Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing

Automotive/Mobility
Apple wants to have self-driving cars in production by 2024, and that timeframe includes having its own battery technology, according to Reuters. Project Titan, the name of Apple’s automotive efforts, has seen its ups and downs, but now Apple has a clearer view of what its strength and niche will be — consumer self-driving cars with a longer range, less expensive battery. Although Apple did not comment on the story. Stock prices of lidar companies has gone up after the Reuters article.

Elon Musk claimed this week on Twitter that he had approached Apple CEO Tim Cook to see if the Apple would be interested in acquiring Tesla. Musk said that he reached out “during the darkest days of the Model 3 program,” and that Cook would not take the meeting.

Maxim Integrated announced its Li+ fuel gauge IC, called the MAX17320, with continuous internal self-discharge monitoring and protection.

While global demand for new automobiles and ride hailing dove in the first half of 2020 because of the pandemic, other uses cases, such as food and grocery delivery, took over ride-hailing, said ABIresearch. The market research company estimates new vehicle sales will drop by 26% in 2020.

Self-driving cars, too, are finding business models in delivering goods. Unmanned delivery service Nuro now has a permit to use put self-driving delivering vehicles on the road in Silicon Valley, in California. Nuro already has low-speed delivery vehicles in Houston, Texas.

LG Electronics is setting up a $1 billion joint venture (JV) with Magna, an automotive supplier, to make e-motors, inverters and on board chargers, and e-drive systems for certain automakers, according to a press release. They will call LG Magna e-Powertrain for the time being. LG’s experience in electric vehicle components includes the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Jaguar I-PACE.

The fabs in Taiwan may have a good chance at gaining more automotive business next year, estimates Digitimes.

Security
Intel, Nvidia, VMware, and Cisco were among the companies that downloaded software-laden with malicious-code from SolarWinds, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. government awarded Tortuga Logic a $12M SBIR Phase III contract to develop advanced hardware security. Ansys and Tortuga Logic will work together on side-channel leakage analysis workflows.  Also working on security with the U.S. government is IBM. IBM announced an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to work on the RAMP (Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes) project, focusing on an end-to-end secure supply chain, operation security standards, a multi-foundry state-of-the-art product pipeline of onshore foundries, and best practices. The work is funded by the Trusted & Assured Microelectronics Program, a U.S. effort to use expertise of the commercial semiconductor industry to produce secure microelectronics with better PPA.

The Institute for Security + Technology (IST) wants to stop ransomware. IST has formed the Ransomware Task Force (RTF) with 19 entities signing on, including Microsoft and McAfee.

While the U.S. is designating $1.9 billion funds to rip and replace ZTE and Huawei’s equipment that exists in the U.S. — if the bill is signed into law, Huawei’s 5G RAN gNodeB and LTE eNodeB passed 3GPP’s Security Assurance Specifications (SCAS) testing, according to a Huawei press release. Huawei says its 5G and LTE products meet 3GPP security standards, based on GSMA’s Network Equipment Security Assurance Scheme (NESAS) audit done by the NESAS Security Test Laboratory in Europe.

Pervasive computing — IoT, edge, cloud, data center and back
IBM is acquiring European cloud startup Nordcloud, the latest addition to its collection of hybrid cloud companies.

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