SemiWiki – Page 583 – The Open Forum for Semiconductor Professionals

December 22, 2016

The transport systems of Science Fiction will be here sooner than you think

The transport systems of Science Fiction will be here sooner than you think
by Vivek Wadhwa on 12-22-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

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 then transports you through a vacuum tube at 760 mph. When you reach the Pasadena station, another self-driving car awaits to take you to your office. You reach your destination in less than an hour.

That is the type of scenario that Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) chief executive Dirk Ahlborn laid out for me as we were preparing to speak together on a panel at the Knowledge Summit in Dubai on Dec. 5. He was not talking about something that would happen in the next century; he expects the first of these systems to be operational in the United Arab Emirates by 2020. The Abu Dhabi government has just announced that it has been working with his company to connect Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, two UAE cities separated by 105 miles, using the Hyperloop system.

A proposal for this mode of transportation came from Elon Musk in August 2013, in a paper titled “Hyperloop Alpha.” Musk envisaged a mass transit system in which trains travel as fast as 760 mph in pressurized capsule pods. These would ride on an air cushion in steel tubes and be driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. He claimed that the system would be safer, faster and cheaper than trains, cars boats and supersonic planes, for distances of up to at least 900 miles, and said that it would be resistant to earthquakes and generate more energy through its solar panels than it would use.

Straight out of science fiction it may be, but two start-ups took up Musk’s challenge to develop the technology: HTT and Hyperloop One. These companies have raised more than $100 million each and say they will have operational systems in three to four years and that they have governments backing them. Hyperloop One demonstrated elements of the technology in the Las Vegas desert in May 2016. The sheiks I spoke with in Dubai were most excited about HTT’s system.

Even if the Hyperloop technology doesn’t pan out, the digital chauffeurs surely are coming. Self-driving cars such as the Tesla that I drive can already take control of the wheel on highways and are able to monitor traffic around them better than humans can — because their sensors enable them to see in 360 degrees and communicate with each other to negotiate rights of way.

By 2020, self-driving cars will have progressed so far that they can drive safely at speeds as fast as 200 mph in their own partitioned lanes on highways. In these circumstances, the commute to Los Angeles from San Francisco would take only an hour and a half — without the need to catch a connection to a supersonic pod. From Abu Dhabi to Al Ain or Dubai could take the car 30 to 40 minutes, door to door. In other words, Elon Musk’s self-driving cars and HTT’s short-haul Hyperloops may be competing with each other. I’m one of those who would prefer the convenience of having their car come with them so that they can keep extra stuff in the back and be working uninterrupted on the commute. In any case, for longer journeys, say from New York or San Francisco to Miami, catching a Hyperloop will make more sense than riding in the self-driving car.

The point, though, is that we are on the verge of a revolution in transportation. For decades — actually, centuries — we have been dependent on locomotives and, more recently, airplanes to take us long distances. The technologies have hardly advanced. The entire industry is about to be disrupted. Many of us will choose to take the shared cars and Hyperloops; others will own their own cars. But we will take fewer rides in trains and planes.

That is why new rail-based transportation systems, such as the one that California has long been debating, are not sensible investments to make. By the time they are complete, our modes of mass transportation will have changed. The California project aims to move 20 to 24 million passengers a year from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco, through California’s Central Valley, in 2 hours 40 minutes. It is projected to cost an estimated $64 billion when completed by about 2030. By then, we will be debating whether human beings should be allowed to drive cars, and public rail systems will be facing bankruptcy because of cheaper and better alternatives.

The wise investment to make will be in accelerating adoption of self-driving cars and in reserving lanes for them, and in building energy-efficient long-distance transportation systems that do not consume even more time, money and arable land than we have lost already. For distances in the hundreds or thousands of miles, we’d do well to explore Hyperloops and other environmentally sensitive modes of mass transportation. They may be far more cost-effective than laying new railways.

For more, follow me on Twitter: @wadhwa and visit my website: www.wadhwa.com

December 22, 2016

7 Trends of IoT in 2017

7 Trends of IoT in 2017
by Ahmed Banafa on 12-22-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: AI, IoT

IoT is one of the transformational trends that will shape the future of businesses in 2017 and beyond. Many firms see a big opportunity in #IoT uses and enterprises start to believe that IoT holds the promise to enhance customer relationships and drive business growth by improving quality, productivity, and reliability on one side, and on the other side reducing costs, risk, and theft. By having the right IoT model companies will be rewarded with new customers, better insights, and improved customer satisfaction to mention few benefits.

With all this in mind, let’s explore some of the trends of IoT impacting business and technology in 2017:

1) IoT and Blockchain Will Converge
Blockchain is more than a concept now and has applications in many verticals besides FinTech including IoT. #Blockchain technology is considered by many experts as the missing link to settle scalability, privacy, and reliability concerns in the Internet of Things. Blockchain technology can be used in tracking billions of connected devices, enable the processing of transactions and coordination between devices; allow for significant savings to IoT industry manufacturers. This decentralized approach would eliminate single points of failure, creating a more resilient ecosystem for devices to run on. The cryptographic algorithms used by Blockchain would make consumer data more private. In 2017 IoT will converge with Blockchain for better security and privacy opening the door for a new category in applications, hardware, and talents.

