With all of the features being added to the automobile that add complexity, there is a belief that the aftermarket audio space — think the big, booming subwoofers of the past — has flattened out. Once, stores like Car Toys and Circuit City were doing a lot of business stripping out standard equipment, and installing aftermarket amplifiers, higher end 8-tracks, then cassette players, then CD players, now USB drives, Bluetooth gadgetry, back-up cameras, remote starters, vehicle alarm systems, and soon to be autonomous driving kits, amongst endless other options. And now as more OEMs move audio from analog to digital, the aftermarket providers may take a hit.

It is true that automotive OEMs now recognize the importance of designing subsystems in from the system level, and are working to move towards this. At the same time, all of this new technology is an investment that, frankly, takes away from the bottom line. As a result, they are re-examining everything – including audio. As part of that, they are starting to place more importance on the default audio system, maybe partly because they want to keep that piece of the pie, but also because customers have demanded it.

“Now they are thinking about it from the beginning, looking at it like a system because they want connectivity to the phone, Bluetooth streaming — so now it’s all in there, it’s not something that you pay extra to go get,” observed Anil Khanna, senior manager for the automotive audio business line in the automotive business unit at Mentor, a Siemens business.

I’m sure this is true from the OEM’s point of view, but I’m not convinced it’s hurting the aftermarket audio guys. A quick Internet search revealed two dozen car stereo installers in Louisville, Kentucky alone, which is the closest ‘big’ city to where I live. Sure, Car Toys and Circuit City have been replaced by Best Buy, Sound Factory and Dad’s Custom Car Audio, but this still seems to be a healthy number of suppliers.

I think the bottom line is that there will always be a segment of the population that want their premium audio from the factory augmented and/or bumped up, which in itself demands a more skilled technician given the complexity of vehicles today versus 20 years ago. So if anything, it would seem reasonable that the dollars may merely be shifting for the true premium audio — from the automotive OEM to the aftermarket car stereo store, as has been true for many decades now.

Related Stories
GMK: Rethinking The Audio Jack
Korean startup adds power and digital communication to standard headphone plug.
Data Storage Issues Grow For Cars
Autonomous vehicles will generate huge quantities of data. Where will it be kept?
Mobile Processors Move Beyond Phones
Qualcomm, other vendors look to autos, drones, and other applications.

The post What Happened To Aftermarket Car Audio? appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

In recent months, unsecured IoT devices have been targeted by multiple malware strains, including Brickerbot, Mirai and Hajime. Brickerbot is a nefarious family of malware that is designed to exploit hard-coded passwords in IoT devices and cause permanent denial of service (PDoS). According to Radware (via the DHS), BrickerBot.1 and BrickerBot.2 exploit hard-coded passwords, exposed SSH and brute force Telnet. Although BrickerBot.1 is no longer active, BrickerBot.2 continues to target Linux-based devices which may or may not run BusyBox and which expose a Telnet service protected by default or hard-coded passwords. The source of the attacks is concealed by TOR exit nodes.

Meanwhile, Mirai continuously scans for IoT devices that are accessible over the internet and protected by factory default or hardcoded user names and passwords. It subsequently infects vulnerable endpoints with malware that forces them to report to a central control server, effectively turning ‘zombie’ devices into a bot that can be used in DDoS attacks. Similarly, Hajime scans the internet for vulnerable IoT devices such as cameras, DVRs and routers that have open Telnet ports and use default passwords. Although the vigilante Hajime botnet has yet to launch DDoS attacks, Radware security researchers warn that the enigmatic malware strain is a “big threat forming” and can ultimately be exploited for nefarious purposes.

The rise of Internet of Things malware illustrates the real-world risks associated with deploying unsecured IoT devices. Indeed, nearly every device is a potential target for cyber criminals with malicious intent. As such, it is important to understand that reducing the IoT attack surface starts with adequately protecting both services and endpoints. To be sure, an attacker cannot compromise an endpoint without first establishing an unauthorized communication channel.

An IoT security solution should therefore only allow legitimate, verified cloud services to ‘talk’ with each device by thwarting unauthorized communication attempts trying to exploit known vulnerabilities in the device’s software or firmware. In addition, IoT devices should be uniquely and cryptographically verified by the service to determine if they are authorized to connect, thereby reducing the attack surface of the service by preventing remote attacker access directly or via device emulators. As a second layer of defense, the service should be able to identify compromised endpoints and quarantine them before they can inflict damage.

