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December 9, 2018

Volvo: Car-less is Better Than Clueless

Volvo: Car-less is Better Than Clueless
by Roger C. Lanctot on 12-09-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Automotive

Sweden has embraced the movement toward a cashless society with banks no longer taking cash deposits and retailers, like Ikea, experimenting with cashlessness. Perhaps taking a cue from the Swedish financial sector, Volvo Cars last week revealed its plans for a car-less stand at this week’s L.A. Auto Show – and the co-located AutomobilityLA.

Volvo’s announcement shines a light on Swedish thought leadership at a time when competing car companies babble incoherently about so-called “mobility.” The car-less stance is in keeping with Volvo’s visionary past which emphasized safety before it was sexy and years-ago gave a yet-unmatched promise to accept crash liability once autonomous driving is achieved.

From General Motors to Ford Motor Company to Toyota and Volkswagen, auto CEOs struggle to redefine their missions in an industry on the cusp of massive disruption. Simultaneously, politicians are at war with cars, car owners and car makers around the world (water cannons and tear gas in Paris this past weekend along over higher fuel taxes) putting pressure on car makers to pave the path to peace.

For Volvo, that path means exploring alternatives to vehicle ownership along with developing creative ways of using cars. “We are trying to shift our focus from doing what we have done for the last 90 years,” Volvo Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy Marten Levenstam, purported mastermind behind the Volvo exhibit, told Automotive News.

The Automotive News reported that Volvo will use its display area for interactive demonstrations of connectivity services, such as in-car delivery, its vision for autonomous driving and its Care by Volvo vehicle subscription service. The stand will also show Volvo’s plans for car sharing.

Volvo’s CEO, Hakan Samuelsen, added that the company wants to move beyond simply building and selling cars. In its quest for redefinition, Volvo has partnered with Amazon, Google, Nvidia, Luminar and Zenuity.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of Volvo’s move coming at the L.A. Auto Show. At a time when car companies are reconsidering their participation in car shows in Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva and elsewhere, the U.S. continues to host half a dozen prominent car shows including Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Washington. The Los Angeles and Detroit events are the largest and most popular and those cities each have a unique relationship with cars.

Detroit, Motown, is seen as the epicenter and birthplace of the North American automotive industry with General Motors’ headquarters located downtown and Ford and FCA based in the suburbs. L.A., on the other hand, is the ultimate embodiment of North American automotive culture blending Hollywood, and hundreds of miles of freeways and ocean-front beaches.

Detroit and L.A. also share a tortured relationship with public transportation. L.A., at least, has the benefit of mass transit including rail running above and below ground to go along with an extensive bus transit system. Detroit has little or no mass transit for stitching together the city with surrounding suburbs. In fact, Detroit crashed out of contention for Amazon’s HQ2 sweepstakes thanks in large part to its lack of mass transit infrastructure.

General Motors bears more than a little of the blame for having cutoff Detroit’s transit oxygen. Now, would be a good time for the General to reverse course especially in the context of the current “mobility” push.

The birthplace of the car in North America, faces the prospect of becoming an automotive cemetery due to the city and the State of Michigan’s inability to craft an attractive transit program better integrating the city with the suburbs. In spite of GM’s prominent downtown location, it is Dan Gilbert, CEO of Quicken Loans, also headquartered downtown, who has taken a leadership role in fostering the fledgling Qline trolley limping along Woodward Avenue.

Disruptive times demand bold moves. Volvo may not have all the answers, but the company is making a statement in L.A. that the time has come to think differently about cars and transportation. (Even Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has taken on the transit challenge with his Hyperloop and Boring Company initiatives.)

It is clear that no single company, in fact no company, has the answers today. But the challenge of moving people into and around cities and suburbs in the safest, cleanest and most efficient manner possible is the goal. It may require cars or it may require something entirely different. Volvo is pointing the way to new possibilities. Car companies need to get into the game.

December 7, 2018

Could China Conflict Curtail Chip Comeback? Part 2

Could China Conflict Curtail Chip Comeback? Part 2
by Robert Maire on 12-07-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Semiconductor Advisors, Semiconductor Services
3 Comments

In our recent note sent several days ago we suggested that the China conflict would come back to haunt the US chip industry. From a stock perspective we suggested taking short term gains from a recent bounce back off the table. Both ideas turned out true, but way faster than we had thought! Not only have investors figured out that the trade truce was hollow but just to make sure, the US had Huawei’s CFO arrested in Canada.

Given that Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested, was not only the CFO but also the daughter of the founder of Huawei, China’s biggest tech success story, as well as a high ranking female, this is not just a slap in the face but rather Trump personally spitting in Xi’s face.

Guilt or innocence is not the issue as we think Huawei is very guilty. The ongoing joke from 15 years ago, which was no joke, was that Huawei routers when booted up would say Cisco on the display as all the code was stolen from Cisco. Huawei even admitted in court to stealing some of Cisco’s code, it was that blatant. We are also very sure that Huawei could care less if their products containing US semiconductors are sold to bad actors around the globe, much as ZTE did.
Yes, Huawei is very, very guilty but the timing of the arrest is the question not the guilt. Its very personal now between Trump & Xi.