2) IoT Devices and More DDoS Attacks
Forrester thinks that the recent #DDoS attack that hit a whopping 1600 websites in the United States was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the threat that the connected device poses to the world. That attack confirmed the fear of vulnerability of IoT devices with a massive distributed denial of service attack that crippled the servers of services like Twitter, NetFlix, NYTimes, and PayPal across the U.S. on October 21st, 2016. It’s the result of an immense assault that involved millions of Internet addresses and malicious software, according to #Dyn, the prime victim of that attack. “One source of the traffic for the attacks was devices infected by the #Mirai botnet”. All indications suggest that countless Internet of Things (IoT) devices that power everyday technology like closed-circuit cameras and smart-home devices were hijacked by the malware, and used against the servers.

3) IoT and Many Mobile Moments
IoT is creating new opportunities and providing a competitive advantage for businesses in current and new markets. It touches everything—not just the data, but how, when, where and why you collect it. The technologies that have created the Internet of Things aren’t changing the internet only, but rather change the things connected to the internet. More mobile moments (the moments in which a person pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants, immediately and in context) will appear on the connected device, right from home appliances to cars to smartwatches and virtual assistants. All these connected devices will have the potential of offering a rich stream of data that will then be used by product and service owners to interact with their consumers.

4) IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Containers
In an IoT situation, #AI can help companies take the billions of data points they have and boil them down to what’s really meaningful. The general premise is the same as in the retail applications – review and analyzes the data you’ve collected to find patterns or similarities that can be learned from so that better decisions can be made.

The year 2017 would see Internet of Things software being distributed across cloud services, edge devices, and gateways. The year would also witness IoT solutions being built on modern #Microservices (an approach to application development in which a large application is built as a suite of modular services. Each module supports a specific business goal and uses a simple, well-defined interface to communicate with other modules) and #containers (lightweight virtualization) that would work across this distributed architecture. Further, machine-learning cloud services and Artificial Intelligence will be put to use to mine the data that would be coming in from IoT devices.

5) IoT and Connectivity:
Connecting the different parts of IoT to the sensors can be done by different technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Low Power Wi-Fi , Wi-Max, Ethernet , Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the recent promising technology of #Li-Fi(using light as a medium of communication between the different parts of a typical network including sensors). In 2017, new forms of wireless connections, such as 3GPP’s narrowband #NB-IoT, #LoRaWAN, or #Sigfox will be tested. Forcing IoT decision-makers to evaluate more than 20 wireless connectivity options and protocols, which is one step in the right direction of having standards for connectivity.

6) IoT and Talent-Shortage
Organizations launching IoT projects including smart cities and industrial facilities face a tougher time in recruiting talent. Complicating matters is that it remains a challenge to find enough workers to secure the Internet of Things. 45 percent of IoT companies struggle to find security professionals, according to a TEKsystems survey. 30 percent report having difficulty finding digital marketers. In 2017, industrial major vendors will invest in IoT training and certifications and make it part of the mainstream training programs in the tech industry.

7) IoT and New Business Models
The bottom line is a big motivation for starting, investing in, and operating any business, without a sound and solid business models for IoT we will have another bubble, this model must satisfy all the requirements for all kinds of e-commerce; vertical markets, horizontal markets, and consumer markets. A new business model including sharing cost of devices with consumers, reducing the cost of ownership and making UX less hassle and more joyful. 2017 will see new categories being added to smart markets. One key element is to bundle service with the product, for example, devices like Amazon’s #Alexa will be considered just another wireless speaker without the services provided like voice recognition, music streaming, and booking Uber service to mention few.

The Road Ahead
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ecosystem of ever-increasing complexity; it is the next level of automation of every object in our life and convergence of new technologies will make IoT implementation much easier and faster, which in turn will improve many aspects of our life at home and at work and in between. From refrigerators to parking spaces to smart houses, IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future. One possible outcome in the near future is the introduction of “IoT as a Service” technology. If that service offered and used the same way we use other flavors of “as a service” technologies today the possibilities of applications in real life will be unlimited. But we have a long way to achieving that dream; we need to overcome many obstacles and barriers at many fronts before we can see the benefits of such technology.

Ahmed BanafaNamed No. 1 Top VoiceTo Follow in Tech by LinkedIn in 2016

References:
http://www.iotworldnews.com/author.asp?section_id=508&doc_id=727678&
http://www.indianweb2.com/2016/11/08/internet-things-iot-2017-predictions-forrester/
http://www.ioti.com/iot-trends-and-analysis/11-iot-predictions-2017
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-standardization-implementation-challenges-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wake-up-call-iot-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/securing-internet-things-iot-blockchain-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-mile-iot-artificial-intelligence-ai-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-implementation-challenges-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
http://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/cry

December 22, 2016

Floki Bot is Becoming an International Sensation with Cybercriminals

Floki Bot is Becoming an International Sensation with Cybercriminals
by Matthew Rosenquist on 12-22-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Security

Floki Bot, a new financial oriented malware, is popular with English, Portuguese, and Russian speaking underground criminal markets, winning over cybercriminals with new features and functionality. It is currently being used by a number of different cybercrime groups around the world and is being sold on the dark market for about $1,000 according to Flashpoint and Cisco Talos.