Perhaps most importantly, IoT security solutions should be ready out of the box: simple, affordable and easy to use. One effective method of simplifying security and reducing costs is to deploy IoT devices with pre-provisioned keys, identifiers and pre-integrated security software that ‘knows’ how to work seamlessly with the service security component. This model allows service providers to bolster security for a wide range of connected ‘things.’

The post Playing Catch Up With IoT Security appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Most people associate automotive audio with the car radio, which has been a fixture in cars for decades. But in the future, these systems also will listen and respond in real time—and they will play music more selectively in different parts of vehicle.

“Traditionally, audio in the car was one-sided, where humans would listen to information or to music or to entertainment,” said Anil Khanna, senior manager for the automotive audio business line in the automotive business unit at Mentor, a Siemens business. “You have your radio on and you are listening to music while you get voice commands through GPS prompts. Now, audio is becoming bi-directional. You can see that very clearly on the consumer side with the emergence of technologies like Amazon Echo, where a person is commanding a device to do something. That’s happening in the automotive audio space, as well.”

Indeed, audio is a very important part of the automobile experience today, and it will become even more critical as cars begin to implement driver-assistance and eventually autonomous driving capabilities.

“The audio subsystem plays a role in infotainment, noise control, sound design, and communications,” said Gerard Andrews, product marketing director, audio/voice IP, Tensilica products at Cadence. “The infotainment system usually consists of a variety of audio decoders and post-processing technologies that provide a compelling user experience. An immersive audio experience is so important to many car buyers that often the audio system is allowed to be branded by a company other than the car manufacturer.”

At a time when automotive electronics are experiencing explosive growth, this segment is just beginning to gain traction—but not for the obvious reasons. Last November, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) passed a mandate that requires new electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles to have an active pedestrian alert system by the fall of 2018. This means dedicated audio technology, which didn’t even exist in cars until about two years ago.

Since then, technologies such as Analog Devices’ Automotive Audio Bus (A2B) have joined consumer-focused options like MOST (media-oriented systems transport), Ethernet AVB, HDBaseT, and others. MOST is the legacy audio bus technology and is found in almost every car brand around the world. It has gone through three evolutions: MOST 25, MOST 50, MOST 150. The number is a measure of the bandwidth, so MOST 150, introduced in 2007, can carry audio (or video) data at speeds of 150 megabits per second.

Fig. 1: Analog Devices’ A2B schematic. Source: ADI

“Even now, some carmakers use analog audio lines to transmit audio,” Khanna said. “Think of the home theater system. There is an amplifier in the front under the TV, two speakers behind you on the floor, all connected through cables. Every speaker has a serial left and right, and there are cables running all over the room. That’s exactly how it is in the cars today with legacy analog audio transmission. It’s either that or MOST, and that’s it. High-end audio systems use Ethernet AVB (audio video bridging). Again, that’s a borrowed bus. It’s not dedicated to audio. It transmits audio and video. Until A2B came along, which is solely dedicated to transmitting 32 channels of digital audio, there were 32 wires going all over the car. Now this is done over two pieces of wire.

Going forward, technology requirements such as higher bandwidth are driving the advancement of new and emerging bus technologies like Ethernet AVB and others. The bandwidth needs are coming from the requirement to drive video specifically. Audio is very low bandwidth, but as soon as video is added a tremendous amount of bandwidth is required. If real-time video is required, that’s even more data, bringing latency and guaranteed timing into the discussion. For example,  an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system with a rear-screen entertainment unit has up to two screens in the back of the vehicle and one screen in the front for the driver’s IVI head unit. When transmitting video throughout the car, a technology that can support higher bandwidth for both audio and video is needed.

High bandwidth is required for surround-view cameras, as well. “Some cars have a bird’s eye view, so you have input coming from four different cameras,” Khanna said. “In this case, you want to be real-time because when you’re parking your car, you want to see what’s around you.”

Video not required
But there also is a growing number of advanced automotive applications that do not require video, and there are good reasons to separate them.

“Applications exist today, and applications are being created just because now we have this dedicated bus,” Khanna said. “For example, the hands-free system. Today, there are microphones next to the driver. You dial by name. Typically, when we think of hands-free we always think of the driver as the primary person who is talking on the phone and no one else is talking. But all of that is changing now. We are seeing microphones proliferate in the car where there are personal audio zones set up. Literally, you will see four audio zones set up. There will be some interference, but not a lot, with the help of software algorithms and noise-canceling and noise-reduction algorithms. So you can form personal zones where someone could be watching their own favorite TV show, somebody could be talking on the phone, and they would have minimal interruption between the two. I’m not saying it’s coming out next year, but I can assure you that research is done and there are companies that are doing this. We are definitely looking to that as well.”