If ZTE doubled China’s resolve to get big in the semiconductor business, Huawei just tripled it.

The next question is whether the administration did this on purpose to piss off China and play the role of “disruptor in chief” or it was just just a question of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. Maybe if its the latter the Chinese could brush it off to stupidity and not react as badly….but we’ll never know.

We would now put the odds of a “good” trade resolution at less than 50%. By good we mean tariffs going away and not giving up everything.

Payback
We would not be surprised if there were some further retaliation against the US tech industry. If we were the CEO/CFO of Micron, we probably wouldn’t want to be traveling anywhere near China for fear of being yanked off a plane for patent infringement, or some other charge.

Whereas the trade truce was likely good for KLAC/ORBK, China could now squash the deal as Huawei payback as it has clearly admitted that M&A approval is only political in nature. Responding in a non-tariff way would allow the Chinese to say they are respecting the truce just like the US.

Reconsidering QCOM/NXP was a joke as everyone understands it was dead and buried.

American Sniper
The arrest of Meng Wanzhou is like a US sniper taking out a North Korean general across the DMZ two days after the truce in 1953…..they might not be happy with us. We don’t think this is a case of a lone sniper not getting the ceasefire message, we think this was calculated on the US part.

Do we even make it to 90 days?
If this is the start of the ceasefire, how much worse can it get? China has now publicly played down what ever was not agreed to in South America. We think the Chinese position got very much more entrenched over the Huawei arrest, and will make compromise very, very difficult.

It all comes back to the semiconductor industry
As we have said for a long time, all roads in trade lead back to the chip industry. The core issue here are the US chips in Huawei products . China needs desperately to be independent of the US to get rid of this issue once and for all.

Chip equipment is at the very core of being independent. China desperately needs chip equipment to get their own chip production up. Jinhua / UMC / Micron was just the beginning of an ongoing struggle behind the public trade war.

The only true leverage the US has is to stop export of semiconductor equipment to any Chinese fab, foreign or domestic, which will choke off China’s oxygen supply. That may become the ultimate “nuclear option” if trade talks go south from here.

The stocks
We would still avoid the stocks as we don’t like where things are headed (in a hurry). We think the downside beta remains higher than the upside beta in the trade issue and the tech industry could wind up with the short end of the stick if there were a bad agreement.

The administration seems more focused on soybeans and cars than chips and technology which is the real underlying issue. We would not be surprised for the administration to announce a “win” in trade on selling the Chinese more soybeans and cars only to cave on chips and technology which is less well understood.

Either way, its going to be rocky for a while with the stocks in a volatile pattern. We would rather watch from the sidelines.

Also Read: Could China Conflict Curtail Chip Comeback?

December 7, 2018

ARM Answers Server Doubts

ARM Answers Server Doubts
by Bernard Murphy on 12-07-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Arm, IoT, IP

At ARM TechCon this year, the company announced the Neoverse brand targeted to infrastructure, contrasting with the Cortex brand we are familiar with for edge devices such as smartphones and IoT devices. Cortex was already used in infrastructure, in networking, base stations and the like but Neoverse splits the infrastructure line of business from the edge line of business, including a roadmap for a dedicated family of processors.

Few would dispute that ARM has a big footprint in communication infrastructure, but the high end of the Neoverse plan, as presented at TechCon, is in servers. Here many would argue that the evidence for progress was less compelling. Servers from HPE (based on Cavium/Marvell processors) and Ampere for example show some progress, and ARM asserts a million units have shipped this year. But Qualcomm dropping out of servers was widely read as a negative and some of us had started to wonder if ARM plans for servers were more hope than substance. ARM may not be Apple or Samsung, but they’re at a scale where a million units in a year is no longer particularly exciting. Where were the big wins?

ARM answered that question definitively when AWS (Amazon Web Services) very recently announced the immediate availability of Neoverse-based servers in their instance lineup. The Graviton processor at the heart of these servers was developed by Annapurna Labs (wholly owned by AWS). This news is compelling on a couple of levels. First, ARM-based servers are part of the AWS instance line-up (EC2 A1 instances). That’s about as a big a win for ARM servers as you can hope to find. Second, AWS developed these processors themselves. That certainly helps with cost and power, but more importantly it signals expanding need to differentiate in the cloud providers. We knew about this around the edges: GPUs for deep learning and ASICs/FPGAs for network optimization and software-defined storage. Looking for advantage in custom servers over commercial solutions takes differentiation to a new level and is likely to cause some disruption in the value-chain.

I talked with Mohamed Awad, VP of the infrastructure line of business at ARM to get more information on why the ARM-based servers work in the AWS lineup and how this may evolve over time. Mohamed acknowledges that lower cost instances in AWS EC2 services are a very visible advantage to cloud users, especially for ARM-based workloads. I have no doubt also that AWS is attracted to ARM’s end-to-end IoT strategy which should drive lots of traffic to their cloud. Why not make that as easy as possible?