Improvements Abound
Floki Bot is a great example of evolutionary release-reuse tactics of hackers. Based upon the venerable Zeus Trojan 2.0.8.9 source code, which was released many years ago, this new bot variant sports many different technologies to bypass detection and eradication by security tools. It has an updated engine to avoid Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a method for cybersecurity used to detect malicious software, and extensibility to use The Onion Router (TOR) network for masking network traffic sources. It uses a number of obfuscation techniques to hide its sensitive code. Floki Bot also sports advanced methods to capture data from one of their primary targets, Point-of-Sale (PoS) devices. Overall, it keeps many of the Zeus banking Trojan tricks while adding upgrades to stay current with the latest security controls and tactics.

Alternate Engineering
Based upon communication traffic analysis, it is believed that several different parties, possibly of different languages, might have contributed to the creation of this malware. As hackers do collaborate well, the result brings together a capable new malware to the stage. This is becoming more common. Bits of code and various experts working together to develop the next generation of malware.

In some cases, it is not intentional. There are several examples of when Nation States have conducted cyberattacks and other parties intercepted their well-developed code, only to reverse-engineer it, and use the parts they found interesting in their own projects. This is the way of the next generation malware author. They don’t need to know everything themselves. They can leverage a community for assistance and even reuse the best parts of other groups code for maximum effect.

Protections Must Adapt
If Floki Bot is any indication of the evolution for malware, we should expect faster cycles of release for more virulent code and methods. Teamwork will increase as groups work together to monetize efforts and fleece victims in more efficient and creative ways. The cybersecurity industry is not only fighting the malicious technology, but also the people who are innovating and collaborating to undermine the security, safety, and privacy of us all.

Interested in more? Follow me on Twitter (@Matt_Rosenquist), Steemit, and LinkedIn to hear insights and what is going on in cybersecurity.

December 21, 2016

Predictions for the IOT in 2017

Predictions for the IOT in 2017
by Bill McCabe on 12-21-2016 at 2:00 pm
Categories: IoT, Security

Although we are a far cry from Nostradamus, there are some fairly reliable predictions that can be made about 2017 and beyond.

The first bold prediction is that 2017 will see a bump in security, and a demand for skilled workers. Since there will be a growing demand for AI and the containers that are utilized to transmit information, there will be a need for individuals who can operate these core foundations.

Prototypes for certain financial transactions will be released. These transactions will utilize blockchain technology, and they will help to expedite and simplify several different types of transactions.

At some point, a massive large scale IoT security breach will occur. This will lead to most industries repairing their coding so that it becomes unbreakable in the future. The potential for better security systems will become a bigger part of this.

Further DDos attacks will then continue to happen. As hackers realize that they can do damage with the DDoS attacks by tapping into the internet of things, there will continue to be older devices that are used for these attacks, until they are remove from the internet. As more devices connect, there will be a need for additional security to take place. Fortunately, places like IBM and Cisco will step in and help to create certifications for devices to help ensure that that the security that is in place is of the highest caliber.

These firms will also likely begin to offer training that is either free for those in the industry, or offer it at a low enough cost that it offers value to developers who need professionals with this level of expertise.

All of this may be taken a step further with industry certified devices. Since the need for security protection will vary from one industry to the next, there is a chance that several certification vendors will come into play and help to ensure that each of the different industries will have what it needs for the IoT technology that it is providing.

What we see is that there is a potential for different advancements within the internet of things. While the actual results of what takes place may vary slightly, there is no denying that we are set to experience another year of growth and advancement in the industry. We can only hope that it continues to be as fascinating as 2016 has been and the years that follow continue to build off that momentum also.

Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the folks at @IoTRecruiting – and www.internetofthingsrecruting

iot, Internet of things, Bill McCabe

December 21, 2016

V2V: Loose Talk about Talking Cars

V2V: Loose Talk about Talking Cars
by Roger C. Lanctot on 12-21-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

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 before adoption, is based on 12-year-old technology that is rapidly being superseded by emerging cellular wireless and sensor-based systems.

http://tinyurl.com/h46kl6t – Notice of Proposed Rule Making – NHTSA

Coming at the end of the Obama Administration, the Notice of Proposed Rule Making, which is the official designation of the announcement, is something of a Hail Mary (i.e. last minute or desperate attempt) to find a solution to the rising toll of highway fatalities now approaching 100 lives lost every day. The announcement also reflects the reality that the U.S. DOT and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have no other solutions or policy plans in development to stem the tide of death – with the possible exception of the suggested expansion of the use of ignition interlocks for impaired drivers.

The proposed vehicle-to-vehicle technology is based on dedicated short range communication technology (DSRC) which is a form of Wi-Fi and provides for inter-vehicle communications between appropriately equipped vehicles. The concept is compelling and exciting, but the messaging regarding its efficacy and effectiveness is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the statements of the leaders at the USDOT regarding this technology:
From Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx we have this relatively reasonable statement of fact:

“We are carrying the ball as far as we can to realize the potential of transportation technology to save lives. This long promised V2V rule is the next step in that progression. Once deployed, V2V will provide 360-degree situational awareness on the road and will help us enhance vehicle safety.”

The exaggeration begins with NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind:

“Advanced vehicle technologies may well prove to be the silver bullet in saving lives on our roadways. V2V and automated vehicle technologies each hold great potential to make our roads safer, and when combined, their potential is untold.”