Harmon is one of these. It already touts its ISZ (individual sound zone) technology, which is all audio-related. It uses a combination of microphones and noise cancelation algorithms to create personal zones.

YT Wang, CTO and president of Archband Labs, points to additional areas of activity:

• The move from analog to digital. More functions with higher standards are required to ensure that the overall performance and cost can meet market demands. Traditionally, car audio signals have been distributed through high-quality analog cables, but those are expensive and susceptible to environmental noise.
• Configurable and expandable channels. With more features packed into personal cars today, one trend is to build high-quality configurable audio channels for recording and playback. For example, a driver may want to listen to the radio while a passenger may want to use his or her AR/VR/TV. Optimized channel partitioning is essential for this, and IP can be expandable to multiple channels for SoC integration and process porting.
• Hands-free intelligent voice-in-command. IP is now available to support hands-free operation for low-power voice detection. This technology already can be used to detect human voices in noisy situations such as high wind. When voice activity is detected, the IP wakes up the SoC system’s natural language search engine for keyword detection. And if a keyword is detected, the whole SoC system is woken up to take in driver’s commands and play back machine-learning responses.

Cadence’s Andrews also is seeing the move in automotive audio to use the audio subsystem to run active noise cancellation algorithms to reduce cabin noise.

Converging problems and context
Being able to isolate physical stimuli and decipher their meaning is an ongoing quest inside of many automotive systems these days. A simple solution in audio is to match a sound against a database of known words or phrases. The same can be done with simple images in a non-safety-critical video subsystem. A more complex solution is to use neural networks to react in a way that is closer to how a human perceives and reacts to stimuli. The problems are similar, though, across a number of sensor types, and the solutions depend upon the end goals.

No matter how these problems are tackled, though, the common denominator is that data needs to move faster, and it needs to be interpreted more quickly so that appropriate action can be taken.

“There are two performance metrics for on-chip and chip-to-chip communication,” said Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing at Achronix. “One is bandwidth, and that can be inside the chip or across a PCB. The second is elimination of the latency as data moves to the end destination.”

This sounds simple enough in isolation, but many of these problems need to be addressed at a system level. Sensor fusion can create interference because multiple signals are competing for resources. In addition, system updates—particularly over-the-air software or firmware updates—can affect the overall performance the same way software updates can slow a computer or mobile device. All of that needs to be considered in the design.

“Two things to remember here are that any source of information is never perfect, and anything new will change,” said Mensor.

For car companies, that may be a good thing. For engineers developing any subsystem, it can cause serious headaches.

“The car itself is good for 20 years, but now you have a car that is three or four years old that is missing all of this new technology,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of ArterisIP. “So one of the unintended consequences is a faster upgrade cycle. Or maybe you lease a car for three or four years and then you turn it in for a new model.”

Car systems also need to have resilience built into them because at some point some component will fail. “But many systems are not designed for reliability,” Janac said. “If your smartphone fails, you may be annoyed, but you go out and buy another one. A smartphone won’t kill you, but a car can. These systems have to be thought through for functional safety and resilience all the way through from the lowest denominator, which is the IP,  to the user. If you look at the satellite electronics, that doesn’t fail very often. But it does get bigger and it costs more.”

Conclusion
In a car, audio is just one piece of a complex collection of interconnected systems. The attraction of a separate audio bus is that it limits unexpected or unwanted interactions between systems. And as cars become more autonomous, it also may be the system that people interface with the most, which is why noise cancellation and personalized audio zones are getting so much attention.

“Road noise cancellation is something we will likely see within the next three years,” said Khanna. “We know that some top OEMs are looking at this very seriously. Previously, the barrier to adoption was the high cost of the individual components. A2B has changed that. Just like any technology, first the technology comes out and then people wait and see how this is going to be adopted. Once they feel like it’s getting traction then you will see the Tier 2 players jump in who make components for the technology that is required. There are companies out there that have already started to manufacture A2B-compliant microphones. They are MEMS microphones—tiny, the size of a penny or a quarter. These tiny things are daisy-chained together to significantly reduce the amount of wiring in the car, which reduces the weight of the car.”

And as voice—and especially natural-language communication—becomes a more important user interface in vehicles, it also will grow in importance. Voice recognition technology is already found in many cars. The next step is to continually refine that technology, allowing much more complex interactions with a minimum of disruption.

