News

How Europe aims to achieve strategic autonomy for semiconductors

Source: Brookings, August 9, 2022 [1]
The EU Chips Act provides billions in financial support to set up factories for advanced chip production. It aims to address semiconductor supply shortages and years of decline in semiconductor investment in the EU. The act is expected to be adopted in the first half of 2023.

Amazon and iRobot sign an agreement for Amazon to acquire iRobot

Source: iRobot News Release, August 5, 2022 [2]
Amazon will acquire iRobot for $61 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.7 billion. The company has a history of making customers' lives easier with innovative cleaning products for the home. Amazon will continue to innovate with every product generation, solving hard problems to give customers valuable time.

iRobot laying off 10% of staff

Source: The Robot Report, August 9, 2022 [3]
iRobot, maker of the popular Roomba robot vacuum, is laying off about 140 employees. iRobot announced the layoffs on August 5, 2022 in its Q2 earnings results. Restructuring will save company up to $10 million in 2022 and between $30-$40 million in 2023.

Google's open-source silicon project takes a big step forward

Source: ZDNet, August 4, 2022 [4]
GlobalFoundries, the world's fourth-largest contract semiconductor manufacturer, has joined Google's two-year-old mission. Google's idea is to offer open-source projects by startups, academics and lower-cost options for manufacturing custom silicon with semiconductor foundries.

New hardware offers faster computation for artificial intelligence, with much less energy

Source: MIT News , July 28, 2022 [5]
A new area of artificial intelligence called analog deep learning promises faster computation with a fraction of the energy usage. MIT researchers have pushed the speed limits of a type of human-made analog synapse. Devices could pave the way for integration into commercial computing hardware for deep-learning applications.

Reducing software complexity is crucial to speeding up the shift to autonomous driving

Source: Automotive News Europe, July 1, 2022 [6]
Autonomous vehicles are part of a larger paradigm shift toward software-defined vehicles. The main barrier is that the technology is not yet mature enough to take full control of the vehicle. Mercedes-Benz recently introduced its Level 3 Drive Pilot system, first available in Germany only.

Dependability in zonal E/E architectures with central compute for autonomous driving

Source: allaboutcircuits, August 5, 2022 [7]
This article explores how dependable electronics like sensors and MCUs within zonal E/E architectures are important for reliable, safe, and secure autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Baidu CEO says autonomous tech from ‘Robocar’ brand JIDU will be a generation ahead of Tesla

Source: Electrek, August 8, 2022 [8]
The CEO of parent company Baidu, said JIDU's autonomous driving technology will "lead the Tesla generation". The company's flagship EV will be based on a concept called the ROBO-01. It will combine interactive robot emotion with artificial intelligence within the driving experience.

Rise Of The Robots—Geek+ raises $100M At $2B valuation

Source: Crunchbase News, August 8, 2022 [9]
Beijing-based Geek+, a developer of autonomous robots for warehousing, raises $100 million Series E1. The round includes Intel Capital, Vertex Growth and Qingyue Capital Investment. In 2021, the company expects annual revenue of $150 million and more than $300 million in orders.

Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries double down on US chip production

Source: The Register, August 8, 2022 [10]
Qualcomm says it is doubling investments in US chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries. Partnership aims to ensure a steady supply of US-based wafer capacity. Comes after CHIPs and Science Act allocates $52 billion in subsidies for additional semiconductor manufacturing in the US.

Source: Tom's Hardware, August 2, 2022 [11]
The Compute eXpress Link (CXL) consortium today unveiled the CXL 3.0 specification. New features include support for the PCIe 6.0 interface, memory pooling, and more complex switching and fabric capabilities. The new spec will support up to twice the bandwidth of recent revisions without adding any latency.

Papers

AMD prefetch attacks through power and time

Source: USENIX, 2021 [12]
This paper shows that AMD suffers from the same type of side-channel leakage as Intel. We show that stronger page table isolation should be activated on AMD CPUs by fault.

Hardware acceleration for object detection using YOLOv4 algorithm on Xilinx Zynq platform

Source: Springer, June 27, 2022 [13]
YOLO is a state-of-the art object detection algorithm which is fast and accurate. This work proposes the implementation of YOLOv4 algorithm on Xilinx® Zynq-7000 System. The proposed work shows better resource utilization of about 23.2 k (43.6%) of Look-up tables.

Previous Hardware Acceleration in Robotics Newsletters

Past ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group meetings

  1. Timmers, P. (2022, August 9). How Europe aims to achieve strategic autonomy for semiconductors. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-europe-aims-to-achieve-strategic-autonomy-for-semiconductors/ ↩︎

  2. Amazon and iRobot Sign an Agreement for Amazon to Acquire iRobot. (2022, August 5). iRobot News Release. https://investor.irobot.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-and-irobot-sign-agreement-amazon-acquire-irobot ↩︎

  3. Crowe, S. (2022, August 9). IRobot laying off 10% of staff. The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/irobot-laying-off-10-of-staff/ ↩︎

  4. Tung, L. (2022, August 4). Google's open-source silicon project takes a big step forward. ZDNet. https://www-zdnet-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/googles-open-source-silicon-project-takes-a-big-step-forward/ ↩︎

  5. Zewe, A. (2022, July 28). New hardware offers faster computation for artificial intelligence, with much less energy. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://news.mit.edu/2022/analog-deep-learning-ai-computing-0728 ↩︎

  6. Sarkkinen, T. (2022, July 1). Reducing software complexity is crucial to speeding up the shift to autonomous driving. Automotive News Europe. https://europe.autonews.com/guest-columnist/reducing-software-complexity-crucial-speeding-shift-autonomous-driving ↩︎

  7. Dependability in zonal E/E architectures with central compute for autonomous driving. (2022, August 5). allaboutcircuits. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/industry-articles/vehicle-automation-dependability-in-zonal-e-e-architectures-with-central-compute-for-autonomous-driving/ ↩︎

  8. Doll, S. (2022, August 8). Baidu CEO says autonomous tech from 'Robocar' brand JIDU will be a generation ahead of Tesla. Electrek. https://electrek.co/2022/08/08/baidu-autonomous-tech-jidu-tesla/ ↩︎

  9. Metinko, C. (2022, August 8). Rise of the robots—Geek+ raises $100M at $2B valuation. Crunchbase News. https://news.crunchbase.com/ai-robotics/geek-raises-startup-warehousing/ ↩︎

  10. Mann, T. (2022, August 8). Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries double down on US chip production. The Register: Enterprise Technology News and Analysis. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/08/globalfoundries_qualcomm_us/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article ↩︎

  11. Alcorn, P. (2022, August 2). Compute express link (CXL) 3.0 debuts, wins CPU interconnect wars. Tom's Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cxl-30-debuts-one-cpu-interconnect-to-rule-them-all ↩︎

  12. Lipp, M., Gruss, D., & Schwarz, M. (2021). AMD prefetch attacks through power and time. USENIX | The Advanced Computing Systems Association. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22summer_lipp.pdf ↩︎

  13. Babu, P., & Parthasarathy, E. (2022, June 27). Hardware acceleration for object detection using YOLOv4 algorithm on Xilinx Zynq platform. Springer. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11554-022-01234-y.pdf ↩︎