I had to ask about performance. There are a number of comparisons of ARM-based server performance (EC2 A1 and Ampere for example) which show these are not as fast as high-end Intel Xeon or AMD Epyc servers. Are ARM-based servers intended mostly to serve ARM-generated traffic and the low-end of the cloud market?

Not at all, according to Mohamed. I’m probably not alone in thinking of datacenters as homogenous ranks of high-end server blades with maybe a few special-case oddities like GPUs sprinkled around. But Mohamed told me that’s already changing. Cloud workloads are not homogenous and there are multiple ways competitive providers can provide services to optimize those workloads, beyond deep-learning, network and storage accelerators. Less familiar may be support for web services (more data throughput than compute intensive, but need to serve many clients in parallel), containerized microservices (a popular trend virtualizing components of a larger service) and applications caching (like caching inside a device but here caching state for an application across many devices). Could you do all of this with Xeon or Epyc servers? Probably. Could you do it more cost-competitively, and maybe better in distributed compute throughput with custom servers? Absolutely.

The EC2 A1/Graviton instance is based on the ARM Cosmos platform, in turn based on the A72 and A75 cores. Following this ARM plan to introduce, on a yearly beat, the Ares, Zeus and Poseidon architectures, each of which they intend will show ~30% incremental improvement in performance, along with new features. Can they catch up with the high-end Intel/AMD processors? Who knows, but clearly that isn’t a necessary goal. There seems to be plenty of compute share they can grab in these rapidly evolving datacenter architectures.

Finally, I asked Mohamed about the other cloud providers – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and others. He wouldn’t tell me, but I have seen indications elsewhere that similar programs are underway. And frankly, if you were running those operations and you knew AWS were working on an added edge based on ARM-based servers, wouldn’t you be talking to ARM too?

Looks like ARM knew all along what they were doing in servers, they just didn’t tell us. And we spent all our time looking in the wrong direction.

December 6, 2018September 1, 2024

Samsung IEDM 2018 Keynote and the Foundry Business

Samsung IEDM 2018 Keynote and the Foundry Business
by Daniel Nenni on 12-06-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Events, Foundries, Samsung Foundry
10 Comments

IEDM is a premier semiconductor conference so it was certainly appropriate for Samsung to do the keynote since they are the largest and one of the most innovative semiconductor companies in the world, absolutely.

Samsung is also one of the more interesting semiconductor companies since they do it all: chip design, semiconductor manufacturing, consumer electronics, and foundry services. Having worked with Samsung many times throughout my career, which included numerous trips to Seoul, I will offer my experience, observation, and opinion, but first let’s talk a bit about the keynote.

Dr. ES Jung, President and GM of the Samsung Foundry business, did the keynote. He started with a joke stating that ES stands for engineering samples which got quite a few laughs, especially from me. ES is a career Samsung employee (he started in 1985) and has spearheaded research and development of advanced logic and memory process technologies and now leads foundry services.

Here is the abstract for his presentation. Remember, IEDM is a conference not a trade show so everyone does papers with abstracts and references:

4th Industrial Revolution and Foundry: Challenges and Opportunities
Abstract—Semiconductor has been the key enabler in the advancement of electronics for the past 50 years. With the coming of 4th industrial revolution, semiconductor will continue to play an even greater role as we invite a wide variety of new applications into our lives, including smart cars, smart factories, artificial intelligence, data centers, robots, etc. Such importance of semiconductor is attributed to its unique ability to copy and create everything human beings imagine. In this paper, the roles of foundry in the 4th industrial revolution, as the entity to turn ideas into reality along with electronic design automation (EDA), intellectual property (IP) vendor, and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) companies, as well as the need for global open innovation to overcome imminent challenges will be discussed.

I also have the slides but I’m not able to share them due to conference guidelines. It is a shame too because there are some very interesting ones. The presentation is in three parts: Industrial Revolution and Semiconductor History, Foundry, Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation.

I’m a big history fan because you really need to know how you got to where you are today to better plan for where you are going tomorrow, right? We have all seen the semiconductor history slides and know semiconductors are a critical part of modern life but it’s nice to be reminded before you get into the really interesting foundry and innovation slides.

With Samsung we have come full circle with the foundry business which started when IDMs had extra fab space that they rented out. Unfortunately, when IDM fabs filled up, the foundry business was shelved, which is what happened to Intel Foundry and is now quietly but officially shut down. The rest is history, pure-play foundries took over and have dominated the fabless chip business for more than 30 years now.

An important part of the foundry business was the ability to multi source to get the best pricing and availability. I remember being involved with a design that was sourced to four different 40nm fabs (TSMC, UMC, SMIC, and Chartered). Some fabless companies were loyal to one fab but that was rare. Now multi sourcing one design to multiple fabs is not possible. In fact, at the leading edge you now only have two foundry choices (TSMC and Samsung). You can certainly use both fabs for different designs and moving forward many companies will do just that, my opinion.