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To accommodate the various requirements of OEMs and service providers, the Rambus CryptoManager IoT Device Management provides flexible deployments. Rambus provides all the required components to enable seamless integration for both the OEM and service provider, creating a one-stop-shop for IoT security.

To read more, click here.

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Autonomous vehicles gather multiple streams of information/data from sensors, radar, radios, IR sensors and cameras. This goes beyond the current Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) or In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). The autonomous car will be acutely aware of its surroundings, running sophisticated algorithms that will make decisions in order to drive the vehicle. However, self-driving cars will also be processing vehicle-to-vehicle communications, as well as connecting to a number of external devices that will be installed in the highway of the future as automotive communication infrastructures develop. All of these features and processes require bandwidth-and a lot of it: Start the car; drive; turn; red light, stop; – PEDESTRIAN – BRAKE! This would be a very bad time for the internal vehicle networks to run out of bandwidth.

Add to the driving functions the simultaneous infotainment streams for each passenger, vehicle Internet capabilities, etc. and the current 100 megabits-per-second (mbps) 100BASE-T1 Ethernet bandwidth used in automotive is quickly strained. This is paving the way (pun intended) for 1000BASE-T1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) for automotive networks. Ethernet has long been the economical volume workhorse with millions of miles of cabling in buildings the world over. Therefore, the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group has endorsed iGbE as the next network bandwidth standard in automotive.

From Car-jacking to Car-hacking—Security Critical
Another major factor for automotive networking is security. In addition to the many technology features and processes needed for driving and entertainment, security is a major concern for cars, especially autonomous cars. Science fiction movies where cars are hacked overriding the driver’s capabilities are scary enough, but in real life would be beyond a nightmare. Automotive security to prevent spyware, whether planted from a rogue mechanic or roving hack, will require strong authentication to protect privacy and passenger safety. Cars of the future will be able to reject any devices added that aren’t authenticated, as well as any external intrusion through the open communication channels of the vehicle.

This is why companies like Marvell have joined with organizations like IEEE to help create open standards, such as GbE for automotive, to keep moving automotive technologies forward. (For additional background or information on this topic view the IEEE 2014 Automotive Day presentation by Alex Tan on the Benefits of Designing 1000BASE-T1 into Automotive Architectures.)

Technology to Drive Next-Generation Automotive Networking
Next generations of automotive Ethernet Networking technology are capable of taking what used to be the separate domains of the car — infotainment, driver assist, body electronics and control — and connecting them together to provide a high-bandwidth standards-based data backbone for the vehicle. For example, new 1000BASE-T1 automotive Ethernet PHY transceivers compliant with the IEEE 802.3bp 1000BASE-T1 standard are already on the market. These types of products support the market’s highest in-vehicle connectivity bandwidth and are designed to meet the rigorous EMI requirements of an automotive system.

The 1000BASE-T1 standard allows high-speed and bi-directional data traffic and in-vehicle uncompressed 720p30 camera video for multiple HD video streams, including 4K resolution, all over a lightweight, low-cost single pair cable. Low-power PHY devices can also support 100BASE-T1 and compressed 1080p60 video for infotainment, data transport and camera systems. In addition, 7-port Ethernet switches are also now available to support these higher automotive networking standards to make it easier to keep up with the additional bandwidth demands for the connected vehicle.

Harnessing the low cost and high bandwidth of Ethernet brings many advantages to next-generation automotive architecture, including the flexibility to add new applications. In other words, allowing the possibility to build for features that haven’t even been thought up yet. Because while the car of the future may drive itself, it takes a consortium of technology leaders to pave the way.

The post Overcoming Bandwidth Issues In Self-Driving Vehicles appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

But in many industries, proprietary solutions to this day have enormous value, deliver trust, security, reliability and scalability. SoC design management (DM) is one of those areas. In this area, proprietary carries an even greater value because of the enormous stakes (and cost) that come with each design project.

Nonetheless, the open-versus-proprietary argument still lingers in our sector, especially when it comes to DM technology.

Optimizing for an industry
Design management software has been used for a longer time by the software industry as opposed to the hardware design teams. As hardware and software teams grow closer together, there can be a temptation to embrace solutions from the software industry that aren’t necessarily (or easily) optimized for SoC design. Ultimately the decision to adopt a solution can come down either to cost or efficiency.

Case in point: Some of the commercial DM solutions in the semiconductor space are actually layers of glue logic added to solutions designed for the software industry. This has value for some teams such as the software and some front-end engineering teams. But what works for the software industry (and software engineers in your company) does not always work for the different types of designs in the semiconductor industry.