Rosekind’s somewhat breathless enthusiasm overlooks the disconnect between the agency’s claimed capacity for V2V to help eliminate or reduce the severity of up to 80% of all crashes (once the technology reaches near full deployment) and the anticipated saving of lives – estimated to be between 955 and 1,321 in the 30th year of deployment or 2051. With an estimated annual cost of deployment of between $2.2B and $5B (based on NHTSA’s own estimates) that is $2.2M per life saved excluding the billions of dollars to be spent on infrastructure.

The agency emphasizes the fact that the V2V mandate is nothing more than an automated vehicle beacon combining GPS and Wi-Fi information to broadcast vehicle location data (location, heading, speed) at 10x/sec. The mandate does not require reception of the vehicle signals nor does it require in-vehicle displays or interfaces and it does not require implementation of the applications that might actually prevent crashes.

V2V informational videos on the NHTSA Website, point out that drivers must remain in control and that the beacon signals are nothing more than warnings which may be conveyed to the driver via tones, displays or seat vibrations – none of which are specified or required by the mandate – nor are they included in the projected cost per vehicle estimated at more than $300 at launch. The NHTSA announcement also glosses over the fact that the mandate is not expected to be finalized until 2019 with initial deployment commencing in 2021.

The significance of the 2019/2021 timeframe is the fact that by that time the first 5G cellular networks will have begun being installed around the world using some of the same wireless spectrum as DSRC and offering the same or superior communication capabilities. The importance of that reality is borne out by the informational videos on the NHTSA.gov Website.

The videos describe four applications: do not pass (DNP), intersection movement assist (IMA), emergency electronic brake light, and blind spot warning. (The videos also show cross-traffic alert technology already available in existing advanced driver assistance systems.) All of these applications can be fulfilled today with sensor-based technologies or, in the near future, with cellular LTE-V2V or 5G technology.

The key difference between DSRC and cellular-based technologies is the fact that car companies are already building cellular connections into cars. And those cellular connections have commercially motivated and business model justifying applications.

The USDOT is essentially proposing that an entirely new wireless network be built from scratch without any commercial purposes other than safety, though the agency is quick to note in its press release:

Separately, the Department’s Federal Highway Administration plans to soon issue guidance for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications, which will help transportation planners integrate the technologies to allow vehicles to “talk” to roadway infrastructure such as traffic lights, stop signs and work zones to improve mobility, reduce congestion and improve safety.

Here, too, cellular communications are already being employed to communicate traffic light information to cars – as shown recently by Audi and introduced two years ago by BMW. BMW, Daimler and Volvo are already deploying inter-vehicle road hazard communications using cellular.

Again, the key differentiator is that the cellular infrastructure is already in place, the investments have already been made. At a time when the U.S. is wrestling with crumbling bridges and tunnels, there is precious little money left to stand-up a new wireless network to potentially enhance driving safety in the interest of saving 1,000 lives out of 35,000 annually. Bigger life-saving gains can be made sooner with existing technology.

In the Notice of Proposed Rule Making the agency notes that it considered two regulatory alternatives:

An “if-equipped” standard with performance requirements. The agency says it felt that “anything short of a mandate for universal V2V capability on all new vehicles would not lead a sufficient fraction of the vehicle fleet to be equipped with V2V to enable full realization of the technology’s potential safety benefits.”
Requiring that V2V-capable vehicles also be equipped with the two safety applications analyzed in this proposed rule – Intersection Movement Assist (IMA) and Left Turn Assist (LTA) – in addition to V2V capability. But the agency felt these two applications were not ready for deployment

What is obviously missing from the USDOT’s deliberations is the potential for cellular technology to be used as an alternative to DSRC. The determined myopia of the USDOT after more than 12 years of work on DSRC is stunning and suggests that the time is indeed ripe for new leadership.

Yet unresolved is the definition and creation of the Secure Credential Management System (SCMS) required to support the inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. In the words of one anonymous V2V skeptic: “Someone needs to ante up the funds to build and operate the SCMS and while the (USDOT) guidance addressed the needs and some technical issues, there are still some significant unknowns regarding the SCMS (who operates, how they operate, governance, funding, etc.) and it’s a big complex system so it won’t be easy to build. And nothing works without the SCMS.”

The USDOT and its supporters have also suggested that V2V will be an essential element of automated driving. But in none of the official USDOT materials is there any suggestion that V2V technology is intended to enable self-driving cars. The USDOT is quite clear on this point: the driver remains in control. V2V is intended solely to provide driver alerts.

Finally, General Motors is still the only car company with announced plans to deploy V2V technology in 2017 which will be in advance of a completed standard or mandate. No other car company has followed GM, suggesting lingering skepticism throughout the OEM community in spite of the official stated support of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

V2V is not the answer to the car-inflicted carnage on U.S. highways. No other government anywhere else in the world has come to the conclusion that V2V is the solution. V2V a clever protocol that is most likely to see adoption within the existing cellular network. But the Notice of Proposed Rule Making ensures ongoing funding ($700M-$800M already spent by the government alone) and Federal support into the incoming Trump Administration. It is highly unlikely that Trump will pump the brakes on DSRC. See you at the inauguration.

Roger C. Lanctot is Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk

December 21, 2016January 27, 2022

IEDM 2016 – Marie Semeria LETI Interview

IEDM 2016 – Marie Semeria LETI Interview
by Scotten Jones on 12-21-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: CEO Interviews, FD-SOI

Marie Semeria is the CEO of Leti, one of the world’s premier research organization for semiconductor technology and the key development center for FDSOI. I first interviewed Marie at SEMICON West and at IEDM I had a chance to sit down with her and get an update on Leti’s efforts over the last several months.