This brings me to the realization I had watching the Samsung keynote. In my dealings with Samsung the most important thing I learned is that they do not give up which is critical in the foundry business. I remember many years ago Samsung told me during one of my visits that they were going to be the number one semiconductor company in the world and here they are. Today, if Samsung told me they were going to be the number one foundry in the world I would not bet against it.

Currently TSMC ($32B+) is the number one foundry by a very large margin with GF ($6B+), UMC (>$5B+), Samsung (>$5B+), and SMIC $3B+) barely visible in the rearview mirror. My prediction today is that Samsung and TSMC will share the majority of the foundry business in the coming years with UMC and GF joining the ranks of the boutique foundries. SMIC is the big question since they have the upper hand in the Chinese market but lack the leading edge innovation. Remember, China buys more chips than the rest of the world and that number will only increase in the years to come, my opinion.

So, my prediction for leading edge wafers in 2025 is that TSMC will have 60% market share and Samsung 40%. I will make my case in the comments section.

December 6, 2018

Imperas and RISC-V

Imperas and RISC-V
by Bernard Murphy on 12-06-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Automotive, EDA, RISC-V
1 Comment

I met Imperas at TechCon this year because I wanted to become a bit more knowledgeable about virtual modeling. That led me to become more interested in RISC-V and a talk given by Krste Asanovic of UCB and SiFive. My takeaway surprised me. I had thought this was an open-source David versus proprietary Goliaths (Intel and ARM) battle in the world of processors/controllers (or more exactly the instruction set architectures – ISAs – underlying those systems). With of course everyone rooting for the plucky newcomer.

I’m sure that remains an aspiration, but I took from Krste’s talk that RISC-V can still be very successful even if the Goliaths hold onto their primary roles. He talked about SoCs with 15-16 ISAs, from the core CPU (usually ARM) to graphics, image processing, radio and audio DSPs, power management, security management, etc, etc. Standard MCU solutions are likely to be sub-optimal for some of these functions, and custom solutions must seem compelling for IP vendors and in-house developers who need an embedded controller. Standardizing the ISA for some of these functions seems like a natural win given potential for healthy competition and hopefully a robust software ecosystem growing around the standard.

I’m not so sure about the DSP examples as a target; radio performance depends on some pretty carefully-crafted architecture support in the more demanding wireless standards. Doesn’t seem like a good fit for a general-purpose ISA, but maybe that’s just my lack of understanding. RISC-V allows you to tune the ISA, which might overcome objections of this kind. In fact this appears to be one of the real attractions in the standard.

But that raises a question – how much can you change before you become non-compliant? Change enough and what you are using is just a convenient starting point on your way to yet another proprietary ISA. So as you’re refining your architecture against your (hopefully) extensive software regression suites, you will want to assess performance and power, among other metrics, when making decision on ISA optimization. But you also want to know that you are staying inside the boundaries of RISC-V compliance. How do you do any of that when you don’t yet have even a hardware simulation model?

The answer is that you use an instruction set simulator (ISS) reflecting the RISC-V ISA, adapted with whatever changes you want to make. Unlike hardware simulators, these things can run at near real-time speed, so it is possible to run those extensive regression suites and compare and contrast performance, power etc between different ISA tweaks. Since the ISA is free, why would you want to pay for this simulator? You don’t have to. In the spirit of the standard, Imperas provides a free ISS for RISC-V; notably this is used by the RISC-V Foundation’s compliance working group in their compliance testing, a feather in Imperas’ cap.

Naturally Imperas offers a number of (presumably charged) options. After all they have to make money somewhere. This model isn’t noticeably different from RedHat or many “freemium” business models. So more power to them.

I talked with Kevin McDermott (VP Marketing at Imperas) while at TechCon to get a bit more insight into his view on the role of virtual prototyping in system design. He acknowledges they didn’t invent this concept but believes they offer a differentiated solution over similar products First, they focus exclusively on virtual prototyping and are not trying to extend down into implementation. Where connection to implementation is important, they partner with companies like Cadence to do hybrid prototyping. Imperas models the CPU/cluster part of an SoC running a software stack and the rest of the SoC runs on Palladium. This allows for software performance, communicating with hardware accuracy where needed.

Second they have an open approach to models. Generic models for many processors, platforms and peripherals are already available under OVP and you are free to adapt these to match what you intend to use/build. The Imperas ISS generated for your system based on these models can then be used for driver development, OS and hypervisor integration and application-level software development, allowing all of this to start before you’ve written your first line of RTL.

Another interesting capability Imperas support is safety analysis with fault injection. In this forum, we’re used to ISO 26262 safety analysis in the hardware domain. ISO 26262 safety analysis is just as important in software and requires, unsurprisingly, fault injection in the software. The Imperas solution has been adopted for safety coverage analysis in aspects of Audi design, which tells me this has to be competitive.

December 5, 2018

Could China Conflict Curtail Chip Comeback?