Why? Software consists primarily of small text files often edited by users concurrently with frequent merges of changes. SoC design flows, on the other hand, comprise a combination of text based RTL files and large binary files in addition to the large text files generated by the tools. The need for concurrent changes and merges by multiple users assumes less relevance. The emphasis is more on ensuring performance while managing large data sets across multiple sites, data security, optimizing disk usage and EDA tool integrations, to name a few. Data management systems built as a layer glued on top of a software configuration management (SCM) system often have to work around the SCM system to cater to the needs of hardware designers, such as fast workspace creation or optimizing disk space.

Let’s take, for example, network disk space usage & optimization. When a workarea is created with a SCM solution, a copy of the data is retrieved from the design repository and copied into the user’s workarea as physical files. A user typically will modify only a handful of the design files in his workarea while utilizing the rest of the design data files simply as read only objects often required to run simulation and/or verification jobs. In a project with multiple users, you can see how redundant read only data is duplicated across workareas! This is a bigger problem in SoC design flows as compared to software design flows because of the size of the design files.

DM solutions using an underlying SCM resort to using Linux kernel-level changes by developing proprietary file system or custom hardware to optimize the disk space. These techniques compromise the stability and integrity of the IT infrastructure by introducing non-standard parts and can be a major headache for the IT staff. As a result, most companies using SCMs for hardware designs avoid using this feature altogether.

We take a different view at ClioSoft, one focused on the unique needs of semiconductor design teams. In the above example, ClioSoft’s solution optimizes network disk space and speeds workspace creation by creating native Linux symbolic links in a common cache for files that are not being modified instead of copying them into each user’s workspace.

Let’s look at another example—tool integration—and another common misperception about so-called proprietary solutions—that integration is hard. Far from it. Tools-integration activity sometimes requires integrators to work with legacy software that has unique requirements. When a DM vendor owns the entire solution software, it can accommodate the needs of the EDA tool even if it may seem quirky and no SCM system would support it.

Let us look at yet another example – something which can impact the performance of the DM system. The performance of a DM system depends on the manner in which the data is managed. Each file used in a typical software design flow is managed individually and over the course of the development cycle has several versions. SCM systems are designed to handle such scenarios and manage files. However, the nature of data is different in case of hardware design. Most EDA tools use an open access database. An open access layout view is composed of 2-4 files sometimes called a co-managed set. A change to any one of the files in the co-managed set implies a change has been done to the entire layout. Depending on the operation the editor does you may have one or more files changing. Tracking individual revisions of the files is therefore meaningless. A DM solution based on SCM would need to store extra glue logic to decode “layout” versions and map it to the version of individual files, which can considerably impact the SCM performance!

A simple solution to this would be to treat the co-managed set of files as a package and then manage revisions of the package rather than individual files. This is both logically correct and efficient in terms of tool performance. Implementing this is difficult if not impossible with an SCM. A proprietary solution like ClioSoft SOS can easily implement such a problem of co-managed data sets. SoC design flows of today have several such examples where managing packages instead of a large number and size of individual files is immensely beneficial – place & route databases, verification IPs and even custom outputs from simulations and verification runs.

The nature of choice
There also can be a lot of hype around “choice” when it comes to DM solutions. Presumably, the more choice the better.

Self-styled “open” solutions, however, can run into challenges in scaling and support. Any issues in the solution which require some fixes within the software based DM solutions could potentially result in a long wait. And in a globally competitive playing field, any delays to the schedule can prove to be catastrophic to the product success.

Enhancement requests? It’s difficult to see a frictionless path with open solutions. But proprietary DM solutions designed for the semiconductor industry have the resources and support to service those needs quickly.

The “open” proponents also will argue that your design data is held hostage in a proprietary solution. But let’s be honest: In today’s world, it is next to impossible to hold anybody’s data hostage. And with ClioSoft SOS, customers can easily export the data from ClioSoft in the same way consumers can move data from iOS to Android and vice versa.

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to DM solutions, but “proprietary” is not a bad word either. In fact, given the immense risk and cost associated with design projects, we can warm to the word.

And at the end of the day, consider that Apple has a proprietary ecosystem. It’s worked pretty well for them and millions of their customers for a long time.

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The move has set off a scramble among a number of companies for unified control and forwarding plane designs, starting from the low to midrange systems and spanning everything from the access and aggregation layers of the fixed network.

