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
ARM and Mentor talk about Real Time Virtualization, Webinar
Processor cores come in a wide variety of speeds, performance and capabilities, so it may take you some time to find the proper processor for your system. Let’s say that you are designing a product for the industrial, automotive, military or medical markets that has an inherent requirement for safety, security and reliability… Read More
It’s Apple TomTom Time Again
It’s December and time for the annual Apple-should-buy-TomTom rant. Of course, we know Apple prefers younger, smaller companies with brighter and clearer long-term prospects, but we also know Apple navigation sucks and if there is one thing TomTom does well it’s navigation… and traffic.
To stir the pot, … Read More
Nvidia Drives into New Market with Deep Learning and the Drive PX 2
Nvidia has found that video games are the perfect metaphor for autonomous driving. To understand why this is so relevant you have to realize that the way self-driving cars see the world is through a virtual world created in real time inside the processors used for autonomous driving – very much like a video game. It’s a little bit like… Read More
These 2 Markets to Drive IC Market Growth through 2020
Spotting trends is an essential insight for marketing folks, general managers and C-level executives in our semiconductor industry. You could read hundreds of press releases, attend dozens of conferences, and interview all of the major thought leaders to help spot an emerging trend, or you could subscribe to a service like IC… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?