My interview with Marie at SEMICON West is available here.

FDSOI
When I spoke to Marie at SEMICON West we discussed the long-term roadmap for FDSOI with extendibility down to 10nm and even 7nm. At the time GLOBALFOUNDRIES had announced their 22FDX technology and that there would be a follow on FDSO technology but had not announced what it would be. At that time Marie noted that Leti was working with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, since then GLOBALFOUNDRIES has announced 12FDX as their next generation technology. Marie noted that Leti continues to work with GLOBALFOUNDRIES to make 22FDX happen, design 12FDX and implement the required ecosystems.

In September it was announced that Sony has developed a smart watch GPS chip with ST Micro on FDSOI. The chip provides 10x the battery life of a bulk chip and the watch utilizing the chip will be announced in the USA and Europe next month. In September GLOBALFOUNDRIES also announced 60 tape outs and Samsung has 16 tape outs on FDSOI. Approximately one half of the tape outs should be products 18 months later, several products should appear at the end of next year.

One of the key attributes of FDSOI is the revolutionary ability to tune the wafers after they come out of the fab using biasing. Designers need to be trained to use back biasing and Leti has designed specific IP for this application. GLOBALFOUDNRIES has an initiative to have a complete design and IP ecosystem and Leti is involved in making this happen.

ST Micro is capitalizing on 28nm FDSOI for MCU and automotive applications. FDSOI inherent radiation hardness makes it ideal for automotive applications.

Another strength of FDSOI is in the RF space where FDSOI has >2x the performance of FinFETs. LETI has already reported FT/Fmax=390/385GHz at 28nm, good analog performance and reduced noise and good RF efficiency of the back gate yielding good RF designs. FinFETs low Ft is mainly impacted by strong parasites capacitances and Fmax mainly impacted by Gate resistance (Gate last process)

One of the biggest collaborations for Leti in FDSOI is with Soitec to optimize the substrates. It is very important to be able to give Soitec the device feedback and understand the impact of the substrate on the device and to be able to understand the contribution of the device and the substrate.

Leti is also working on new ways to leverage FDSOI and at IEDM presented a paper on integrating a photodiode under the Box layer to generate bias under the Box.

Horizontal Nanowires
Horizontal Nanowires (HNW) is an area of intense research in the industry. Both FinFETs and FDSOI devices are facing fundamental scaling issues around the 7nm node and are reaching thickness and electrostatic control limits. HNWs have a process very similar to FinFET formation and represent an evolutionary path with superior electrostatics. Leti has been working on HNW for 10 years whereas IMEC started with vertical nanowires before switching to HNW more recently.

Similar to the FDSOI work described in my SEMICON article (see above), Leti develops models of HNW, then they build test devices and calibrate and confirm the model to give confidence to model based projections. Leti has a long history of stressors in the substrate and S/D and they can carry that over to HNW. They have the full model that has been confirmed and characterized to use for HNW.

Leti has two HNW efforts, one with ST Micro and relaxed geometries and one with IBM at scale. Leti has presented a compact model of HNW stress they developed with IBM. The model integrates quantum effects and stress and is confirmed by experimental data. Their experience in stressors is very useful for tuning very advanced devices

At IEDM Leti presented a paper on a stacked HNW technology with raised source/drains including for the first time a silicon germanium (SiGe) raised S/D to strain the pFET channel. The pFET had a SiGe:B (boron doped SiGe) raised S/D and the nFET had a Si:P (phosphorus doped silicon) raised S/D. They used an inner spacer and wet etch to etch out the SiGe layers releasing the Si nanowire while protecting the SiGe:B raised S/D.

The basic process flow is:

Super lattice deposition (alternating SiGe and Si layers)
Fin patterning – similar to FinFET process except that two different materials are etched
Dummy gate formation – similar to FinFET
Spacer formation – similar to FinFET
Inner spacer formation – CD recess with wet etch, second deposition and etch back to form a spacer in the recess
Source/drain epi – similar to FinFET
ILD and CMP – similar to FinFET
Dummy gate removal – similar to FinFET
Nanowire release etch – wet etch
Gate stack formation – similar to FinFET
Contact and back end of line – similar to FinFET

As can be seen from the process flow above, only a few steps are different from FinFET processing although the difficulty of the integration issues should not be underestimated.

Non-Volatile Memory
Leti has developed a test vehicle for comparing nonvolatile memory: MRAM, OXRAM, PCRAM, CBRAM on the same test vehicle. They are working to benchmark and optimize the nonvolatile memory for each design. RRAM is interesting for computing application. With Spintech they are working on MRAM. They have set up a roadmap to very low power MRAM using a new type of spin. They are working with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung on MRAM and ST Micro on PCRAM.

Conclusion
In conclusion Leti is working with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Samsung, Soitec and ST Micro to commercialize FDSOI while also pursing next generation HNW and nonvolatile memory technologies for future generations.