Could China Conflict Curtail Chip Comeback?
by Robert Maire on 12-05-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Semiconductor Advisors, Semiconductor Services

At the recent trade talks in South America, the US and China both kicked the can down the road as neither one were obviously willing to do a deal nor had done any background work to get a deal done. Instead we have a bunch of empty promises and vague and conflicting descriptions of what was not really even agreed to.

Essentially worthless
However, the market was happy that nothing happened as stocks rallied based on hope that something might happen in the future as the alternative of continuing on to higher tariffs was an unpalatable alternative.

The semiconductor and tech industries remain at the core of the trade conflict and perhaps are the most critical and difficult trade issue to resolve. While selling soybeans may feed a few more people more food, chips and the technology infrastructure associated with them represents technological and therefore military dominance between the two superpowers who are locked in a new struggle with technology substituting for thermonuclear devices.

At some point we will likely no longer be able to kick the can further down the road and we will need to resolve trade issues. The longer the delay, the better off for China as they have the current advantage. Much as with North Korea, where a similar can has been kicked down the road with no agreements or resolution sooner or later there will be an explosion (figuratively or literally).

Even though there was talk of a 90 day timer, even that information was conflicted as it was unclear whether it was 90 days from the dinner or 90 days from January 1st (90 days or 120 days??). Our view is that by not addressing the issue it will come back some time in the spring.

The sword of Damocles gets frozen
From a stock perspective, the near term pressure is off so the stocks have popped. However we think that investors need to be aware that the sword hanging over tech stocks did not go away but is just delayed.

While tariffs are not going further up they are not going away and espionage is still ongoing.
We don’t see China/Xi as caving in over the next 3-4 months (much as Kim in North Korea hasn’t caved). In fact, it would appear the US was willing to kick the can down the road due to domestic issues and pressure and thus was more of a strategic win for China who benefits from a delay in further tariff increases.

Our view is that the ongoing trade issues will be an ongoing “discount” to many chip and tech stocks that will not fully go away until we get a real, permanent resolution. This discount will likely increase as we near the end of the 3-4 month period when people will start looking for an answer. We could easily find ourselves back where we started with no real progress. We also remain concerned that tech companies could get the short shrift in trade talks as California is not the political base of the administration which seems to care more about less strategic soybeans and their farmers.

An admission of the politicization of M&A – QCOM/NXP
Its obviously no surprise that the Chinese admitted that the QCOM/NXP deal was sunk for political reasons. We had clearly stated this in several of our previous notes. It shows, as we had suggested, that the Chinese will use all tools at its disposal, to get an advantage in the trade and technology wars. The US administration seems to think they have the upper hand as there are more Chinese imports than US exports and therefore more exposed to tariffs but tariffs are obviously only one lever that China has to respond.

M&A is likely more critical to US companies and thus may be more valuable than adding to tariffs. In blocking and burying the QCOM/NXP deal (which is not coming back from the dead), the Chinese blocked the US becoming even more dominant in semiconductor telecommunications technology.

Given that China has used M&A approval as a weapon in the past, its a safe bet they will use it in the future to get their way in tech, which they clearly care about.

KLAC/ORBK – What does the trade truce really mean?
The knee jerk reaction is that the current truce period is likely good for the KLAC/ORBK deal approval as the Chinese probably don’t want to take an offensive action during this ceasefire period.

You can add to that logic the fact that China has approved several deals recently that are much larger than the rounding error size of the KLAC/ORBK deal. UTX’s $30B purchase of Rockwell Collins was approved along with Disney’s $71B deal to buy Fox entertainment.

The UTX deal is more of a proxy for KLAC/ORBK as Rockwell Collins is a defense electronics manufacturer. While we think the KLAC/ORBK deal goes through and the trade truce is a good omen we remain concerned about the length of time for a relatively small deal as we are quickly approaching the self imposed end of year deadline for the deal. Could it be that the Chinese care more about a chip related deal?

What will it take to make you Capitulate?
(Apologies to Musk’s girlfriend Grimes for stealing lyrics- Appreciate Power)

In looking at AMAT’s recently announced quarter, we wonder if capitulation is what it will take for the semi equipment stocks to move on and up.

Applied had a very bad quarter with a big miss on guidance and the stock dropped sharply in the after market on the news. Yet the following day the stock seemingly recovered on no other news.

Some investors and industry participants suggested that Applied’s “capitulation” in admitting to the down cycle rather than fighting reality was the reason for the bounce in the stock in the face of otherwise ugly news.

On the call, Applied CFO, Dam Durn, had suggested that they didn’t know where the bottom of the cycle was and seemed to be capitulating to the fact that cyclicality still exists rather than trying to fight it and suggest otherwise.

Is capitulation of the chip/tech slowdown the “cathartic cleansing” we need to have the stocks get over it and move on? Perhaps so…

The stocks
We have had a nice bounce off the bottom here and have gotten another bounce from the trade truce. Our concern remains that these are more emotional reactions rather than hard facts that support a real recovery and thus could be short lived.

