Embedded computing reaches edge server space

Dan Demers, General Manager Americas, congatec

Rugged servers are a major megatrend in 2022 and beyond

2022 will be the year of embedded server technologies. For Dan Demers, General Manager Americas at congatec, there’s no doubt about it. Semiconductor manufacturers will bring new powerful server CPUs onto the market. Embedded vendors such as congatec will implement them immediately on the brand new COM-HPC Server-on-Module standard recently released by standardization body PICMG. As these new server modules provide a significant performance leap over previous modules, OEMs will be able to completely open up y new edge server applications for their customers.

The big trend during the last decades saw PC technologies moving deeper and deeper into embedded applications. First, it was x86 low power desktop and notebook processors, later ARM based processors designed for smartphones and tablets. With Linux support for both ARM and x86 application processors, freely programmable applications are now available for nearly all devices. And IP communication standards as well as wireless technologies make it possible to intelligently connect almost everything. Smart products available today range from relatively simple temperature sensors to control heating systems, to WLAN based light switches and smart bulbs for the smart home sector. And the same trend towards IP based connectivity is happening across all the various industry sectors. Starting with IP based gateways for machines, devices and controls, it reaches deep into the industrial field with its IP based industrial Ethernet communication that includes TSN and IP technologies to connect peripheral devices and all the various established industrial field busses and serial interfaces.

(more…)

Yamaha Intelligent Machinery 2022 Market Forecast

2021 saw a significant increase in demand for assembly equipment, placing significant stress on the supply chain, especially in sea freight to the west coast and on available aircraft for urgent deliveries.  Standard sea freight custom clearance has now increased from a few days to several weeks.  Available space on ships has also decreased dramatically.

We expect this trend to continue for at least the first half of 2022.

For larger suppliers such as Yamaha, we enjoy preferred shipping status due to our entire importation strategy; but we are not immune to such delays.

(more…)

Yoan Dupret

Yoan is the Managing Director and CTO of Menta – a leader in embedded FPGA IP cores for chips and smart sensors. Prior to his position at Menta, he held various managerial and technical positions at DelfMEMS, Samsung, CSR, Infineon and Altis Semiconductor. Yoan holds a PhD from Supelec (France) and an Engineering degree (MSEE) from ESEO (France).

‘Enabling Adaptive and Resilient Compute at The Edge and Extreme Edge’

Two years on, the world Is still experiencing the aftershocks of Covid-19 – but despite the human tragedy it continues to be, without doubt science and technology helped us cope with it better. Imagine how much worse it would have been 30 years ago.

At the same time, east-west geopolitical tensions are growing – with technology as its core battlefield. So, both at a human level and political level, there is heightened awareness of science and technology as a key differentiator for nations and enabler for a better life.

(more…)

Kent McLeroth is President & CEO of Zuken USA, Inc.

As a leading global supplier of electrical and electronic design solutions, Zuken delivers world-class design solutions combining MBSE products and services with a mature, proven electrical and electronic design suite to address the needs of a broad range of industries across the globe. Looking at the year ahead, we see some trends in a few key application areas that will be interesting to track.

Digital Transformation builds momentum, and 2022 will see unprecedented changes in how we engineer our products.

2022 will continue the progression towards a robust digital engineering process. Today, many companies are just now researching what it means to deploy a digital engineering process. The digital engineering process is evolving as new tools, methods, and approaches are required. As adoption continues, drawings and documents will give way to product models that directly drive design and downstream processes, and serve as intelligent building blocks of the Digital Twin. The product model is rigorous, allowing for adjacent engineering disciplines to be coupled more tightly than ever before. The Digital Thread will not only capture design activities and data, but also manufacturing, supply chain, and the end-user via the IoT. Companies that embrace digital engineering will build an insurmountable competitive advantage.

(more…)

Four Reasons for a Positive Outlook on Embedded Memories

By Nando Basile, Marketing Manager for NVM Solutions, X-FAB

The prospects for embedded memories, particularly non-volatile ones, are pretty solid both in the medium and the long term. This is the result of several key technology and business trends, with the macro-scale evolution of modern society and increasing demand for electronics goods both being major contributing factors. The following article gives more detail on the dynamics involved.

The first trend influencing embedded memories is the contingency situation of semiconductor capacity shortage, which leading analysts (such as J.P. Morgan, Gartner and Deloitte) all expect to continue throughout the whole of 2022, and possibly even longer. From a chip availability perspective, customers embedding the required memory IP in their SoC design will be better protected, compared to those having to face the inherent risks associated with multiple supply management – where sourcing separate parts from different vendors and having to comply with SiP integration providers availability present challenges. Embedded solutions, coupled with advanced booking of capacity allocation will result in increased confidence that “everything will be included for the chip to work.” This will mean that customers’ trust in time-to-market delivery and that solutions will be cost effective can be assured, because of optimized utilization of the total silicon required by their application.

