Cruise self-driving taxi to go driverless in SF; open-source lowRISC to acquired NewAE; CFD goes to America’s Cup; cooling solder melting point.

Automotive, mobility Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving car company, obtained a permit to charge for rides in San Francisco, according to a story in Reuters. The California Public Utilities Commission, the regulatory board that can approve permits, voted 4-0 to issue “the first Phase I Driverless Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Passenger Service Deployment permit in California to Cruise LLC to allow for passenger service in its AVs without a driver present in the vehicle,” according to its press release. The cars will have limits to what areas of the city they avoid or can go during certain hours. They cannot go on highways and will not operate in heavy fog, rain, or smoke.

Renesas introduced a complex device driver (CDD) software module for designers of automotive battery management systems (BMS) in electric vehicles (EVs). The module is AUTOSAR-compliant and includes configuration and integration of required microcontroller abstraction layer (MCAL) modules.

Three America’s Cup teams are using computational fluid dynamics tools from Cadence to improve the performance of their boats’ hydrodynamics, which includes the hydroplane that elevates the boat.

Synopsys introduced its DesignDash tool, which offers a real-time 360-degree view of all design activities in the SoC development process. The goal is to help teams understand trends, and collaborate better using the dashboards on the cloud. The tool’s machine learning finds actionable understanding from vast volumes of structured and unstructured EDA metrics and tool-flow data. The program can classify design trends, identify design limitations, providing guided root-cause analysis, and deliver flow consumable, prescriptive resolutions, according to Synopsys’ press release.

Advantest entered an agreement to acquire Italy-based CREA, a developer and producer of power semiconductor test equipment, including equipment that tests SiC / GaN power semiconductors. The acquisition will broaden Advantest’s test and measurement offerings to appeal to more customers in high-growth sectors, such as electric vehicles and energy-efficient data centers.

Supplier of automotive inverters Zhuhai ENPOWER Electric Co. will be the first company to adopt Infineon‘s latest 750 V automotive-grade discrete IGBT EDT2 devices. The is the first to integrate the latest 750 V automotive-grade IGBTs AIKQ120N75CP2 and AIKQ200N75CP2.

BAE Systems’ FAST Labs will have access to Movellus’ Intelligent Clock Network IP as part of an agreement. The IP included Radiation Hardened by Design (RHBD). Movellus will provide TrueDigital IP with its rad-hard ASIC technologies and libraries for creating rad-hard SoC designs.

Pervasive computing Renesas unveiled a I3C intelligent switch family for server, storage, and communications systems that can be used on I3C control plane networks with multiple initiator controllers to support targets across a large physical network. They also support heterogeneous designs by providing IO level shifting and protocol translation for mixed I2C/SMBus and I3C networks.

Infineon’s and pmd technologies’ indirect-time-of-flight (iToF) depth-sensing REAL3 3D image sensor will be used in the upcoming Magic Leap 2 augmented reality (AR) headset.

A solder material in the form of supercooled microcapsules of BiSn-based alloy both with or without 1wt.% silver has a substantially lower melting point than conventional solder paste, concluded SAFI-Tech in a SEMI FlexTech R&D program. According to the press release, the supercooled microcapsule solder paste can be stencil printed at ambient room temperature onto a low-temperature PET substrate. SAFI-Tech’s solder joint withstood thermal cycling, drop-shock testing, and hundreds of bend cycles of the PET substrate. The finding means the solder does have to go through the normal thermal stresses from high-temperature processing. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) provided the SEMI FlexTech funding.

Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) grouped advanced packaging tools into its VIPack design system. VIPack includes horizontal and vertical interconnect tools to interconnect disaggregated SoCs and high-bandwidth memory used for HPC, AI, ML, and network applications. The system supports ASE’s high-density RDL-based fanout package-on package (FOPoP), fanout chip-on-substrate, (FOCoS), fanout chip-on-substrate-bridge (FOCoS-Bridge), and fanout system-in-package (FOSiP), through silicon via (TSV)-based 2.5D and 3D IC and co-packaged optics processing.

Infineon announced its next-generation high-performance XENSIV MEMS microphones with audio capturing in consumer electronics. The microphones IM69D127, IM73A135, and IM72D128 use Sealed Dual Membrane (SDM) MEMS technology.

Security The open-source organization lowRISC of OpenTitan fame acquired NewAE Technology, a privately held tools designer/manufacturer for silicon security analysis. “NewAE’s groundbreaking and accessible tools have the potential to be central to security testing of embedded silicon throughout the ecosystem,” said Gavin Ferris, CEO of lowRISC. “With its open-design approach to hardware and its commitment to transparency and security, NewAE strategically complements our own open-source silicon design focus, helping create transparent silicon worthy of being trusted. We look forward to continuing to support and expand upon NewAE’s current product offerings, bolstering evaluation of OpenTitan’s own security, and ensuring that open-source hardware can be hardened against the most serious attacks.”

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