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.

Read the rest of Opportunities and Challenges for Semiconductor Industry Awaits in 2021

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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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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – Cepton

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – Imperas

The year 2020 kicks off a decade of transformation. Companies will move from a tool-centric design process to a model-centric design process–known as Digital Engineering.

Digital Engineering is part of the larger Digital Transformation movement. Many companies have recently embarked on their own Digital Transformation journey with their sights set on improving efficiency and competitiveness. A recent IDC study showed that 90% of small- and medium-sized businesses are budgeting for the digital transformation, and 73% have already begun the process. According to the survey, the top goal for these companies making the digital transformation journey is to improve product development and design processes. Let me repeat that–“the top goal for these companies making the digital transformation journey is to improve product development and design processes”.
Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – Zuken USA

The edge is modular

There are exciting times ahead for the edge. If analysts’ predictions are true, we will see a massive growth at a CAGR of 54.0%[i] in the edge computing market over the next few years. Micro data centers will be located close to the infrastructure to address real-time issues in nearly all embedded markets. The cry for massive edge computing performance is coming from OEMs in markets as varied as industrial, energy & utilities, healthcare, transportation & logistics as well as retail and smart buildings & cities. The embedded computing industry already serves all these markets with low-power, ruggedized platforms that offer long term availability for harsh environments. But until today, there was a gap in processing performance for the server class, which may also include AI. The next generation of rugged mid-range server processors will address this gap, and embedded computing vendors will integrate these new processors on embedded platforms, offering nearly the same, well-known benefits for OEMs as in the past. There will be only one difference: These platforms will have brand new server-grade functionalities, including all required RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety) features such as IPMI interfaces and functionalities for out-of-band management. It is obvious that existing Computer-on-Module standards can neither cater for these server-grade functionalities nor support the latest high-speed interfaces such as 25 GbE or PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – congatec

Flexibility as key enabler for success in 2020

Written by Stefan Skarin, CEO of IAR Systems

With 2020 just started, we have exciting opportunities ahead of us. We also have challenges, both when it comes to meeting customer needs as well as a being a vendor in a changing industry landscape. What I think is a key enabler going forward is flexibility, both in our offerings to customers and in the way we collaborate in the embedded industry.

During the last couple of years, one of the major trends in the embedded industry has been consolidations and changes in the ecosystem. Previous major players have become less important and new rising stars have been born. This has led to an uncertainty of what might come next, driving a need of new ways of collaborations for us as vendors. The industry is a bit more complex to describe and get an overview of. There are less “traditional” players in the market due to the consolidations. But with growing technologies such as RISC-V, security and cloud services entering embedded solutions, the ecosystem is also growing. I think we will see this accelerate further in 2020. With new collaborations, we are able to offer our customers flexibility in choosing solutions for their need. We need to show our customers that they can be this flexible. And at IAR Systems, we have already started this. Never before have we done so many integrations with other technologies as we have done the last years, and this will continue in 2020.
Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – IAR Systems

Continued explosion of amount of data created causing increased development of FPGA-based hardware platforms optimized for data acceleration.

The industry has witnessed an explosion of data over the past decade with the amount of data expected to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025. The challenge ahead becomes trying to derive meaningful insights from the massive amount of unstructured and structured data. This has forced the development of many new AI hardware and software based solutions to process data in the most cost, power and time efficient manner. Addressing this challenge is much different from in the past where each generation of more powerful CPUs could keep up.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – Achronix