While traveling to California this year I had my first Uber trip after a concierge in Santa Clara recommended it as the best way to get to the airport, instead of the usual and expensive taxi ride. Later in the year I had my first Lyft ride after my road bike broke down and I needed a ride back home. Our transportation choices are shifting,… Read More
The transport systems of Science Fiction will be here sooner than you think
Picture the commute of the future: You live in Palo Alto, Calif., but work 350 miles away in Los Angeles. After your morning latte, you click on a smartphone app to summon your digital chauffeur. An autonomous car shows up at your front door three minutes later to drive you to a Hyperloop station in downtown Mountain View, where a pod… Read More
V2V: Loose Talk about Talking Cars
The U.S. Department of Transportation issued a proposed rule this week which may ultimately require the installation of a communications box in every car manufactured or sold as new in the U.S. The U.S. is alone in the world in pursuing such a mandate and the proposal, which requires years of additional evaluation, testing and definition… Read More
Moving from SRAM to DDR DRAM in Safety Critical Automotive Systems
Until now, most of the processors contained within automobiles could be served by SRAM, at the exception of infotainment systems relying on a more powerful CPU connected to DRAM, but these systems are non-safety-critical. Advanced Driver Awareness Systems (ADAS) and self-driving vehicle systems demand powerful processors… Read More
Mind-Boggling Uber Hubris
Uber was on a mighty roll throughout 2016 picking up strategic alliances with Ford Motor Company and Volvo Cars (for test vehicles) adding talent (cybersecurity experts Chris Vlasek and Charlie Miller) and acquisitions (Otto) and rubbing up against university researchers (Carnegie Mellon). So it was jaw-droppingly hideous… Read More
Reducing the Cost of SoC Testing
Every year certain technology themes appear, like at ITC this year a big theme was how to reduce the cost of SoC testing. I spoke with Rob Knoth of Cadence by phone to hear more about this cost of test theme. Rob gave me an example of an SoC that takes 27 seconds on a tester, so at $0.04 per second in test costs amounts to $1.08 per part. If you… Read More
What Stephen Hawking gets right and wrong about the most dangerous time for our planet
Stephen Hawking made a bold headline last week: “This is the most dangerous time for our planet.”
In an essay in the Guardian, the renowned theoretical physicist wrote: “Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump… Read More
Waymo Misses the Boat… Wayless?
The big news in the world of transportation today is Alphabet’s spinoff of its automated driving business into a business unit called Waymo. The effort is positioned as Alphabet’s formal attempt to commercialize automated driving technology.
The project has been greeted with much fanfare and rumors of a late 2017… Read More
#CES2017: Aftermarket to the Rescue
Has it really been 50 years? Listening to a George Hotz Udacity podcast got me to thinking that the upcoming CES 2017 in Las Vegas will be a turning point in automated driving technology. It was just two years ago that Audi was self-driving itself from California to Nevada for CES 2015, but we don’t seem to have come that far in … Read More
NVIDIA’s Deep Learning GPUs Driving Your Car!
In a recent SemiWiki article it was noted that 5 of the top 20 semiconductor suppliers are showing double-digit gains for 2016. At the top of the list was NVIDIA with an annual growth rate of 35%. Most of this gain is due to sales of its graphics processors (GPUs) which one normally associates with high performance computer gaming engines.… Read More
Podcast EP267: The Broad Impact Weebit Nano’s ReRAM is having with Coby Hanoch