Author: Techtime

Marvell, NVIDIA and NXP Chose Argus’ Protection

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Argus Cyber Security is gaining momentum within semiconductors providers for in-vehicle networks, following the cooperation with Marvell, NVIDIA and NXP. Marvell chose Ethernet cyber protection solution from Argus Cyber Security to be integrated into its 88Q5050 automotive Ethernet switch. The integration of the Argus solution will provide Marvell’s 8-port Ethernet gigabit capacity switch with an enhanced level of security.

The solution also works with Argus Lifespan Protection to online services such as situational awareness, detection of emerging attacks with cross-fleet big-data analysis, and over-the-air (OTA) security updates. Based on ARM Cortex-M7, 250 MHz  CPU, it utilizes advanced security features to guard against cyber threats like hacking and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Its main Applications include Gateways, In-Vehicle Infotainment and Advance Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).

Meanwhile, Argus  is working closely with NVIDIA to add layers of cyber security defense to NVIDIA DRIVE, an AI computing platform designed to enable autonomous vehicles of all types. “Safety is our highest priority,” said Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive business development at NVIDIA.  “Argus’ demonstration on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform adds another layer of defense to our ongoing efforts to thwart potential cyber security attacks on autonomous vehicle platforms.”

Argus is also collaborating with NXP to bring to market a complete software-hardware solution to protect cars from cyber attacks. The combined solution aimed to enable car makers to comply with upcoming regulations that require equipping vehicles with the ability to detect and respond to cyber-security incidents. The solution consists of NXP’s Secure CAN Transceiver for a vehicle’s controller area network (CAN) bus, Argus’ Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) and Elektrobit’s Sync software, which enables continuous over-the-air (OTA) updates in the vehicle.

Founded in 2013 by Israeli cyber security experts, Argus is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, has a team of more than 70 people and a comprehensive solution suites based on 38 granted and pending patents. In November 2017, Argus was acquired by Continental, a wholly owned  subsidiary of Elektrobit (EB), for approximately $450 million. Today Argus is an independent company of Elektrobit, a provider of automotive software products and services.

Intel reportedly offered $6 Billion to Acquire Mellanox

Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman
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The chipmaker Intel Corp may plan another big deal in Israel, following the $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye, completed in August 2017. Israeli media Themarker and Calcalist quoted today (Wednesday) unidentified source who claimed that Intel has bid $6 billion in cash and stock to buy Mellanox Technologies. This price tag represent a 35% premium to the company’s value on Nasdaq, of approximately $4.4 billion.

In November 2018, CNBC news reported that Xilinx is planning to bid for Mellanox at $100 per, giving it a total price of approximately $5.5 billion. CNBC quoted unidentified sources, claiming that Xilinx had hired Barclays to advise in promoting the deal. This followed earlier CNBC report published in October 25, saying that Mellanox appointed an investment bank to explore its sale.

Based in Yokneam, Israel, Mellanox provides fast connectivity solutions for data centers, cloud infrastructures and supercomputers. It is considered the world’s largest provider of InfiniBand solutions for supercomputers. Its strategy is based on complete solutions based on its own core semiconductor chips.

The company’s InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions connect 53% of overall TOP500 platforms or 265 systems. Its InfiniBand accelerates the top three supercomputers on the TOP500 list: the fastest High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputer in the world deployed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the second fastest supercomputer in the US deployed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the fastest supercomputer in China(ranked third).

In October 2018 Mellanox reported a five consecutive quarters of record results, and a $798.7 million sales during the first three quarters of 2018, compared to$626.3 million in 2017.  “Our strong results reflect the differentiated and superior product technologies that Mellanox has to offer for data center infrastructure,” said Eyal Waldman (photo above), President and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

Hailo Raised $21 Million for Deep Learning Processor

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Artificial Intelligence drives a new generation of computing architecture. One of the newcomers in this emerging market is Hailo from Israel who developed a dedicated microprocessor for deep learning applications. Hailo’s processor is designed to fit into embedded devices that need to process high-resolution video and other high-throughput streams of real-time data. This week the company announced the expantion of its Series A funding round to $21 million.

Chinese venture capital firm, Glory Ventures, led the investment-round. This VC is active in Israel and made investments in Innoviz, CorePhotonics, Vayyar, Intuition Robotics and Lumus. The current round will support marketing efforts in China and Hong Kong, complementing its existing markets in Europe, North America, Japan and Korea.

Hailo is also opening registration for the Hailo-8 Fast Track program to select customers and is offering these customers the opportunity to evaluate the initial samples of its high-performance, low-power Hailo-8 deep learning processor. The participants will gain access to the upcoming samples of Hailo-8 processor, and will be able to develop and prototype their own deep learning products. The company said that beyond its strategic focus in the automotive market, Hailo’s processor targets other markets including surveillance, smart home, IoT and industrial, robotics, AR/VR and wearables.

