Week In Review: Design, Low Power

Mobix Labs finalized its acquisition of Cosemi Technologies, a provider of hybrid active optical cables, optical transceivers, and optical engines. Mobix Labs provides wireless connectivity solutions with CMOS-based mmWave beamformers, antenna solutions, and RF semiconductors. “Our Cosemi acquisition bridges the gap between wireless and wired applications, enabling Mobix Labs to bring a full suite of connectivity solutions to customers that provide significant advantages in performance, efficiency, cost, size and time to market,” said Fabian Battaglia, CEO of Mobix Labs. Based in Irvine, Calif., Cosemi was founded in 2006. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tools
IBM described scaling an optical proximity correction flow using Synopsys’ Proteus tools to 11,400 cores spread across three data centers, using two virtual private clouds to simulate a hybrid burst cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Comparing run times over a range of core counts between 2,000 and 11,400, IBM found a linear reduction in run time, indicating no latency issues.

AI
Mythic selected Codasip’s L30 RISC‑V‑based core for Mythic’s next generation Analog Matrix Processor, M1076. The Analog Matrix Processor has an array of tiles, each containing a large Analog Compute Engine (ACE) to store neural network weights and perform matrix multiplications, local SRAM memory for data being passed between the neural network nodes, a SIMD unit for processing operations not handled by the ACE, and a customized Codasip processor for controlling the sequencing and operation of the tile.

Mobile & wearables
Samsung Electronics uncorked a new wearable processor. Built on a 5nm EUV process node, Exynos W920 integrates a 4G LTE modem and two Arm Cortex-A55 cores with a Mali-G68 GPU. Power management IC, LPDDR4, and eMMC is included in the same package with SIP-ePoP.

MediaTek announced two new 6nm chipsets for 5G smartphones. Dimensity 920 includes Arm Cortex-A78 processors in an octa-core CPU at 2.5GHz clock speeds, LPDDR5, UFS 3.1 storage, automatic display refresh rate adjustment, and 4K HDR video capture engine. Dimensity 810 includes Arm Cortex-A76 processors at 2.4GHz in its octa-core CPU along with features intended to improve camera performance.

Infineon announced a MEMS scanner, made up of a tilting MEMS mirror and driver, designed to be integrated into laser beam scanner (LBS) projectors for AR applications such as wearables and automotive HUDs.

Kioxia debuted its newest generation of 256 and 512 GB Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Housed in 0.8 and 1.0mm-high packages and targeted at mobile devices, the company said they improve performance by 30% for random read and 40% for random write compared to the previous generation.

Automotive
Mixel received ISO 9001 Quality Management System Certification by DEKRA Certification for its IP development process and ISO 26262 certification for automotive functional safety by SGS-TUV Saar for its MIPI IP processes and products.

Infineon and Robert Bosch launched a new ultra-low-loss diode for light vehicle generators. According to the companies, the Active Rectifying Diode enables an increase in generator efficiency of up to 8% compared to conventional power conversion methods and can reduce the CO2 emissions of a car by up to 1.8 g/km.

Ansys and IPG Automotive partnered to integrate Ansys’ VRXPERIENCE physics simulation with IPG Automotive’s CarMaker driving simulation software for verification and validation of automotive sensors and interactions between ADAS features.