Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing

Automotive/Mobility
Tesla has to recall 158,000 2012-2018 Model S and 2016-2018 Model X vehicles because of an eMMC NAND flash memory chip. The chip can cause the touchscreen to stop working when the memory reaches its limit of writes. According to a story in Reuters, the United States NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) is insisting on the recall because many of Tesla controls are only accessible via the touchscreen.

The NHTSA also expanded its Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing (AV TEST) Initiative into full program. The program tracks the on-road testing of automated vehicles in the U.S. of 52 participating companies, governments, and associations through an online tracking tool, available here.

The supply of automotive chips is low and is forcing some car production lines to close, according to an article in The New York Times. The auto industry had a slowdown at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic but demand for cars unexpectedly shot up when semiconductor companies had shifted production chips for products more in demand during the pandemic.

The concept vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOL) — aka, the flying car — made a showing at CES 2021. Uber Elevate, which is being acquired by Joby Aviation, discussed its plans for an all-electric VTOL, or eVTOL. General Motors discussed its flying car concept. The idea is still four years off, say a blog on CES’ web site.

NXP expanded its BlueBox automotive high performance computing platform, adding I/O and PCIe ports, a Layerscape processor, and S32G processors that support ASIL D.

Pervasive computing — IoT, edge, cloud, data center, and back
Qualcomm has a definitive agreement to acquire Nuvia for approximately $1.4 billion before working capital and other adjustments. Nuvia was founded in 2019 by former Apple A-series chip engineers, who will join Qualcomm. Qualcomm says Nuvia’s efficient CPUs will be used across its products for 5G and ADAS.

T-Mobile will use Ericsson equipment, software, and services for large 5G rollout in the U.S., including active and passive antennas and related services from the Ericsson Radio System portfolio. T-Mobile’s 5G buildout also includes 5G Standalone (SA) architecture, voice over new radio (VoNR), New Radio (NR) carrier aggregation, network slicing, and multi-user massive MIMO, according to a press release.

Moley showed off its robot kitchen at CES. The robots make meals (they have 5,000 recipes in memory) and clean up after themselves.

The AI chip startup company Hailo is using Arteris IP’s interconnect IP products Hailo to improve the dataflow performance.

Samsung Exynos 2100 SoC is an early adopter of Arm’s Cortex-X1 CPU in a tri-cluster, octa-core configuration, and optimized for 5nm.

People & companies
Intel’s board has named VMWare’s Pat Gelsinger as CEO, after current CEO Bob Swan is leaves the role on February 15^th. Gelsinger began his career at Intel, where he worked for 30 years. He “learned at the feet of Grove, Noyce and Moore,” he said in a press release, and was the architect of the original 80486 processor.

Job, Event and Webinar Boards: Find industry jobs and upcoming conferences and webinars all in one place on Semiconductor Engineering. Knowledge Center: Boost your semiconductor industry knowledge. Videos: See the latest Semiconductor Engineering videos.