(more…)

Among what we observed is that SoC Design should be oriented to be seen as a commodity. A strong demand around SoC Compilation is occurring especially at front-end level. Several major semiconductor companies confirmed that first versions of SoC should be available “at the glance”.

Accelerating the process of SoC creation requires that EDA design tools provide a much higher degree of automation to manage design information very early in the design process. We believe it requires a unique way to manage unified design formats. All design information, including functional design (RTL), architecture (IP-XACT), timing constraints (SDC), power intent (UPF), physical (LEF/DEF), must be taken into consideration together and as early as possible in the SoC build process.

In practice, such approach should allow non-domain experts to make important design decisions. For example, a CAD engineer or RTL designer would have the capability to build a first SoC configuration from design assembly to synthesis.

A complementary trend that we observe is in the design space exploration. Traditional SoC integration approaches are not sufficient anymore to forecast the best PPA design configuration. Given aggressive design schedules and low-cost requirements, the amount of engineering resources required to run multiple what-if scenarios manually may be excessive, preventing design teams from achieving optimized solutions. Industry is looking for automated ways for SoC design planning. Learning algorithms are certainly important direction to take. Current EDA initiatives around ML algorithms are still timid in comparison to other industries, such as robotics and health care.

Bastien Gratréaux, Project and MARCOM Lead at Defacto Technologies

Owner of a master’s degree in management and communication linked to an electrical engineering background, Bastien is leading the communication at Defacto along with close interaction with R&D team for 8 years.

info_req@defactotech.com

Growth in FPGA market is fueled by its growing end applications in many industries where they provide unique advantages of flexibility, low-latency and security to meet complex and evolving requirements.

Data Centres- FPGAs finds application in Data Centres for offloading computing from CPU and accelerate certain functionalities to improve throughput and response time. FPGAs are also being deployed for machine learning applications in Data Centres. The dramatic shift in workplace norms during pandemic and resulting demand for digital and cloud infrastructure is driving the Data Centre market. Construction of new data Centre is underway along with increased investment in edge to support the post-pandemic normal. The need for lower latency at the edge in healthy buildings, smart cities, distributed energy resources, and 5G will also fuel FPGA market.

Autonomous Vehicles and ADAS- Real-time processing, safe and secure against cyber-attacks along with low-power consumptions are the key requirement for autonomous vehicle. Flexible IO and high data rate are also required to enable real-time processing of huge data from multiple sensors. FPGAs are very well suitable for meeting the complex and continuously evolving computing requirement of ADAS and autonomous driving segment. They can be used for both edge and central hub functions of the ubiquitous LiDAR units in AD applications.
(more…)

Big fish will grow bigger, risk-taking smaller fish will thrive

It’s Christmas 2021. The semiconductor industry is flooded with income: all fabs run at or above maximum capacity, volumes are in short supply while prices of wafers and ICs are floating up. Electronics are everywhere in our lock-down offices and private homes, and in many other systems and services that all of us use (almost) every day.

Cash is flowing in abundantly in our industry. This cash needs to roll … or else its value is slowly melting away – you know: negative interests and high inflation… There is no better option than to invest… in big(ger), small(er) and new(er) fish. Foundries invest in more capacity, while IC design companies focus faster on new products. New ideas will have more opportunity.

Author: Koen Verhaege Title: CEO at Sofics BV

• Koen took his first steps in the ESD world at IMEC (1990-1995) where he pioneered the ESD group. He crossed the Atlantic to join Sarnoff Corporation (1996-2000) in Princeton, NJ, to innovate on-chip ESD design – first as an engineer and later as a group leader.
• In 2000, he co-founded Sarnoff Europe and moved back to the old world (Belgium) where he built a world-wide IP licensing business for on-chip device solutions for EOS and ESD.
• Koen with his wife Inge bought out Sarnoff Europe in 2009 and renamed the company Sofics – which stands for Solutions for ICs. Sofics today licenses on-chip EOS/ESD solutions worldwide to more than 100 licensees (large and small) and for all major foundries and process nodes. On average one new IC including Sofics solutions is released for mass production every new business day. Beyond device solutions, Sofics develops and licenses robust circuit solutions as well. Sofics provides custom analog/specialty I/O’s and well as PHY’s.
• Koen authored and co-authored various scientific papers and is named inventor or co-inventor on various patents.

(more…)