Also Read:

CEO Interview: Dündar Dumlugöl of Magwel

CEO Interview: Jack Harding of eSilicon

CEO Interview: Randy Caplan of Silicon Creations

December 20, 2016

Semiconductors flat for second straight year

Semiconductors flat for second straight year
by Bill Jewell on 12-20-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Semiconductor Intelligence, Semiconductor Services

The global semiconductor market posted strong 11.6% growth in 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] quarter 2016 from 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] quarter, according to WSTS. This strength is reflected in the 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] quarter revenue growth reported by the major semiconductor suppliers. Of the 12 companies, half (Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, TI, Micron and Toshiba) reported growth of over 9%. The other six companies reported revenue growth in range of 2.3% to 8.1%.

The 4[SUP]th[/SUP] quarter of 2016 looks weak based on the available guidance from the above companies. Six companies projected declines in 4[SUP]th[/SUP] quarter revenue from 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] quarter based on the midpoint of their guidance. But the upper end of guidance from four of these companies (Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom and NXP) is for 4[SUP]th[/SUP] quarter growth. Only Micron Technology (for its fiscal quarter ended in early December) and STMicroelectronics are guiding for increases based on midpoint guidance. Samsung and SK Hynix did not provide revenue guidance, but both stated demand for their memory products will be strong in the 4[SUP]th[/SUP] quarter.

2016 will be another basically flat year for the semiconductor market following a 0.2% decline in 2015. Recent forecasts call for a range of a 0.9% decline (Gartner) to a 1% increase (IC Insights). Our Semiconductor Intelligence projection in August was a 2% decline. However with the strong 11.6% 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] quarter growth, a modest 1.3% gain in 4[SUP]th[/SUP] quarter would drive a slight 0.1% annual growth in 2016. We are confident overall 4[SUP]th[/SUP] quarter market growth will be sufficient to drive a slight positive gain for the semiconductor market in 2016. We are revising our 2016 forecast to 0.1% growth.

The projections for 2017 are generally for moderate growth in the semiconductor market, with most in the 3% to 5% range. Our latest forecast at Semiconductor Intelligence is 8% growth in 2017, the same as in our August forecast. The scenario is based a moderate improvement in end demand for electronics, the quarterly trend driven by 2016 and a modest inventory recovery. In October, Gartner projected the total units of PCs plus tablets would decline 0.7% in 2017 after an 8.7% decline in 2016. Total mobile phones should move from a 1.6% decline in 2016 to a 1.2% increase in 2016. IC Insights in November called for a slight acceleration in smartphone unit growth from 4% in 2016 to 5% in 2017. Thus no strong growth in key electronics devices in 2017, but an improvement from 2016.

The world economy should show modest improvement in 2017, with GDP growing 3.4% compared to 3.1% in 2016 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Among advanced economies, improved GDP growth from the U.S., Canada and Japan will more than offset weaker growth in the UK and Euro Area countries. In emerging and developing economies, steady growth in India and southeast Asia and recoveries in Russia and Latin America should more than compensate for slowing China growth.

Downside risks to the forecast are significant. The impact of Brexit, the UK’s vote to withdraw from the European Union, is difficult to estimate. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened high tariffs against China. A trade war between China, the largest electronics producer, and the U.S., the second largest electronics consumer after China, would negatively impact the electronics and semiconductor markets in the near term. The continuing conflicts in the Middle East and global terrorism threats could also disrupt the economy. Despite these risks, the overall global economy is healthy and should show modest improvement in 2017.

December 20, 2016July 18, 2025

Moving from SRAM to DDR DRAM in Safety Critical Automotive Systems

Moving from SRAM to DDR DRAM in Safety Critical Automotive Systems
by Eric Esteve on 12-20-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, IP, Synopsys

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 that require the memory capacity and bandwidth that is only possible with DRAM. Designers need to precisely understand the differences between DRAM and SRAM in term of reliability, temperature sensitivity and refresh requirements before to move from (embedded) SRAM based computing to external DRAM based architecture, especially for safety critical automotive systems.

In the above Table (DRAM vs SRAM Use in Automotive Applications) the reader can identify the main differences. The latency associated with DRAM is larger than for SRAM and most importantly, can be non-deterministic. The DRAM technology is characterized by the need to be periodically refreshed to avoid the loss of data in the memory.

The core of a DRAM chip is an analog array of bit-cells that operate by storing a small amount of charge on a capacitor within each bit-cell – just a few tens of femtoFarads or just a few tens of thousands of electrons per bit, on a DRAM device with 4 or 8 billion bits per die. The rate of leakage is dependent on the temperature, leaking more at higher temperatures… and the automotive segment requires the devices to run fully at spec at higher temperature than consumer or even industrial. This results in specially designed DRAMs targeted towards automotive applications.

In term of reliability, DRAM devices are also susceptible to soft errors due to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) – the effect of ionizing radiation on the DRAM device. As a consequence, a bit-cell may lose its charge and again error correction should be employed to recover the lost data. The impact of soft errors can be dramatic and is obviously not acceptable for safety critical automotive systems.

The SoC has to integrate Error Correction Code (ECC) mechanisms when using an external DRAM. We will see further which type of ECC may be implemented in automotive systems to prevent error propagation.

