Onn Haran
CTO & Co-Founder of Autotalks

Global expansion of V2X will take place in 2021, deployed in vehicles and infrastructure. In China, all OEMs have demonstrated their V2X capabilities and readiness in the recent ‘New Four-Layers’ interoperability event in Shanghai. Many OEMs will deploy a line of production vehicles starting next year, and expanding in the years to follow. For example, GM announced that the 2021 Buick GL6 will include V2X. More announcements from other OEMs are expected. In parallel, V2X infrastructure will be installed across the country.  Today, there are multiple infrastructure pilots in over 10 provinces. V2X will be added to C-NCAP scoring starting 2023.

V2X equipped infrastructure will be deployed in Europe as well. France and Czech Republic already have many C-ITS station installed and plan to enhance the deployment.  Other large-scale deployment are planned in Austria and other countries. Volkswagen will continue to equip its best-selling vehicles with V2X. A project to add V2X to EuroNCAP rating will start in full-force, highlighting the importance of V2X for future safety. Since 90% of the vehicles sold in EU are NCAP rated, the OEMs would kick-off their production programs.

US has finally selected a V2X technology, bringing certainty to the US market that will allow OEMs to actually start deploying. Although no vehicles with V2X will reach US roads next year, OEMs will accelerate their productization plans, with some early deployments in 2022, as was announced by Ford.

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Shawn Carpenter Program Director, 5G & Space

Deployment strategies for 5G

5G in 2021 will be all about deployment – the infrastructure and handsets are available and is being rolled out as we speak.

However, carriers have taken a very diverse range of approaches to this deployment. For example, some carriers have used long range, low frequency bands that don’t add that much bandwidth to mobile user download speeds, compared to the low-range, high frequency, high speed bands that are also part of 5G. This means that in effect, a consumer could purchase an expensive 5G phone and not necessarily experience a superior connectivity speed to the one they enjoyed with 4G / LTE. However, there will also be some areas that will be able to access the breathtakingly fast speeds that 5G is capable of.

5G deployment is also very complex. Some carriers are completely ripping out and replacing their 4G infrastructure with 5Ginfrastructure that is backwards compatible – but this is a very expensive approach. Other carriers are installing 5G equipment on 4G masts and either working to avoid interference, or actively looking at dynamic spectrum sharing – and yet more are creating two separate systems for 4G and 5G, which means buying two sets of equipment.

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Frankwell Lin President, Andes Technology

2020 was a year like no other in recent history. The worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on the global economy. In the challenging times, we are all learning how to resume normal operations and seek opportunities at the same time.

Production in Full Swing despite COVID-Crisis

Widespread vaccination is key to the global economy’s return to pre-pandemic levels of activity. As the coronavirus vaccine is on track for international deployment, however, the global economy is not expected to recover until mid-2021. Even so, the pattern of our working life has already changed irreversibly. Working from home, for instance, may become a new norm for some companies as it not only prevent the spread of the virus, but also reduces operating costs.

Due to the rise of the stay-at-home economy brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing a huge growth in applications including wireless networking, gaming, at-home learning, etc. Some of the products are even facing shortage due to strong demand worldwide. The production of many semiconductor manufacturers is in full swing because of the related orders. The momentum is expected to last in 2021 as stay-at-home economy will likely thrive before the pandemic ends. Taiwan’s IC industry chain is ready for the development and production of these popular applications.

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Calista Redmond CEO of RISC-V International

The RISC-V era of computing is here. Today there are more commercial IP providers working on RISC-V than any other architecture. Adoption is growing quickly, as reflected in a Wilson Research Group/Siemens double-blind 2020 study, which found that 23% of ASIC and FPGA projects incorporated RISC-V in at least one processor. The free and open standard RISC-V ISA is the perfect base for the multitude of specialized processors we see today and is growing to meet new workload demands due to the incredible design flexibility and modular approach of RISC-V that enables a proliferation of design options for designers.

In 2021 and beyond, open source collaboration will continue to grow with RISC-V appearing in consumer devices such as wearables, home appliances, robotics, autonomous vehicles, factory equipment and more. We are working on expanding learning opportunities for a broader audience to teach and learn about the ISA helping to further accelerate adoption and use of RISC-V across industries. RISC-V also anticipates the Q1 2021 public review for our Vector, Bit Manipulation, Scalar Cryptography, Packed SIMD, Secure PMP and Virtual Memory extensions to make it even easier for companies to build innovative RISC-V solutions. We have made incredible progress over the past few years, and we look forward to seeing it continue in 2021.

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Dan Demers, Director, Sales & Marketing, congatec Americas

High performance – high core count – utilize it best with the RTS Hypervisor

The global pandemic challenges all of us. Some industries are suffering while others experience an extra growth push. Digitalization is on the growth side. Growing data traffic and new application fields also push the use of embedded computers forward. The ever-growing demand for higher performance and lower power consumption is stronger than ever.

The low power concepts are firmly in place, with these embedded applications utilizing COM Express Mini, Qseven and SMARC modules. For higher performance re quirements, COM Express Compact and Basic are in use. Until very recently, however, there was no equivalent in place for the very highest computing performance requirements. This gap is now filled with the new COM-HPC module specification. COM-HPC extends the possibilities towards highest performance. Not only does it offer more and faster interfaces, it also supports faster and more power-hungry processors while providing more space for higher memory capacities. COM-HPC Client modules support USB4 with Thunderbolt and DisplayPort 2.0 with high refresh rates and color depths to drive multiple 8k screens. Server designs can leverage up to 64 PCIe lanes supporting the upcoming PCIe Gen 5 speed with 32 Giga Transfers per second (GTps). Ethernet is extended to 8 lanes with 25 GBps each, which allows for 2x 100G Ethernet implementations with COM-HPC Server modules.

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