Week In Review: Design, Low Power

Infineon acquired Industrial Analytics, a provider of AI-enabled industrial equipment monitoring. Its solution can monitor plants for early detection of critical developments, based on analysis and evaluation of vibrations, and evaluate data for both predictive and prescriptive maintenance. “Industrial Analytics has outstanding expertise in the area of predictive analysis for industrial machinery and equipment using artificial intelligence,” said Peter Wawer, president of Infineon’s Industrial Power Control division. “We intend to jointly expand Industrial Analytics’ business and to offer Infineon’s industrial customers new AI solutions that complement our semiconductor portfolio.” Industrial Analytics was founded in 2017 and based in Berlin, Germany.

Renesas debuted RZ/N2L microprocessor units (MPUs) for Industrial Ethernet communication. The MPUs can be used as a companion chip complementing the host CPU, enabling addition of network functionality to industrial equipment and devices without major changes to its internal configuration. The new products support the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Ethernet standard that ensures real-time communication. Equipped with an integrated TSN-compliant 3-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and an EtherCAT slave controller, the new devices also support all major industrial network communication protocols, such as EtherCAT, PROFINET RT, EtherNet/IP, and OPC UA, as well as the new PROFINET IRT.

Siemens Digital Industries Software will participate in the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) Phase II initiative, a project of the U.S. Department of Defense. Headed up by Microsoft, the program aims to develop secure microelectronics design and prototyping capabilities without depending on a closed-security architecture fabrication process or facility. Siemens will initially focus on physical design and verification.

Inuitive is using Arteris IP’s FlexNoC interconnect IP for its next generation of computer vision platforms based on Inuitive’s Vision-on-Chip processors. The company noted the solution enable it to meet performance goals and facilitate the scalability of future products.

Xiaomi selected Keysight’s 5G device test solutions to accelerate 5G Release 16 (Rel-16) device validation in support of the latest 3GPP 5G new radio (NR) features and specifications. Xiaomi also used Keysight’s S8811A 5G Device Performance Test Solution with advanced channel emulation capabilities to create a real-world lab-based test environment.

Arteris IP reported second quarter 2022 financial results with revenue of $14.8 million, up 37% from the same quarter last year. “Despite macroeconomic headwinds, we believe that Arteris IP is well positioned to make progress even in a challenging economic environment. We continue to see higher levels of silicon integration, driving system houses to become more involved in silicon design,” said K. Charles Janac, president and CEO of Arteris IP.

Arm reported first quarter 2022 revenue of $719 million, an increase of 6% compared to the same quarter last year. The company also noted that partners shipped 7.4 billion Arm-based chips in the quarter, up 7% year-over-year.

Standards

Accellera formed a Proposed Working Group to focus on defining a standard Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) collateral specification to ease SoC integration. “Typically, the CDC verification tools that the IP and SoC teams use rely on different formats to capture CDC intent,” said Martin Barnasconi, Accellera Technical Committee Chair. “Based on the level of interest and commitment from the community, the PWG will determine if a standard is needed to enable the interoperability of CDC collateral generated by different CDC verification tools to ease integration.”

The CXL Consortium released the Compute Express Link (CXL) 3.0 specification, introducing fabric capabilities and management, improved memory sharing and pooling, enhanced coherency, and peer-to-peer communication, along with doubling the data rate to 64GTs with no added latency over 2.0.

Quantum computing

A team led by Rigetti Computing and including University of Technology Sydney, Aalto University, and the University of Southern California were selected for a DARPA program to develop benchmarks for quantum application performance on large-scale quantum computers. The program aims to produce a more detailed understanding of how errors occur at the qubit level, how those errors impact performance on target applications, and to provide an accurate estimation of how quantum hardware and software need to evolve to meet critical performance thresholds. “We will be developing some of the first automated software tools for quantum performance analytics that have ever existed,” said Yuval Sanders, researcher at the Center for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. Up to $2.9 million will be put toward the project over three years.

D-Wave completed its merger with special-purpose acquisition company DPCM Capital and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker QBTS. The company is building both annealing and gate-model quantum computers and offers hardware, software, real-time quantum cloud service, developer tools, and quantum hybrid solvers.

Read more

Find more of the week’s news at Manufacturing, Test and Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing.

Check out the latest Low Power-High Performance newsletter to read about some of the new uses for AI in chips, a very cool technology, and why storing everything in the cloud isn’t the answer to archiving data. And in the latest Systems & Design newsletter, selecting an appropriate tool chain for custom processors, a fundamental shift in the economics of processing put attention on ASICs, and common themes at DAC.