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Cars are everywhere these days. It
doesn't really matter what sort of
event you attend in the semiconductor
ecosystem, you will hear a lot about
cars. In fact, even if you go to the
movies. The best-picture-Oscar-for-
two-minutes winner La La Land, is
a love story but it famously opens
with...cars. Pixar's next movie...Cars
3. I think it is the perfect theme for
semiconductors in 2017. Wherever
you turn, it will be cars.
I recently went to IRPS, the
International Reliability and Physics
Symposium. It has been going
since 1962 when the sophisticated
automotive electronics of the day
was pretty much a coil, to generate
a high enough voltage for a spark,
and a mechanically driven distributor
to sequence the cylinders. This
year's conference covered a lot of
topics but one of the tutorial tracks
was automotive, and a several of
the papers were concerned with
automotive reliability. I left IRPS in
Monterey early in the morning to
drive up to Santa Clara for the Linley
Autonomous Hardware Conference.
This used to be focused on mobile,
but from a merchant semiconductor
point of view that is now boring: the
big guys design their own chips, and
Qualcomm and Mediatek mop up
most of the rest. Now it is all about
cars: LED-based lidar, networks-on-
chip for automotive reliability, vision
processing, deep learning.
Automotive
Semiconductors Are the
Next Big Thing
One of the reasons for this is that it is
the Next Big Thing in semiconductors.
But it is also a segment of the industry
in transition. Until recently, "interesting
automotive semiconductor" was an
oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp." It
was a segment that consisted of
low-complexity devices designed
in extremely mature and well-
characterized processes. Competition
was mainly on price and reliability
considerations. No chips were in
leading-edge processes since there
wasn't a decade of data to characterize
them, and the performance wasn't
required. Then along came advanced
driver assistance systems (ADAS) and
autonomous driving. Suddenly higher
performance networks (Ethernet) and
higher performance processors were
required to process camera data.
It was a new class of requirements.
The
advanced
semiconductor
ecosystem didn't understand the
reliability requirements in detail since
they weren't required for mobile.
The automotive semiconductor
leaders didn't understand advanced
processes or high-performance
multicore processors, since they
Autonomous Is the New Mobile: Linley on
Cars
Paul McLellan, Cadence
46 l New-Tech Magazine Europe