Beneath the hood of this shift is an effort to tap into the growth of the IoT and the innovation surrounding it.

“The carriers are looking at these IoT-like services, and at the same time looking at how and when they transition off of their 2G networks, and virtualization is an absolutely key technology,” said Ross Cassan, director of product marketing for mobility infrastructure at Spirent Networks. “We are seeing all of our carrier customers really come to grips with that.”

Spirent’s platform emulates a Narrowband-IoT network from end to end, verifying whether the network can handle the expected IoT traffic and, if so, what kind of service-level agreements (SLAs) can be guaranteed and relied upon. The company worked with the Brocade software group formerly known as Connectum on that.

“When you do that, you can see where you might simplify the protocols, and simplify the silicon at either end—the end device or the core of the network,” said Cassan.

Using virtualization, carriers can create a ‘network slice’ for IoT for a given set of customers and applications, like utilities and power meters, or banks for transaction processing. It’s this work that actually makes the IoT business model viable for carriers.

Cloud seeding
The cloud-based software revolution, together with the processing power gains the semiconductor industry has made, have enabled this “central office re-architected as a data center.” Known as the Mobile Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center, or M-CORD, the name is consistent with the alphabet soup of acronyms that has always dominated this market. M-CORD is just one of a multitude of efforts created by the NFV (network function virtualization) Congress to iron out how equipment makers, standards bodies, and carriers will get this very seismic shift in telco network architecture accomplished.

“All of the things that people worked on for the last 7 to 10 years are the same general techniques” the carriers can use to scale at 5G, said Raj Singh, vice president and general manager of the network and communication group at Cavium. “The carriers are saying, ‘Hold on a minute, if I can make this work it makes my life really easy. I don’t have to make custom hardware…By definition, virtualized functions are scalable.”

ARM and Intel enabled this when their cores gained the ability to support hypervisors, Singh said. “You needed to be able to run hypervisors and containers and dockers.”

That happened in the new cloud-based software data centers. Cavium makes an ARM-based network server chip solution that work in this mode. The Spirent/Brocade solution is Intel-based. Both are enabled by extensions that allow the system to run the kernel-based virtual machine (KVM).

ARM has been building out its IP portfolio for the customers in this ecosystem for the past few years, having recognized that the carrier networks were poised for change. The company coined the “Intelligent Flexible Cloud” for “intelligence across the network, with different combinations of storage, acceleration and compute, rather than in previous generations having intelligence located at either end of a rather dumb network,” according to Bob Monkman, a senior segment marketing manager with ARM.

Cavium’s Singh points out that the semiconductor industry crossed a threshold in terms of compute power and latency, which makes virtualization and intelligence across the network possible. “After about 28nm, the silicon was capable and quick enough to perform this, to allow for the extra level of abstraction that is virtualization in the network,” he said. “At 28nm and after that, these network ICs were up to the task. It was always feasible. But it became possible.”

Singh notes that as carrier networks improved from 2G to 3G and 4G (LTE), they added capacity and feeds. Hardware scaled in the form of fixed function appliances, increasing cost and complexity all along.

“Why do we need to change the network architecture now? Why can’t we just continue along the same path?” Singh asks. The answer is the gigabit-per-second capacity required for 5G. “That’s 20 times the capacity per sector—100 Gpbs, in each direction, and not by two. It’s by eight. That is impossible, because it means 20 cables going to each one of those radio heads. It’s clearly not a feasible way to go building networks in the future. Suddenly that becomes very important, if you can virtualize the network for the radio access.”

Disaggregating the radio access network (RAN) allows carriers to create a new front-haul network with a lower bandwidth requirement.

“In the network topology of the future, the core of the network is in virtualized baseband networks,” said Singh. Cavium and ARM together have become expert in silicon that can run multiple virtual machines, each of which is separate from others and secure. That has always been one of the advantages of virtualization technology, and it is in widespread use throughout datacenters partially for that reason.

The cellular side
What happens on the server is only one piece of the puzzle. The cellular infrastructure is undergoing change, as well.

“Cellular infrastructure is arguably one of the most dynamic segments right now,” says ARM’s Monkman. “Certain equipment types will be driven much more towards latency and throughput with stringent power budgets. These cannot be met with generic, virtualized compute only. You need a mix of the right core, the right interconnect [depending on whether the ASIC is for the Aatenna, basestation (BTS) or mobile edge computing (MEC) boxes]. As functions disaggregate from the BTS, real time offload and feature rich APIs are key.”

