New-Tech Europe | May 2017

Autonomous Is the New Mobile: Linley on Cars

Paul McLellan, Cadence

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

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

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