In connected car news are Parade Tech, Siemens, KLA Corp, DENSO and IARAI.
Parade Tech PS8461V
Parade Technologies, Ltd. (Taiwan OTC: 4966.TWO), a leading high-speed interface, video display, and touch controller IC supplier, today announced the availability of its PS8461 retimer device in an automotive grade, the PS8461V. Using a retimer function, the PS8461V provides jitter cleaning of a DisplayPort™ video transport to increase signal reach, improve data reliability, and increased resilience to crosstalk and other electrical interference. The PS8461V is AEC-Q100 grade 2 certified with a -40° to 105°C operating temperature range.
The PS8461V provides two DisplayPort inputs to allow selection between two video sources and supports up to the DisplayPort HBR3 link rate of 8.1Gbps. The PS8461V uses an advanced input equalizer to overcome signal distortion resulting PCB trace and cable signal loss, followed by a retimer function to remove timing jitter and re-clock the video display stream to its original signal integrity. The PS8461V is compliant with the latest DisplayPort 2.0 specification including support of the DisplayPort LTTPR (Link Training Tunable PHY Repeater) protocol to facilitate link training.
“The automotive industry is responding to consumer demands for updated displays in their next vehicles,” notes Jimmy Chiu, Executive VP of Marketing at Parade Technologies. “The PS8461V is one example of a high-performance, consumer-oriented display product that Parade is making available for the automotive industry, and we plan to continue the roll-out of such automotive grade product options.”
The PS8461V is packaged in a 5x10mm 66-pin QFN which is RoHS compliant and halogen-free.
Availability
The PS8461V is available for production now.
About Parade Technologies, Ltd. and Parade Technologies, Inc.
Parade Technologies, Ltd. is a leading supplier of mixed-signal ICs for a variety of increasingly used high-speed and display interface standards used in network and storage systems, computers, automotive, consumer electronics, and display panels. Parade is a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2005 and publicly listed on Taipei Exchange (TPEx) in 2011 (stock code: 4966). Parade’s portfolio of signal conditioning IC products serves the growing demand for high speed data integrity solutions for HDMI™, DisplayPort™, USB, and PCI Express interface applications.
Parade leverages its close relationships with market leading Tier-1 OEMs to develop ICs that enable competitive system capabilities. Parade is also a key contributor to industry standards development organizations. The company’s devices integrate proprietary technologies that offer superior signal integrity as well as improved system integration and power efficiency. As a result of the company’s “standards-plus” design philosophy, Parade ICs have been designed into products offered by nearly every leading computer and display vendor worldwide.
DENSO Chooses Siemens
Siemens Digital Industries Software announced that DENSO Corporation, a global automotive components manufacturer, has selected Siemens’ software portfolio for the technological foundation of their next generation model-based development (MBD). By using model-based simulations, DENSO can resolve existing issues as well as investigate a broad range of design possibilities, early in the process and before physical models are built. This new process is expected to reduce time needed for product development, cut costs, increase design quality, and improve competitiveness.
Siemens will be underpinning the project through a variety of services including process consulting, conducting pilot projects at the design site, and establishing processes for modeling. By using the Simcenter™ portfolio of simulation and test applications, DENSO can continue to drive implementation of system simulation in the development process. Simcenter solutions are being deployed for use by designers who can now conduct 1D system simulation alongside analysis specialists while Teamcenter® software enables seamless distribution of model data among global sites.
“Thanks to high quality Siemens software products, expertise in consulting and technical service, our three-year MBD pilot has been successful,” said Masaki Suzuoki, General Manager MBD Promotion Dept. Engineering Digital Transformation Promotion Div. DENSO Corporation. “Full scale deployment will start throughout the company in Japan and abroad and we look forward to additional support from Siemens that can help us accelerate MBD deployment across business domains.”
The automotive industry is undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation. DENSO’s long-term effort to pursue value from both the vehicle and subsystem perspectives is a strategy to enhance growth and profitability. Specific examples of programs which can lead to increased value include electrification and the implementation of advanced safety and automated driving. To achieve these goals, DENSO has begun the roll-out of MBD across the entire company. Research in Europe provided the opportunity for DENSO to have a direct discussion with Siemens regarding roll-out plans for Siemens’ MBD solutions which have a proven track record and are widely used by OEMs globally.