We are well past the peak season and holiday driven demand, of semiconductor sales and about to head into the weakest quarter of the year (Q1) for chips which is almost always a sort of postpartum period after the holidays and usually the low point for memory sales/pricing. Q1 also contains Chinese new year which also slows sales.
This suggests that we will not get positive data over the next few weeks/ months to support the bounce or a more extended recovery.

We might consider taking some short term gains off the table as we may get a chance to buy them back at a lower valuation.

Also Read: Could China Conflict Curtail Chip Comeback? Part 2

December 4, 2018January 8, 2020

Cadence Summit Highlights Automotive Market Dynamics and System Enablement

Cadence Summit Highlights Automotive Market Dynamics and System Enablement
by Camille Kokozaki on 12-04-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, Cadence, EDA, Events

Cadence held a well-attended Automotive Summit where Cadence presented an overview of their solution and system enablement along with industry experts and established or startup companies sharing their perspective and product features from autonomous driving, LiDAR, Radar, thermal imaging, sensor imaging, and AI.

Continue reading “Cadence Summit Highlights Automotive Market Dynamics and System Enablement”

December 4, 2018June 9, 2021

Improving Library Characterization with Machine Learning!

Improving Library Characterization with Machine Learning!
by Daniel Nenni on 12-04-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Siemens EDA

For SOC designers that are waiting for library models the saying “give me liberty or give me death” is especially apropos. Without libraries to support the timing flow, SOC design progress can grind to a halt. As is often the case, more than just a few PVT corners are needed. Years ago, corners were what the term sounded like – the 4 corners of a square. In today’s designs, they are more like the many corners in a massive Parisian roundabout. Multiplied by the hundreds of cells in a typical library, the size of the library creation task has become an enormous undertaking.

In fact, Wei-Lii Tan, Product Manager in Mentor’s AMS Design and Verification group, estimates that it can take between 10 to 100 million simulation runs to create a usable library. This figure comes from their white paper on improving library characterization by using machine learning. If we have learned anything about machine learning in the last few years, it is its ability to revolutionize the tasks that is it applied to. It turns out that this is indeed the case for semiconductor design too.

Mentor’s MLChar Generator and MLChar Analytics address this problem by applying predictive machine learning to this difficult task. Mentor identifies five challenges that have hindered timely and accurate library development for SOC projects. They are: runtime and throughput, accuracy of results, incremental PVT corner characterization, library validation, and debugging and repairing. Each of these benefits greatly from the application of machine learning.

The value proposition for the acceleration machine learning provides really comes to light when teams are faced with the need for new corners that were not available in the initial library, or when the process for the cell library is relatively new and undergoing revisions. To see how it’s useful to look at the process Mentor’s MLChar uses.

The input to MLChar generator is a subset of the Liberty files for PVT corners, which are called anchor corners. With a properly selected set of anchor corners the number of corners that need to be generated by brute force simulation can be reduced by 30 to 70%. MLChar will even help select the optimal anchor corners. Using MLChar, new PVT corners can be produced in a fraction of the runtime that would be needed for full simulation.

An interesting side benefit is because MLChar does not need device models or simulator runs, new corners can be created easily if the need arises, without having to duplicate the initial library characterization setup.

Machine learning is also very good at finding anomalies in data, making it a great tool for validating libraries. It is useful for detecting outliers and ‘spikes’ that could indicate issues in the library characterization process. It comes with a suite of analytics and visualization tools to make debugging library issues much easier.

The net effect of using machine learning is a dramatic reduction in the time needed for library generation of standard cells or memories, with virtually no loss in accuracy. Additionally, the speed up for library validation not only improves library quality, but shortens the process. There is much more about the technology and how it works in the whitepaper. Mentor is making good use of its acquisitions, this whitepaper shows that they are continuing the technology and initiatives that Solido brought to the table, absolutely!

December 3, 2018July 18, 2025

Car Vandals Eschew Crowbars

Car Vandals Eschew Crowbars
by Tom Simon on 12-03-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, IP, Security, Synopsys

It used to be that automotive theft and crime was perpetrated with a crowbar. Now with increased electronics content, car designer and owners need to worry about electronic threats. Anywhere there is a communication link or a processor, there are potential threats to the security of the car. The range of these threats covers everything from privacy, safety, malicious intent, damage or even vehicle theft. Automotive suppliers are taking these threats seriously and designing their products with security in mind up front.

On the privacy front, hackers could listen in as you speak inside your car, or they could track your location. Every automated system could be tampered with from door locks, to safety critical systems such as airbags and crash avoidance. Hacked motor and automotive control systems could be harmed by improper commands.

Cars are coming with more and more data connections to the outside world, ones that could be exploited by hackers or malicious actors. The question is, what can be done to minimize security vulnerabilities in connected cars? Synopsys has a technical bulletin that discusses the fundamental problem and ways to deal with it. The paper written by Mike Borza, Principle IP Security Technologist at Synopsys, is titled “Minimizing Security Vulnerabilities in Connected Cars Starts with Silicon”.