At this point, you may ask why integrating a DRAM into automotive systems, while considering these drawbacks!
The answer is simply that you have no other choice than using DRAM when designing computing intensive automotive systems, as DRAM is an enabling technology for these three automotive advances:

1. Displays: High definition displays generally require DRAM, and as displays like instrumentation consoles and heads-up displays will relay safety-critical information to the driver, then DRAM is needed in this safety-critical application.
2. ADAS systems that process camera and high-bandwidth sensor input: The cameras and other sensors that provide the input to the ADAS system generate a large amount of data which also requires further processing to remove noise, adjust for different lighting conditions, and to identify objects and obstacles. This kind of processing requires the bandwidth and capacity of DRAM.
3. Self-driving vehicles: Self-driving vehicles require processing of a number of high-bandwidth input sources and intense computation, making DRAM a necessity.

The most common DRAM device for new ADAS designs is the LPDDR4 SDRAM. LPDDR4, originally designed for mobile devices offers a balance of capacity, speed and form factor that is attractive for automotive applications. As a result, LPDDR4 has been automotive qualified by DRAM manufacturers and is available in automotive temperature grades.

Even with careful physical interface design, at LPDDR4 data transmission speeds, there is a non-zero bit error rate, so the risk of data transmission errors must also be addressed. There are a few possible ways to mitigate possible errors that may occur in DRAM devices to prevent the errors from propagating into the rest of the system.

The DRAM manufacturer may attempt to create a bit-cell that is more temperature resistant, or the DRAM manufacturer may introduce error correction within the DRAM die to correct for the bit-cells which have lost their charge between refreshes. Even if error correction is present within the DRAM die, the SoC designer may also introduce error correction on the DRAM interface to correct errors in the DRAM.

In traditional DDR DRAM designs such as servers and networking chips, any error correction is usually transmitted side-band to the DRAM data. However, when using LPDDR4 devices, the arrangement of LPDDR4 into 16-bit channels, 2 channels per die, 2-4 dies per package, 4 channels per package means that it is highly impractical to implement sideband pins with which to transmit sideband Error Correcting Code (ECC) data. In that case, an in-line ECC scheme may be used, which transmits the ECC data on the same data pins as the data it protects (Above Figure).

As a conclusion, DRAM devices are clearly an enabling technology for advancements in automotive safety, features, and convenience. With careful design and stringent process, DRAM can be introduced into safety-critical areas of the automobile to provide high bandwidth and large capacity to enable the computing necessary for driver information systems, ADAS, and self-driving vehicles.

This article has been inspired by the excellent paper “Understanding Automotive DDR DRAM” written by Marc Greenberg, Product Marketing Director, in Synopsys DesignWare Tech Bulletin.

You will find an exhaustive list of Synopsys Automotive Grade DDR interface IP including PHYs, Controllers, Verification IP, architecture design models, and prototyping systems here

From Eric Esteve from IPnest

December 20, 2016July 18, 2025

Building a Virtual Prototype

Building a Virtual Prototype
by Bernard Murphy on 12-20-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Synopsys

I wrote recently about how virtual prototypes (in the form of VDKs) can help embedded software teams practice continuous integration. Synopsys has just released a white paper detailing a practical approach to building a VDK, using the Juno ARM development platform (ADP) to illustrate. Just as a reminder, the point of a virtual prototype is to provide software developers a platform on which they can start development while the hardware is still in design. This is a software model capturing just enough architectural detail to track hardware behavior with reasonable accuracy, but avoiding implementation detail so it can run at close to real-time speed.

You can see the block diagram for the Juno ADP above. It has lots of functionality – two Cortex clusters, a Mali GPU, a control processor, debug, cache-coherent interconnect and TrustZone security, and a bunch of peripherals. If you take a serial view of “first build the VDK, then use that as a platform for software development” this task could look daunting. Worse yet, you might find that your polished VDK becomes available for use only as first silicon samples appear!

But it doesn’t have to happen that way – VDK development can be pipelined just like any other phase in product design. A software stack in development doesn’t need all features of the virtual prototype to be available from day 1. Components of the software are themselves developed in a pipelined fashion – development for the bootloader, OS, drivers, middleware and applications launch progressively and will require access to control, communications, audio and other layers only as those components evolve. As a result, the virtual prototype can start as a relatively incomplete model with many stubs and can be refined as the software stack itself evolves.

The minimum component you need to start is the compute subsystem, and this is also the easiest part. You just pick up the ARMv8 starting point VDK, do a very small amount of configuration and that part is done. You will want to add stubs for peripherals and other components in the Juno design since you’ll need to reference these in the next steps. This is pretty simple in Virtualizer Studio (VS). Where you already have models available you can of course use them but otherwise you can simply add stubs and add and type interfaces as needed (memory-mapped, interrupt, clock, etc).

Next you’ll want to add memory-map information, effectively a simple table of masters, slaves and address ranges, since this is fundamental to modeling the hardware-software interface. VS doesn’t require blocks to be connected explicitly in the model to support the memory map. It will generate a basic routing mechanism for you in support of however you define the map.

You’ll also need an interrupt map specification, again a simple table of devices and interrupt slots. Note also that in stub models, VS supports simple scripting so you can implement simple behavior for those endpoints without having to manually create a TLM. You can also add clock and reset tree information and model off-chip interfaces in a simple way, to model for example serial I/O. These features together should get you to your first-order VDK on which software development can start. Certainly, with the CPU models in place you should have enough to start testing basic boot.