DENSO has been a long-term partner with Siemens for the development of Siemens’ software including NX™ software. Siemens was selected for this project due to its approach to product development and the fact that its culture would be beneficial for DENSO. The two companies have been working together to develop solutions based on their aligned strategies, with DENSO submitting requests to Siemens for MBD that are implemented as standard functions of Siemens solutions. DENSO is currently conducting a trial roll-out through a cross section of various fields, including their primary domains of thermal systems, powertrains, and electrification. Implementation of these standard functions benefits not only DENSO, but all companies implementing MBD, including those within the automotive industry.
“We are honored to collaborate with DENSO to drive next generation MBD product development for their business transformation,” said Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “We appreciate the trust of DENSO and the other global automotive companies who have chosen Siemens’ software and services for digital transformation, as well as effective and profitable operations.”
Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise where engineering, manufacturing and electronics design meet tomorrow. The Xcelerator portfolio helps companies of all sizes create and leverage digital twins that provide organizations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation. For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit www.sw.siemens.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Where today meets tomorrow.
Siemens Digital Industries (DI) is an innovation leader in automation and digitalization. Closely collaborating with partners and customers, DI drives the digital transformation in the process and discrete industries. With its Digital Enterprise portfolio, DI provides companies of all sizes with an end-to-end set of products, solutions and services to integrate and digitalize the entire value chain. Optimized for the specific needs of each industry, DI’s unique portfolio supports customers to achieve greater productivity and flexibility. DI is constantly adding innovations to its portfolio to integrate cutting-edge future technologies. Siemens Digital Industries has its global headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, and has around 76,000 employees internationally.
KLA Corp Intros Auto Chips
KLA Corporation (NASDAQ: KLAC) announced the launch of four new products for automotive chip manufacturing: the 8935 high productivity patterned wafer inspection system, the C205 broadband plasma patterned wafer inspection system, the Surfscan® SP A2/A3 unpatterned wafer inspection systems and I-PAT® inline defect part average testing screening solution. The automotive industry is focused on innovations in electrification, connectivity, advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving. This means vehicles require more electronics, which drives the demand for semiconductor chips. With chips at the core of vehicle operations and safety applications, reliability is critical and automotive chips must meet strict quality standards.
“Today’s vehicles include thousands of semiconductor chips that sense surroundings, make driving decisions and control actions,” said Ahmad Khan, president of the Semiconductor Process Control business unit at KLA. “These chips cannot fail – a fact that has led chipmakers to pursue new strategies to find and mitigate reliability-related defects in the fab, well before the chips are integrated in vehicles. Tailored for fabs producing automotive chips, our new products detect potential reliability defects at the source and provide an innovative solution for inline screening. These actions help fabs achieve production of high quality, high reliability chips at high yield to maximize their output.”
The three new inspectors form a complementary defect discovery, monitoring and control solution for larger design node chip manufacturing in the automotive industry. The Surfscan SP A2/A3 unpatterned wafer inspectors incorporate DUV optics and advanced algorithms to produce the sensitivity and speed required to identify and eliminate process defects that can cause automotive chip reliability issues and to ensure process tools are operating at peak performance. For R&D and production ramp, the C205 patterned wafer inspector utilizes broadband illumination and NanoPoint™ technology for high sensitivity discovery of critical defects, helping speed optimization of new processes and devices. During high volume manufacturing, the 8935 patterned wafer inspector employs new optical technologies and the DefectWise® AI solution to capture a wide variety of critical defects at a low nuisance rate for fast and accurate identification of process excursions that can affect final chip quality.
I-PAT is an innovative inline screening solution that runs on KLA inspection and data analytics systems. I-PAT begins by extracting defect characteristics from data collected for all wafers at critical process steps by the high speed 8 Series inspectors, including the 8935, or the Puma™ laser scanning inspectors. I-PAT then leverages customized machine learning algorithms on the SPOT™ production platform and the statistical analysis capabilities of the Klarity® defect management system to identify outlier defect populations so at-risk chips can be removed from the supply chain.