They posit that by 2023 there will be over 70 million connected cars on the road. Each one of them will have multiple connections that could be used to compromise their security. This can range from USB, SD, AUX connections to WiFi, Bluetooth, and embedded modem devices. With new smart car functionality, comes increasing pathways in and out of the vehicle. Prevention of these threats requires a ground up approach starting at the SOC level to ensure security.

Two significant types of breaches are installation of hacked software and intercepted or falsified communications. Synopsys asserts that the best way to protect software integrity is to build security into the silicon that it is running on. Using Hardware Root of Trust can enable the creation of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Synopsys’ approach is to provide SOC developers an IP Hardware Security Module (HSM) that offers an isolated secure processing enclave that serves as the center of chip security.

The HSM contains a set of secure services to enable unique chip identification, encryption and application code validation. At startup, the HSM is the first unit that begins operating, it can then validate its own code and then ensure that any application code run on other processors in the system have not been tampered with. Once the SOC is up and running the HSM can provide encryption API’s that make possible secure and authorized communication within and outside of the vehicle.

Synopsys calls its hardware security module tRoot HSM. It offers complete IP for implementing a TEE and also is supported by software libraries and development tools that enable SOC designers to build a complete hardware/software solution and also perform debug and ensure post production test.

The Synopsys Technical Bulletin delves into the details of how tRoot HSM IP can contribute to making SOCs targeted for automotive use as secure as possible. One key take-away is that it’s important to have a complete system that includes all the components, from hardware IP to software, to ensure robust security.

December 3, 2018

9 IoT Predictions for 2019

9 IoT Predictions for 2019
by Ahmed Banafa on 12-03-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: IoT

By 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) is predicted to generate an additional $344B in revenues, as well as to drive $177B in cost reductions. IoT and smart devices are already increasing performance metrics of major US-based factories. They are in the hands of employees, covering routine management issues and boosting their productivity by 40-60% [1].

The following list of predictions (Figure 1) explores the state of IoT in 2019 and covering IoT impact on many aspects business and technology including Digital Transformation, Blockchain, AI, and 5G.

Figure 1: IoT Predictions For 2019

IoT Prediction 1: Growth in Data and Devices
By the end of this year there will be are around 3.6 billion devices that are actively connected to the Internet and used for daily tasks according to IT Pro [8]. With the introduction of 5G that will open the door for more devices, and data traffic. You can add to this trend the increase adoption of edge computing which will make it easier for business to process data faster and close to the points of action [5].

IoT Prediction 2: IoT and Digital Transformation
IoT is a key driver of digital transformation in several industries. Sensors, RFID tags, and smart beacons have already started the next industrial revolution. Market analysts predict the number of connected devices in the manufacturing industry will double between 2018 and 2020.

These devices are a total game changer for the many industries, disrupting every part of the production process from development to supply chain management. Manufacturers will be able to prevent delays, improve production performance. Another example; in 2019; 87% of healthcare organizations will have adopted IoT technology. The possibilities are endless for healthcare organizations and the IoT—smart pills, smart home care, personal healthcare management, electronic health records, managing sensitive data, and an overall higher degree of patient care. This type of improvements can be applied to many sectors vertically and horizontally [6][9].

IoT Prediction 3: More Investments in IoT
IoT’s undisputable impact has and will continue to lure more startup venture capitalists towards highly innovative projects in hardware, software and services. Spending on IoT will hit 1.4 trillion dollars by 2021 according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) [7].

IoT is one of the few markets that have the interest of the emerging as well as the traditional venture capitalists. The spread of smart devices and the increase dependency of customers to do many of their daily tasks using them, will add to the excitement of investing in IoT startups. Customers will be waiting for the next big innovation in IoT—such as smart mirrors that will analysis your face and call your doctor if you look sick, smart ATM machine that will incorporate smart security cameras, smart forks that will tell you how to eat and what to eat, and smart beds that will turn off the lights when everyone is sleeping [5][14].

IoT Prediction 4: Expansion of Smart IoT
IoT is all about connectivity and processing, nothing will be a better example than smart cities , but smart cities have been in a bit of a holding pattern recently. Smart sensors around the neighborhood will record everything from walking routes, shared car use, building occupancy, sewage flow, and temperature choice 24/7 with the goal of creating a place that’s comfortable, convenient, safe, and clean for those who live there. Once the model is perfected, it could be the model for other smart neighborhoods and eventually smart cities [2].

Another area of spreading smart IoT is auto industry with self-driving cars become a normal occurrence in the next few years, today tons of vehicles have a connected app that shows up to date diagnostic information about the car. This is done with IoT technology, which is the heart of the connected vehicle. Diagnostic information is not the only IoT advancement that we will see in the next year or so. Connected apps, voice search, and current traffic information are a few other things that will change the way we drive [2].

