1. Traffic management: The need to implement technologies that provide real-time data about changes in traffic flow, volume and traffic incidents will play an integral role in smart city infrastructure in 2020 and beyond. Incorporating lidar into intelligent transportation systems makes it possible to automate appropriate responses to aid traffic flow, helping to predict and detect congestion, near-miss events and other road safety challenges, as well as adding intelligence to traffic intersections for increased efficiency. This will allow city traffic controllers and state DOTs to take action and minimize the impact on motorists and residents.

2. Road tolling: We will see a continuous upgrade in traditional tolling systems in 2020 and beyond. Tolling solutions providers can become less dependent on traditional ground loop systems to detect and profile vehicles moving at highway speeds, shifting more towards using  real-time high density lidar point cloud object data, a three dimensional representation of each vehicle. The resulting data is of such a high fidelity that it even helps answer questions such as how many axles a vehicle has, or whether a truck is towing a trailer. This will minimize the risk of leakage and mischarged fees by ensuring all physical vehicle attributes are captured.

(more…)

The Lost Art of Microprocessor Verification

Microprocessors have been a disruptive force within the electronics industry since the 1970’s, bringing compute resources to new levels of devices and breaking barriers as innovation based on the key specification of ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), which allows hardware and software to have a defined boundary for successful collaboration. Some well documented market segments solidified around an architecture and the proprietary alternatives were relegated to niche markets or the history books, but the open ISA of RISC‑V is poised to bring a new wave of flexibility with standard and custom extension that allow optimization for end applications. The engineering freedoms, which are now available to SoC developers and system designers, can address the challenges of domain specific devices in the use-cases when the one-size-fits-all approach is not optimal. But to paraphrase a popular Star Trek character, “you cannot break the laws of DV” – if you design it, then you must also complete the test plan before tape-out.

(more…)