In addition to the development of new products tailored for automotive chip manufacturing, KLA continues to collaborate closely with the automotive industry. From KLA’s membership in the Automotive Electronics Council (AEC), the organization that sets qualification standards for electronic components in the automotive industry, to the company’s second headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, KLA is committed to helping ensure the automotive industry achieves strict electronics quality standards.
IARAI Contest for Traffic Flow Predictions
The Institute for Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI), an independent and global machine-learning research institute established by HERE Technologies, has announced its third annual Traffic4Cast competition. This year’s competition dataset covers 10 diverse cities (from New York to Berlin to Bangkok) in a time span of 2 years, and the dynamic data are derived from the GPS trajectories of a large fleet of vehicles, made available by HERE. Participants are tasked to create algorithms that predict future traffic flows for 10 cities.
This year’s Traffic4cast is evolving from the previous, successful competition and is aimed at predicting traffic under both temporal and spatial domain shift conditions. This goes to the heart of understanding implicit, underlying traffic rules or patterns and making robust and transferable predictions. This robustness of the predictions will be explored and challenged through:
- the core challenge with the drastic temporal domain shift induced by the COVID-19 pandemic aiming at models that will be able to contend with the changing traffic patterns;
- the extended challenge with a spatio-temporal domain shift to cities with only very little data available (only the test data and supporting road network properties are provided).
Hence, these two challenges will ask for solutions from few-shot learning, transfer-learning or more generally, meta-learning, as well as video frame prediction or graph-based modelling.
The data include dynamic and static information. With the new static data, new encodings of the road graph are provided in order to better support graph-based approaches and bridge between different machine learning communities. An extensive GitHub repo with baselines, metric and data exploration and other code helpers is also provided for a quick head start in the competition.
Traffic4cast 2020 saw almost 600 submissions from competing teams from around the world, with winners from South Korea, US, China and Sweden. Submissions for this year’s competition are due by October 14, 2021. The winners will be presented with awards at the NeurIPS 2021 conference and their solutions will be published in a special NeurIPS volume of the ‘Proceedings of Machine Learning Research’ journal.
The winners of the core challenge (temporal domain shift) will receive the following prizes:
- 1st place – a voucher or cash prize worth 8,000 EUR to the participant/team plus one free NeurIPS 2021 conference registration;
- 2nd place – a voucher or cash prize worth 4,000 EUR to the participant/team plus one free NeurIPS 2021 conference registration;
- 3rd place – a voucher or cash prize worth 2,000 EUR to the participant/team plus one free NeurIPS 2021 conference registration.
The winners of the extended challenge (spatiotemporal domain shift) will receive the following prizes:
- 1st place – a voucher or cash prize worth 8,000 EUR to the participant/team plus one free NeurIPS 2021 conference registration;
- 2nd place – a voucher or cash prize worth 4,000 EUR to the participant/team plus one free NeurIPS 2021 conference registration;
- 3rd place – a voucher or cash prize worth 2,000 EUR to the participant/team plus one free NeurIPS 2021 conference registration.
To receive the prizes, participants must submit the working code, the learned parameters, and a short scientific paper describing their approach.
“Building on the success at NeurIPS 2019 and NeurIPS 2020, Traffic4cast is going into its third year and aims to give us a more in-depth understanding of complex traffic systems. This year, we are challenging leading machine learners to build robust traffic models that can adapt to domain shifts in space and time,” said Sepp Hochreiter, a founding co-director of IARAI and an artificial intelligence pioneer, who invented the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network architecture. “Our Traffic Map Movies have been derived from over 10^12 data points and cover 10 diverse cities around the world, providing much more data compared to last year. In the core challenge, the models need to adapt to a drastic temporal domain shift due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Once again, we hope to demonstrate that AI methods are the most effective for predicting traffic instead of more traditional methods,” said Giovanni Lanfranchi, Senior Vice President Development and Chief Technology Officer at HERE Technologies. “Using dynamic location data from HERE, derived from probe data from a large fleet of vehicles, participants will be able to take traffic prediction accuracy to the next level, helping to vastly improve urban mobility flow and ultimately lead to lower transport emissions.”