5G and IoT; election security; Waymo permit.
Internet of Things
The expensive implementation of 5G cellular communications may be justified by the Internet of Things, writes Hatem Zeine, founder and chief technology officer of Ossia, a developer of wireless power technology. Bain & Company forecasts the B2B IoT market will be worth more than $300 billion by 2020. IDC predicts overall IoT spending will hit $1.2 trillion in 2022.
Michael Harttree of Cisco Systems writes about long-range WAN technology in this blog post. “In any environment, especially military, the capability to visualize locations of key assets, and do so inexpensively, can be a game changer. And with new battery technology that can extend a sensor’s operational life to several years, coupled with extending data transmission distances significantly from feet to miles, we have a feeling LoRaWAN will go mainstream very soon,” he writes.
The F25 Series connected construction crane from Telecrane had a technical flaw that could enable spoofing of the crane’s controller, this blog post notes. The company has addressed the vulnerability with a firmware update.
Cybersecurity
The midterm elections in the U.S. next week may be subject to meddling from outside the U.S. While states have amped up the defenses for their election systems from the lessons learned in 2016, bad actors around the world will be trying to sway the results in their favor. Fortalice Solutions CEO Theresa Payton discusses what may be going on up to and including Election Day in this interview.
Honeywell Process Solutions reports that flash drives and other removable USB media devices pose a cybersecurity threat to industrial process control networks. Honeywell technology was used to scan and control USB devices at customer site; 22 of 50 sites had at least one file with a security issue. The industrial sites involved included refineries, chemical plants, and pulp/paper mills.
Automotive Tech
The California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit to Waymo, allowing the company to test self-driving cars without a human at the steering wheel to take over if needed. The Alphabet subsidiary said it would initially use the streets of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale for the testing.
AT&T Communications and Daimler Trucks North America announced they would offer wireless connectivity for DTNA’s heavy-duty trucks for use in Australia and Europe. AT&T provides the connectivity for the Detroit Connect platform in DTNA’s Freightliner Cascadia trucks in the U.S. and Canada.
Baidu and Volvo Cars will work together to develop autonomous electric vehicles for the Chinese market. They will use Baidu’s Apollo platform for autonomous driving to design Level 4 cars.
Products/Services
Synopsys made available new soft-error analysis functionality within the Spyglass DFT ADV tool. That tool is fully certified to comply with ISO 26262, meaning it can be used automotive designs. Meanwhile, the company rolled out Test Fusion technology that is said to reduce silicon test costs by an average of 40%, increase defect detection, and meet design targets for power, performance, and area. Lastly, Synopsys brought out the DesignWare STAR Memory System with new memory built-in self-test, repair, and diagnostic capabilities for embedded MRAM designs, with initial support for the GlobalFoundries eMRAM on the 22FDX platform.
Montage LZ Technologies selected the Rambus CryptoMedia core for integration into its set-top box chips. The security core provides smartcard-level security inside the chipset.
Flex Logix Technologies this week introduced its NMAX Neural Inferencing Engine, providing up to 100 TOPS of neural inferencing capacity in a modular, scalable architecture that requires less DRAM bandwidth. The product is in development and will be available during the second half of 2019.
Arteris IP announced the new Arteris IP FlexNoC version 4 interconnect IP and the AI Package companion. FlexNoC 4 and FlexNoC 4 AI can be used in system-on-a-chip device designs for artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and deep neural networks.
Mentor, a Siemens Business, added automotive-grade automatic test pattern generation technology to its Tessent TestKompress software. It includes fault models and test pattern generation applications to detect defects in ICs at the transistor and interconnect levels.
Personnel
Luc Seraphin, the interim CEO of Rambus since June, was appointed president and CEO by the company’s board of directors.
Digi International appointed Mike Ueland, formerly senior vice president of global sales, as President of IoT Products and Services. Kevin Riley, previously chief operating officer, was named President, IoT Solutions.
Finance
Deutsche Private Equity is considering the sale of its 36% equity stake in First Sensor, a German manufacturer of electronic sensors used in automotive, industrial, and medical applications. DPE invested in First Sensor in 2011.
M&A
Munich Re completed its acquisition of relayr, an IoT software venture, through its Hartford Steam Boiler subsidiary for $251.7 million in cash. Munich Re and HSB said the acquisition would help the two companies compete in commercial and industrial IoT products and services.
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