Some ARM SoC vendors are delivering more than 100 cores in a given device for this new style of network compute power.

“ARM SoC vendors deliver a wide range,” Monkman said. “That means 2 cores in some applications, all the way to 100+ cores. It really depends on the use case, some being remote radio heads or low end routers, through RAN and even EPC proof points. Our licensees deploy many-core SoCs, with virtualization hooks, different combinations of compute, storage and value-add accelerators for workload optimized solutions. The ARM business model is well suited to the range of use cases from RRH, antennae, IoT gateways, storage controllers, up to high-performance servers. A high percentage of cellular equipment edge network based equipment is, in fact, ARM-based today. But this is new equipment that has transitioned over from MIPS or POWER-based designs.”

And this is just the beginning of this transition.

“For MEC, and for the core network, there is certainly a desire to use more generic compute requirements, reuse of software over platforms, faster deployment and development cycles, and CoRD is one of the frameworks that is set up to enable this type of agile development and deployment,” said Monkman.

He cites ARM’s activity in Linaro, the open-source software community, and more specifically helping to define the right software interfaces to allow network offload and ensuring NFV compliance for these containerized/virtualized environments. In OPNFV, ARM has been delivering an ARM-based NFVI platform for three releases now, through the ARMband subproject, he noted.

The “M-CORD” project, meanwhile, began at Stanford rather than in the labs at Verizon or AT&T.

Not so fast
But carriers around the world have a large 2G infrastructure today. They only want to decommission it as necessary, say numerous industry sources.

“Virtualization allows them to start bringing over customers and offer them IoT services on their network, and then scale it as the financial and business models evolve and mature,” Cassan said.

China Mobile has an Open NFV test lab that Cavium and ARM are supporting, as well as the Swedish network software stalwart Enea. Singh said Comcast, Google, SK Telecom and China Unicom, the mainland’s other giant carrier, are embracing and supporting M-CORD too.

“One key emerging area is for containerized microservices architectures—meeting real-time, latency-sensitive traffic needs, and re-defining the hierarchy for the infrastructure, is 5G slicing,” said ARM’s Monkman. “ARM views this particular emerging segment as a blend of the edge access requirements and the core network, and ARM is focusing on where NFV equivalence across architectures is key—while balancing the performance with the correct level of offload for edge applications to meet the 1ms turn-around targets for mmWave applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.”

Conclusion
After watching other technology segments take advantage of gains in performance and power and increased connectivity, driven in part by the IoT, the large telecommunications companies are finally poised for change. How quickly that plays out, and in what markets or regions, remains to be seen. But for the first time in years, big changes are at least being discussed and tried out. And that, in itself, is worth watching.

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The post Carriers Push Datacenter-Style Virtualization appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

The post Tech Talk: Cryogenic DRAM appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

DAC deserves kudos for continuing to serve its community in new ways. The conference long ago evolved beyond its historical roots as a showcase of academic IC design automation research and now embraces a slew of more hands-on topics, including embedded software, IoT, IP and security. Automotive just happens to be the most compelling of these new focus areas.

Okay, so maybe I’m biased as director of automotive marketing at Mentor, a Siemens business (as of March). But there is a whole pile of evidence that supports this conclusion, including, over the last year or two, the most astonishing run of M&A activity the semiconductor industry has ever seen. A good chunk of this activity, most agree, is about jockeying for position in the auto industry, where the growth rate for semiconductor revenue is more than twice that in the more staid realms of PCs and phones. A few hundred billion dollars in bets suggests that the car will indeed turn out to be the ultimate mobile device, as we marketeers like to say.

That was my bet, anyway, when I jumped from Freescale-NXP to Mentor early last year. Back then I confidently blogged it was a “can’t miss career move,” though in truth, a few of my tech pals in Austin and Europe raised their eyebrows at the news. Any questioning stopped when I explained the scope of Mentor’s auto business. Our customer base is populated by (among others) 17 of the world’s top 20 carmakers, and our track record spans two decades and includes a growing portfolio of design tools and services covering all the automotive megatrends routinely in the news — autonomous vehicles, electrification, connectivity and advanced vehicle architecture. We boil down our offerings in less than a minute.

Prior to the Siemens acquisition, Mentor CEO Wally Rhines — who also has one of the best analyses of recent chip M&A activity you’ll read anywhere (see EE Times part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) — liked to point out that auto-related business accounted for about 20% of our overall $1B+ revenue, and that it was by far the fastest growing segment. Do some Googling and you’ll see this puts us in fairly rarefied company among tech and software companies jockeying for positioning in the new automotive supply chain.

