Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing

Automotive
GM’s self-driving car Cruise and Alphabet’s Waymo have won permits to offer rides to passengers in California.

Ford Motor Company announced it is expanding its electric pickup truck assembly lines. With SK Innovation, Ford will create a 3,600-acre mega campus in west Tennessee to produce electric trucks. The company estimates the campus will add 6,000 new jobs to the economy. Ford and SK Innovation are also opening a new battery plant in Kentucky, that will add 5,000 jobs.

U.S. electric vehicle company Lordstown Motors Corp. and Foxconn have agreed “in principle,” according to a press release, to work jointly on Lordstown Motors’ electric vehicle programs in Lordstown Motors’ 6.2 million square foot production and assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The agreement is non-binding until a more definitive agreement is in place, but the end goal is Foxconn would purchase the facility and manufacture Lordstown’s Endurance pickup trucks at the facility.

4D lidar company Aeva Technologies licensed Arteris IP’s FlexNoC interconnect IP for digital processing SoC. Aeva’s 4D lidar measures the velocity and position of every pixel instantaneously with a proprietary frequency modulated continuous wave technology.

AIM Photonics certified Synopsys’s IC Validator for physical verification signoff of photonics ICs. Design rule checking (DRC) signoff for photonics IC designs is also possible through Synopsys’ PIC Design Suite. AIM Photonics is a billion-dollar semiconductor fabrication foundry funded by New York State and is a U.S. Department of Defense Manufacturing Innovation Institute (MII) — a program to develop a U.S. workforce in advanced manufacturing technologies. “We are seeing an explosion of new design activity as integrated photonics expands from data communications into markets such as AI, machine learning, quantum computing and lidar,” said David Harame, chief operations officer, AIM Photonics, in a press release. “IC Validator, along with other Synopsys solutions, enables our customers to produce clean, accurate and correctly connected designs that can be more quickly handed off to AIM for manufacturing.” Synopsys just renewed its membership in AIM Photonics to provide electronic/photonic design automation (EPDA) solutions. A photonic IC is an integrated circuit with optical functions. Photonics uses curvilinear lines, which is why tools need to be designed to handle curves — which Synopsys’ IC Validator can do. Synopsys also hosts the Photonic Symposium, the most recent of which was held last week.

Above, Waymo self-driving car is a common sight on San Francisco streets in September 2021. Source: Semiconductor Engineering/S.Rambo.

NI and automated driving systems company Foretellix will collaborate to integrate tools to help automotive engineers test and validate automated driving systems. Foretellix’s platform delivers scenario generation, metrics, and analysis on the millions of driving scenarios across all testing platforms. NI offers hardware and software in the loop and ADAS data recording.

Advantest Corporation has added a high-frequency resolution option for its TAS7400TS terahertz optical-sampling analysis system that uses pulsed electromagnetic waves to batch measure high-frequency characteristics of radio wave absorbers and base materials over a wider band than vector network analyzers (VNAs) can measure. The system is useful for evaluating millimeter-wave radar technology used in ADAS and other 5G/6G comms equipment.

Pervasive computing
Qualcomm says its IoT-as-a-Service model, available now for a year, has 30 smart verticals using it. The company also recently enhanced the platform to support the latest IoT as-a-Service (IoTaaS) applications, including drag and drop deployment, automated device onboarding and management, streamlined device configuration, and customizable user-interface (UI), among other features.

Siemens Digital Industries Software entered the IC power analysis market with its recently unveiled power integrity software for analog, digital and mixed signal IC designs. mPower completes Siemens electro-physical signoff suite, which also offers performance and reliability analysis.

Xilinx said that Sony is using Xilinx FPGAs and adaptive SoC devices in its professional audio-video (A/V) electronics, including the new XVS-G1 4K Live Production Switcher.

Intel introduced its second-generation neuromorphic research chip, Loihi 2, and an open-source software framework for developing neuro-inspired applications, called Lava. Intel says Loihi 2, supports new algorithms and applications, and has improved support for advanced learning methods, including variations of backpropagation. The chip has up to 15 times greater resource density than previous models and up to 1 million neurons per chip. Loihi 2 has been fabricated using EUV lithography on a pre-production version of the Intel 4 process.

Security
Synopsys’ Software Integrity Group published the latest version of the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) report, a report that tracks 200 software security initiatives from 128 organizations. The current report, BSIMM12, shows that over past two years, software security is shifting leftwards to earlier in the development cycles, and security teams are loaning their resources to DevOps. Open source component tracking increased by 61% and software bill of materials activities increased by 367%. BSIMM report — a tool for tracking software security initiatives across different industries, including fintech, cloud, healthcare, and IoT — dates back to 2008. Consultant, research, and data experts from what is now the Synopsys Software Integrity Group produced the first report, according to BSIMM12.

Read the most recent Automotive, Security, & Pervasive Computing newsletter. Check out 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.