IoT Prediction 5: Artificial Intelligence and IoT Data
Artificial intelligence is the fundamental ingredient needed to make sense of the vast amount of data collected these days, and increase its value for business. AI will help IoT data analysis in the following areas: data preparation, data discovery, visualization of streaming data, time series accuracy of data, predictive and advance analytics,andreal-time geospatial and location (logistical data). Here are a few examples.

Data Preparation: Defining pools of data and cleaning them, which will take us to concepts like Dark Data and Data Lakes.
Data Discovery: Finding useful data in defined pools of data.
Visualization of Streaming Data: On-the-fly dealing with streaming data by defining, discovering data, and visualizing it in smart ways to make it easy for the decision-making process to take place without delay.
Time Series Accuracy of Data: Keeping the level of confidence in data collected high with high accuracy and integrity of data
Predictive and Advance Analytics: Making decisions based on data collected, discovered and analyzed.
Real-Time Geospatial and Location (Logistical Data): Maintaining the flow of data smoothly and under control [3].

IoT Prediction 6: Fog Computing & IoT
Fog computing is a technology that distributed the load of processing and moved it closer to the edge of the network (sensors in case of IoT). The benefits of using fog computing are very attractive to IoT solution providers. Some of these benefits allow users minimize latency, conserve network bandwidth, operate reliably with quick decisions, collect and secure a wide range of data, and move data to the best place for processing with better analysis and insights of local data. Microsoft just announced a $5 billion investment in IoT, including fog/edge computing [3][4][5].

Hardware manufacturers like Cisco, HPE, Dell and more are building specific infrastructure for the edge deigned to be more physically rugged and secure, and security vendors will start to offer endpoint security solutions to their existing services to prevent data loss, give insights into network health and threat protection, include privileged user control and application whitelisting and control, that will help in the fast adoption and spread of edge/fog computing implementations by businesses [2].

IoT Prediction 7: IoT and Blockchain
The current centralized architecture of IoT is one of the main reasons for the vulnerability of IoT networks. With billions of devices connected and more to be added, IoT is a big target for cyber-attacks, which makes security extremely important.

Blockchain offers new hope for IoT security for several reasons. First, blockchain is public, everyone participating in the network of nodes of the blockchain network can see the blocks and the transactions stored and approves them, although users can still have private keys to control transactions. Second, blockchain is decentralized, so there is no single authority that can approve the transactions eliminating Single Point of Failure (SPOF) weakness. Third and most importantly, it’s secure—the database can only be extended and previous records cannot be changed.

In the coming years manufactures will recognize the benefits of having blockchain technology embedded in all devices and compete for labels like “Blockchain Certified”[3][5].

IoT Prediction 8: IoT and Standardization
Standardization is one of the biggest challenges facing growth of IoT—it’s a battle among industry leaders who would like to dominate the market at an early stage. Digital assistant devices, including HomePod, Alexa, and Google Assistant, are the future hubs for the next phase of smart devices, and companies are trying to establish “their hubs” with consumers, to make it easier for them to keep adding devices with less struggle and no frustrations [3][5].

But what we have now is a case of fragmentation. One possible solution is to have a limited number of vendors dominating the market, allowing customers to select one and stick to it for any additional connected devices, similar to the case of operating systems we have now have with Windows, Mac and Linux for example, where there are no cross-platform standards [3][5].

To understand the difficulty of standardization, we need to deal with all three categories in the standardization process: Platform, Connectivity, and Applications. In the case of platform, we deal with UX/UI and analytic tools, while connectivity deals with customer’s contact points with devices, and last, applications are the home of the applications which control, collect and analyze data. All three categories are inter-related and we need them all, missing one will break that model and stall the standardization process [3][5].

There is no way to solve the problem of fragmentation without a strong push by organizations like IEEE or government regulations to have common standards for IoT devices [3][5].

IoT Prediction 9: IoT Skills Shortage
While investment in the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to reach over $1 trillion by 2020, according to IDC, the need for IoT skills may just hamper this growth. In fact, according to a Canonical report, 68% of businesses still struggle to hire IoT experts [10]. The latest Tech Cities Job Watch report from Experis showed a 35% increase in the demand for technology skills since this time last year, as businesses look to harness the power of IoT [11][13].

The Tech Cities Job Watch report noted that IoT has massively increased the number of connected devices and has exploded the volumes of data businesses have to process and as a result, big data roles are important to delivering success on IoT. The report found that businesses were willing to pay for such skills, with big data professionals commanding by far the highest salaries and day rates of any other technology discipline analyzed [13].

Since connected devices also create many more vulnerabilities to cyber threats for businesses to contend with, security skills are also in demand, the report found. There has been a 24% increase (year-on-year) in the demand for IT Security contractors. Businesses are urgently plugging short term security gaps and using contractors to train up existing employees across the business and are shifting focus to this more flexible contractor model for IT security in response to the demands for IoT [13].

Universities cannot keep up with the demand, so to deal with such shortage, companies have established internal training programs to build their own teams, upgrading the skills of their own engineering teams and training new talents. This trend will continue, representing an opportunity for new engineers and a challenge for companies [3][5].

References