Article Roundup: Thermal Simulation for Autonomous Cars, Cloud-Based Chip Design, Reliability Verification, Wally Rhines on PCB Design & SMTP in Embedded Devices

1. Thermal Simulation Software Aims to Improve Design of Autonomous Cars
2. Is Cloud Computing Suitable For Chip Design?
3. Beyond DRC and LVS, why Reliability Verification is used by Foundries
4. Wally Rhines Talks About the Future of PCB and System Design
5. Using an SMTP client

Thermal Simulation Software Aims to Improve Design of Autonomous Cars
Design News

The thermal behavior of an autonomous electric vehicle is critical to its drive range, performance, and passenger experience. Traditionally, design engineers needed to enlist the help of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) experts to analyze, understand, and optimize the thermal behavior of their designs. Now, new solutions reduce this reliance on experts by embedding CFD software into the design engineer’s CAD environment.

Is Cloud Computing Suitable For Chip Design?
SemiEngineering

The EDA industry has yet to adopt cloud computing as widely as many other industries. However, there may be good reasons for the industry’s collective reticence. This article examines the benefits and challenges to transitioning EDA solutions to the cloud, including compute elasticity, pricing, performance & more.

Beyond DRC and LVS, why Reliability Verification is used by Foundries
SemiWiki

Chip foundries are providing an increasing number of reliability checks for ICs to prevent problems caused by electrostatic discharge (ESD), latch-up (LUP), electrical overstress (EOS), and more. This article looks at the reliability checks offered by two major foundries and discusses best practices for ensuring the reliability of chip designs.

Wally Rhines Talks About the Future of PCB and System Design
EE Journal

Moore’s Law has not completely dictated the advancement of PCB technology as it did for integrated circuits. As a result, PCB design made a relatively slow transition to computer-assisted design (CAD). Nonetheless, PCB complexity rose throughout the years prompting new design technologies, and plenty of acquisitions as the major vendors competed for market share. This article recaps Wally Rhines’ PCB West keynote, covering the history and future of PCB design.

Using an SMTP client
EDA Café

Imagine an embedded device that needs to intermittently send and receive data to and from a remote location via the internet. In addition to an internet connection, this device would need a communication protocol to manage the transferal of data. SMTP, a technology usually only used for email, may be the ideal choice due to its simplicity, small size, and availability on a wide variety of real-time operating systems. Colin Walls explores how this technology can be repurposed for embedded applications in this article.