Batteries Take Center Stage

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Battery market is shifting and is beginning to draw the attention of the big technology companies around the world. Traditionally, the major applications of batteries were in portable electronic equipment and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). But new demands stir this relatively sleepy market and bring in new players. Growing demand for electric and hybrid electric vehicles, new demands for energy storage in wind farms and solar farms and emerging markets such as electric aircraft, are creating a tremendous growth opportunity for the battery industry. As a result, investments are soaring.

Earlier this month Toyota Motor Corp and Panasonic Corp revealed a plan to launch a joint venture next year to make electric vehicle (EV) batteries. The new company will employ a total of 3,500 employees and will produce lithium-ion batteries to be sold to various automakers. Yesterday, Siemens opened a robotic battery module factory in Trondheim, Norway, for marine transportation application. “We expect this market to grow significantly in the future,” said Bjørn Einar Brath, Head of Offshore Solutions at Siemens. The fully automated factory comprises a robotized and digitized production line with eight robotic stations with a capacity of up to 300 megawatt hours (MWh) per year.

Harley-Davidson’s first electric motorcycle
Harley-Davidson’s first electric motorcycle

Daimler, the producer of  Mercedes-Benz Cars, is investing more than one billion euros in a global battery production network. At the moment the battery production network consists of eight factories at six sites on three continents. Last week the company announced that it will build the ninth battery factory at the polish site in Jawor, approximately 100 km away from the German border. “We will electrify the complete portfolio until 2022, and produce batteries on our own,” Markus Schäfer, Member of the Divisional Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz
Cars, Production and Supply Chain.

Even unlikely partners such as Samsung and Harley Davidson partnering to face the new era: Samsung SDI, the battery manufacturing subsidiary of Samsung, has signed a deal to provide battery-pack for Harley-Davidson’s first electric motorcycle “LiveWire”, unveiled during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019 in Las Vegas. The electric motorcycle runs on a battery pack, comprised of lithium-ion cells made by Samsung SDI and can go up to 110 miles on a single charge.

Daimler's future fleet of Electric Vehicles
Daimler’s future fleet of Electric Vehicles

Meanwhile, Volvo is investing in wireless electric charging technology from the Philadelphia-based Momentum Dynamics, Volkswagen Group has invested USD 10 million in the Colorado startup, Forge Nano to support industrial trials of a material coating technology that could improve performance of battery materials, and the Swiss based Blackstone Resources AG is invasting 200 million euro setting up a new subsidiary in Germany, Blackstone Research GmbH, to produce 100 million battery cells per annum – the equivalent of 25,000-100,000 electric-vehicle batteries.

And this in Europe alone, without mentioning the US and China, currently the largest producer of batteries. It is clear the batteries are gaining momentum as he next core technology, along semiconductors. Now it is the time to reshape the technology and to achieve the level of innovation we see in the semiconductor industry.

Intel to invest $11 Billion in production facilities in Israel

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Intel today announced it will submit a business plan to the Government of Israel for continued investment in the company’s Kiryat Gat manufacturing site. The Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon revieled yesterday in his twitter account, that the plan includes $11 billion investment in Intel’s production facilities in Israel. Yaniv Gary, VP, Intel Israel GM, said “Our excellent partnership with the State of Israel is at the foundation of the business plan we will submit.”

Today, Intel employs 11,700 people across Israel in addition to 1,100 employees of Mobileye, an Intel company. Some 60% of the employees work in development and the balance in manufacturing. Intel also said that in 2018 it has also made $1.7 billion of local procurement in Israel and its exports from Israel totaled $4 billion.

Details of the project, including schedules, costs and technologies are not being disclosed at this time. The current announcement follows the post of Ann Kelleher, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of Manufacturing and Operations from December 2018, saying that Intel is Planning a Multiyear Manufacturing Site Expansion Projects in Oregon, Ireland and Israel.

60% Shorter Delivery Time

She explained that Intel is transforming from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company:”As a result, we are now competing to win in an estimated $300 billion total addressable market for silicon — making a more diverse array of products at ever-higher volumes for a broader set of customers.”

Having additional fab space at-the-ready will help us respond more quickly to upticks in the market and to reduce our time to increased supply by up to roughly 60 percent. In addition, we will continue our selective use of foundries for certain technologies where it makes sense for the business.”

According to IC Insights, Intel Corp. capital spending in 2018 reached US$15.5 billion in 2018, up 32% from US$11.78 billion in 2017. Intel was the number one ranked semiconductor supplier from 1993 until 1Q17, when it lostlost its lead spot to Samsung.

CEVA Announced a New Hybrid DSP/Controller Architecture

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CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA), announced CEVA-BX, a new all-purpose, hybrid DSP/Controller architecture to address new algorithms of digital signal processing in voice, video, communication, sensing and digital signal control applications.

CEVA-BX is a new breed of DSP architecture, combining the inherent low power requirements of DSP kernels with high-level programming and compact code size requirements of a large control code base. Using an 11-stage pipeline and 5-way VLIW micro-architecture, it offers parallel processing with dual scalar compute engines, load/store and program control that reaches a speed of 2 GHz at TSMC 7nm process node.