As development progresses, you’re going to want to replace more of your stub models with real models. VS supports an extensive library covering most standard peripherals among other function types. You might choose to include these in your first revision of the VDK or you might want to introduce them in subsequent revisions. In many cases this is very simple – select the full model you want to use and the stub it will replace. VS will figure out and reconnect memory and interrupt maps and other connections as needed. If the full model supports more than one memory map (or other connections) you’ll need to specify which one should connect to the prototype and provide a way to stub other connections, but again this is a pretty simple substitution.

Even for those functions for which the VS library cannot supply a ready-made VDK you can still defer a lot of the heavy lifting in building a full TLM model. TLM Creator (inside VS) will let you import an interface definition and register map from Excel or IP-XACT, or you can create these through simple table interfaces in the tool. This will build a skeleton model you can use in place of a stub. And when you want to complete the model, you’ll often find the skeleton already has 50% or more of the code on which you need to build.

The white paper provides much more detail on using VS in support of this kind of flow.

ARM and Open Silicon Join Forces to Fight the IoT Edge Wars!

ARM and Open Silicon Join Forces to Fight the IoT Edge Wars!
by Mitch Heins on 12-19-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Arm, IoT, IP, Open-Silicon, Security, Semiconductor Services

I spent the last several days doing a deep dive into the world of IoT security and what I’ve learned has scared the pants off me. Various analysts predict that there will be over 30 billion connected IoT devices by the year 2020 growing from 9.9 million in 2013. A quick audit of my home identified over 40 connected devices including everything from iPhones, laptops, and smart TVs to security cameras and motion detectors. My security system alone had 10 individually addressable devices. With approximately 124 million households in the United States, if we say 20% of them are as connected as I am that means roughly 1 billion IoT devices today. Pick your favorite multiplier but at the rate we are moving 30 billion sounds low by 2020. All of this connectivity sounds good right? What could possibly go wrong?

On October 21, the U.S. experienced one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks ever recorded that took down a major portion of the eastern seaboard’s internet service for over an hour. The attack made use of 10’s of millions of discrete IP addresses representing IoT devices infected by the Mirai botnet. These IoT devices were compromised and used to bombard a major DNS vendor that effectively took out the internet. It seems that the industry needs to snap to attention to get this under control moving forward.

On that note, I was fortunate enough to attend a webinar by ARM and Open Silicon that addressed how to improve security of IoT edge devices. This diagram provided by ARM explains that IoT chains are typically made up of sensors/actuators at the edge talking to gateways and then cloud-based servers. Devices within the cloud tend to be less vulnerable to attack as they are kept under constant surveillance in controlled environments. The edge devices however live “in the wild” and early versions of these devices really didn’t have much thought put into them regarding security. With the advent of the October attack, we have come to sudden realization that these devices can in fact be used against us.

Yossi Weisblum of ARM and Kalpesh Sanghvi of Open Silicon both made it very clear that future IoT devices must have security designed into them from the beginning. This starts by understanding of the threat surface (e.g. the types and techniques of threats that must be mitigated) for a given device and identifying the right level of security required. Both of these gentlemen went on to describe some basic tenants of good design-for-security and how their offerings give an IoT designer a fighting chance.

One of the key tenets of establishing security is what is known as RoT or Root of Trust. A RoT is some piece of code or hardware that has been hardened well enough that it’s not likely to be compromised, and either can’t be modified at all, or else can’t be modified without cryptographic credentials. IoT edge devices must be enabled to be secure by default. ARM’s TrustZone CryptoCell family of security IP enables IoT designers to design RoT into their edge devices. CryptoCell starts by isolating the execution environment of the edge device into multiple domains, those that ensure RoT and those that will be exposed to the outside world. CryptoCell also provides for secure boot and OTA (over the air) update capabilities to enable real-time resets and updates for edge devices that may be under attack or compromised.

TrustZone’s modular approach enables designers to make PPA (power, performance and area) trade-offs as not all devices share the same security needs. The TrustZone domains address control and scheduling, data interfaces, encryption and other security resources such as crypto key generation in hardware. It should be noted however, that ARM’s solution is actually a combination of both hardware and software. To that end, ARM’s offering also includes their mbed OS operating system that integrates the rest of ARM’s IP with the integrated security modules of CryptoCell. The mbed OS also includes application support for creating secure transmissions using mbed TLS and mbed Client, both of which use the encryption/decryption of the CryptoCell hardware IP.

Ok, so given you have all of ARM’s security IP, it’s still a challenge to figure out how to make an optimal IoT device for your application. Open Silicon has stepped in to help with a reference architecture for IoT design called Spec2Chip. The Spect2Chip architecture is based on ARM’s Cortex M series processors and the TrustZone CryptoCell security subsystem. This reference architecture gives designers a dramatic head start and includes the ability to prototype their designs in an FPGA based implementation before committing to a full production SoC for their IoT edge devices. The solution includes both the hardware stack based on ARM IP as well as application specific software stacks that make use of ARM’s mbed OS with associated drivers for sensors and communications modules. The idea is to provide a platform that allows both hardware and software designers to quickly build and test their proposed edge devices. The FPGA implementation includes the critical ARM security IP including key generation, encryption/decryption and authentication functions for real world testing.

So, while I am tempted to now unplug all of my early version IoT accessories for the sake of the country, it is certainly heartening to know that the industry has indeed awoken to this IoT edge threat and is fielding some very powerful solutions to take back the internet. If you are an IoT edge device designer be sure to check out ARM and Open Silicon’s offerings.