Our DRS 360 Autonomous Driving Platform, which we announced at SAE World Congress in Detroit,  generated dozens of original news stories in countries around the world, a rarity in this age of collapsing media and perpetually recycled press releases. Without a doubt, though the biggest story of all came last fall, with the announcement of Siemens $4.5B bid to buy Mentor. The deal cleared its last hurdle in March and now Mentor is part of much more powerful and deep pocketed automotive enterprise.

Check out this from a March 30 open letter to Siemens and Mentor Graphics customers, by Tony Hemmelgarn, chief executive of Siemens PLM Software, our new parent organization: “Only Siemens provides integrated software and automation solutions across the entire value chain of our customers from initial conceptual design through manufacturing planning and execution through service and support of both the products and the plants that produce them. With the addition of Mentor Graphics, Siemens now delivers the most comprehensive digital design portfolio—from integrated circuit design, to system design and the complete Digital Enterprise.”

You can’t miss Siemens at DAC. Former CEO of Siemens PLM Software, Chuck Grindstaff will deliver the DAC keynote on Tuesday, June 9, in ballroom A. Since October, Chuck has been executive chairman of Siemens PLM Software.

Mentor, long a fixture and sponsor at DAC, will be there again this year, and automotive content looms large in our offerings. The big automotive themes you hear from the main stage will be echoed in our booths, where we’ll feature a stellar lineup of sessions, themselves reason enough to attend DAC if you’re working in the automotive space. The complete list of these sessions is below. I hope to see you there.

In the meantime, if you have questions, whether about the raw data sensor fusion or the best place for Austin-style tacos, drop me a note: andrew_macleod@mentor.com.

Sessions at either Mentor or Verification Academy booths:

How Pre-Qualified Tools Simplify ISO 26262 Compliance (Monday, Tues, Weds)
Presenter: Joseph Dailey, Global Functional Safety Manager, Mentor
Products: Security

Test Solutions for the Automotive Market (Monday, Tues, Weds )
Presenter: Stephen Pateras, Product Marketing Director, BIST & Automotive Solutions, Mentor
Products: Tessent

Emerging Trends in AMS Verification Methodology for Automotive & IoT Devices (Monday)
Presenter: Sathish Balasubramanian, Product Marketing Manager, Mentor
Products: Verification

STMicroelectronics: Low-Power Design using High-Level Synthesis for Automotive Image Sensor (Tues)
Presenter: Marc Schmitz, Imaging Product Digital Design Manager, STMicroelectronics
Products: Catapult HLS, PowerPro

TowerJazz Automotive Reliability with RESCAR Checks and Calibre PERC Reliability Analysis (Tues)
Presenter: Alexandre Arriordaz, Technical Marketing Manager, Mentor
Presenter: Ofer Tamir, Senior Director, CAD, Design Enablement and Support, TowerJazz
Products: Calibre

Selective-hardening: Low-cost Soft-error Solution for Automotive (Tues)
Presenter: Amir Rahat, Vice President of Research & Development, Optima DA
Products: Verification

Implementation of Advanced Automotive ICs Using Mentor’s Digital Implementation Platform – On Semiconductor (Tues)
Presenter: Wai Yung, Design Engineer, OnSemi
Products: Oasys-RTL, Nitro-SoC

Avoiding the Potholes of ISO 26262 with Mentor’s Enterprise Verification Platform (Tues)
Presenter: Bryan Ramirez, Strategic Markets Manager, Mentor
Products: Questa

Impact of ISO 26262 on the Fabless Ecosystem (Tues)
Moderator: Joseph Davis, Director of Product Marketing for Calibre Interfaces, Mentor
Panelist: Lluis Paris, Director of IP Portfolio Marketing, TSMC
Products: Calibre

Veloce Brings Unique Solutions to the Automotive Market (Weds)
Presenter: Neill Mullinger, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Mentor
Products: Emulation

Communication-aware Pipelined Instruction Set Architecture for AUTOSAR-based Automotive ECUs (Weds)
Presenter: Ahmed Hamed, Mentor
Products: EDA

How Formal Reduces Fault Analysis for ISO 26262 (Weds)
Presenter: Doug Smith, Formal Applications Specialist, Mentor
Products: Verification

Enabling ISO 26262 Compliance with Calibre (Weds)
Presenter: Joseph Davis, Director of Product Marketing for Calibre Interfaces, Mentor
Products: Calibre

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