The CEVA-BX Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) incorporates support for Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) widely used in neural network inference, noise reduction and echo cancellation, as well as half, single and double precision floating point units for high accuracy sensor fusion and positioning algorithms.

Mike Demler, Senior Analyst at The Linley Group commented: “Consumer, automotive, industrial and healthcare devices are increasingly integrating multiple sensors, such as cameras, microphones, environmental and motion detectors. Processing these heavy-duty signal-processing workloads in edge devices requires an efficient combination of control and DSP capabilities. The CEVA-BX eliminates the need for separate CPUs and DSP coprocessors, employing a hybrid architecture that delivers excellent all-round performance for smart devices.”

CEVA-BX employs key architecture principles of advanced micro-processor architectures such as a large orthogonal general purpose register set for maximum C compiler efficiency, innovative Branch Target Buffer (BTB) for minimizing branch overhead, hardware loop buffer for reduced power consumption of code loops, fully cached memory subsystem, and native support for all standard C types.

Its CoreMark/MHz score of 4.5 reflects the superior control capabilities of the architecture. CEVA-BX customers are able to add proprietary ISA into the architecture using the CEVA-Xtend, to accelerate proprietary algorithms and take advantage of CEVA’s automatic Queue and Buffer management mechanisms to integrate co-processors and create a cluster of CEVA-BX cores.

Moshe Sheier, vice president of marketing at CEVA, said that CEVA-BX architecture, “revolutionizes the ‘all-purpose DSP’ concept by offering a high performance hybrid architecture that is a single compute island for all DSP and control workloads that are commonplace in intelligent connected devices. Using a high level programming model and parallel processing it addresses the main performance shortfalls and programming difficulties of older special purpose DSPs and controllers.”

The CEVA-BX is initially offered in two configurations – the CEVA-BX1 with single 32X32-bit MAC and quad 16X16-bit MACs and the CEVA-BX2 with quad 32X32-bit MACs and octal 16X16-bit MACs, that are also capable of supporting 16×8-bit and 8×8-bit MAC operations. The CEVA-BX2 addresses intensive workloads such as 5G PHY control, multi-microphone beamforming and neural networks for speech recognition, with up to 16 GMACs per second. The CEVA-BX1 serves low to mid-range DSP workloads, such as cellular IoT, protocol stacks, and always-on sensor fusion, with up to 8 GMACs per second. Security is addressed using dedicated trusted execution modes to comply with the stringent safety standards.

CEVA-BX family is accompanied by a comprehensive software development tool chain, including an advanced LLVM compiler, Eclipse based debugger, DSP and neural network compute libraries, neural network frameworks support such as Android NN API, ARM NN, and Tensorflow Lite, and choice of industry leading Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS).

For more information:www.ceva-dsp.com/app/multipurpose-dsp-controller/.

Availability
The CEVA-BX cores are available now to lead customers and by end of Q1/2019 for general licensing.

Celeno raised $10 Million for Wi-Fi Innovation

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The European venture capital firm Iris Capital has led a strategic investment of US$10 million in the Wi-Fi solutions innovator Celeno from Ra’anan, Israel. The investment, joined by Celeno’s existing shareholders, will support Celeno’s product development and expansion in Europe. Celeno’s Wi-Fi chipsets are used by OEM customers such as ARRIS, Compal and Samsung in home gateways, routers, set-top boxes, Wi-Fi access points and extenders. The smart Wi-Fi technologies provided by Celeno include advanced Quality of Service management, multi-AP mesh management and smart antenna technology to intelligently connect each device in the home to the others, in order to achieve true Gigabit speeds.

The growing reliance on Wi-Fi as infrastructure and subscribers viewing Wi-Fi more as a utility than an add-on are causing the demand for Gigabit Wi-Fi to skyrocket, challenging standard equipment that was not designed for this. Early 2019, Celeno will unveil its next generation Wi-Fi 6 chipset which will include industry-first innovations, including Elastic MIMO, a world-first capability set to revolutionize access-point equipment design by cutting costs and size while doubling the performance.

“Iris Capital is a leading European VC that will help expand our market leadership by leveraging their connections, expertise, and influence,” said Gilad Rozen, Founder and CEO of Celeno. Iris Capital is a European VC specialized in the digital economy. It provides active support to its portfolio companies, through its offices in Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Dubai.

Celeno’s Technology is based on hardware ans software: Its Argus RF and DSP-based spectrum analyzer and intelligence engine is embedded in the silicon as are Smart Antenna Steering (SAS) algorithms that enhance the performance and coverage in different environments, ranges and interferences. The OptimizAIR Software defined Wi-Fi Virtualization enables prioritized airtime management via dynamic allocation of Wi-Fi resources, while ControlAIR Smart Multi-AP Wi-Fi Controller enables multiple smart Wi-Fi access points to work better together.illion