, two times faster performance, and fully encrypted conversations. The company noted, “Customer prompts and company data are not used for training OpenAI models.”
Meta introduced FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a benchmark for evaluating computer vision models across classification, detection, instance segmentation, and visual grounding tasks. The dataset is made up of 32,000 images containing 50,000 people.
Google Deep Mind launched a beta tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images, called SynthID.
In China, Baidu publicly released its generative artificial intelligence (AI) bot, named Ernie, after receiving government approval. Access had been restricted since the initial release on March 16.
Prototyping is an essential technology for designing complex chips in tight market windows, but it’s becoming significantly more challenging for the growing number of designs that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
The WIFIRE team at UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center (SDSC) partnered with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to integrate edge computing in its systems for wildfire hazard monitoring, mitigation, and response.
Bluon is beta testing Master Mechanic, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool for the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) sector that was “trained on 50,000 HVAC tech support calls from Bluon’s master mechanics.”
IBM Research and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center present an approach to formally modeling and proving a security monitor that introduces a canonical architecture for virtual machine (VM)-based confidential computing systems.
Portable consumer electronics need compact energy sources. Researchers at University of Florida and Brookhaven National Laboratory propose distributed batteries within a heterogeneous 3D IC, utilizing multiple smaller batteries with different specifications among different modules of 3D ICs.
An energy-efficient 10T SRAM-based IMC macro architecture is proposed to perform logic, arithmetic, and in-memory dot product (IMDP) operations, by researchers at Atal Bihari Vajpayee-Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (ABV-IIITM).
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built a profiler called Scalen that precisely identifies inefficiencies in Python code and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest how the code can be improved.
UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering launched an online Master of Advanced Study in Engineering (MAS-E) program to create “a feasible pathway for engineering professionals whose employment, family and other commitments keep them from pursuing graduate degrees in a residential, full-time engineering program.” The curriculum “reflects the growing interdisciplinary nature of modern engineering — and the evolving need for engineering leaders with the latest, state-of-the-art technological expertise.”
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