Infineon launches new Development Centre for automotive electronics and AI in Dresden

Infineon is setting up a new Development Centre at its Dresden location. The company is planning to create around 100 additional new jobs in the first phase. The new Development Centre is expected to employ a total of around 250 people in the medium term. One focus of it will be to develop new products and solutions for automotive and power electronics, as well as artificial intelligence. It is scheduled to be launched in the course of the 2018 calendar year.

In Dresden, the Infineon Group already has one of its largest and most cutting-edge locations for developing wafer technologies and manufacturing processes, as well as a highly automated production plant. 2,200 employees carry out research into and develop technologies for microcontrollers, sensors and power semiconductors and make chips there – including for the automotive industry. System integration is gaining in importance to enable complex interaction between semiconductors in more and more technically sophisticated cars. Modeling complex systems and developing highly integrated products will be one of the new Development Center’s core tasks in addition to chip design.

“Microelectronics is responsible for around 90 percent of all innovations in the car. Semiconductors are a prerequisite for electromobility and autonomous driving, trends that are major growth drivers for Infineon,” says Dr. Reinhard Ploss, Chief Executive Officer of Infineon Technologies AG. “Algorithms, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things play a key part in the increasing networking of traffic systems. The new Development Center will also address those issues intensively. We will create synergies as a result of the direct links with our development and production location in Dresden. That will help us develop products faster and put them on the market sooner.”

“Over the past years we’ve continuously increased our share of the growing market for automotive electronics,” says Peter Schiefer, Division President Automotive at Infineon. “We’re one of the technology leaders in the field of electromobility and autonomous driving. We’ll expand our leading position further thanks to the new Development Center in Dresden.”

“The State Government of Saxony offers us ideal conditions to do business in Dresden,” says Mathias Kamolz, Managing Director of Infineon Technologies Dresden GmbH. “We can also leverage a broad network of suppliers, universities, research establishments and public institutions in Saxony. The new Development Center will help Infineon enhance its development expertise in Dresden and deepen its successful collaboration with local partners.”

Automotive is Infineon’s largest business area: Semiconductors for the automotive industry generate 42 percent of the Group’s revenue. Infineon expects that the trend toward electrically driven, connected and increasingly autonomous cars will help boost its growth significantly in the coming years.

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Software improves operation efficiency for distributed systems management

Designed to improve operational efficiency and decrease maintenance costs through a centralised interface for automating tasks, SystemLink application software is for distributed systems management.

NI has introduced the software in response to trends like the industrial IoT, 5G and the electrification of vehicles, coupled with maintaining distributed legacy systems. NI believes the drive towards connected and centrally co-ordinated systems has transformed theories and pilot projects into large-scale, distributed deployments. Companies derive returns from the actionable, data-driven insights that help them maximise uptime, increase efficiency and drive future product innovation. At the same time, companies need to balance their adoption of new, connected technologies while preserving support for valuable legacy assets with long life cycles.

Systems that manage, maintain and extract insight from small-scale pilots or groups of systems are relatively straightforward to implement, explains NI. The next challenge is to scale and manage large deployments, varying life cycle stages and distributed testers and nodes across entire plants, fabs and factories. This includes tasks like remote software and system configuration as well as data management and performance monitoring in industries from aerospace and defence to transportation and manufacturing.

SystemLink enables engineers to connect, deploy, and manage distributed systems, both NI and third-party, through a centralised interface accessible from anywhere. As a result it is possible to remotely configure and deploy software, monitor the health and performance of their equipment, manage alarms, and visualise application parameters. Additionally, engineers can automate the communication of data to

To meet demands like testing higher complexity devices under test and shorter timeframes, engineers need tools tailored to their needs. SystemLink is the latest addition to NI’s software-centric platform. It has LabVIEW engineering system design software at its core and TestStand test management software for overall execution. The workflow helps to improve the productivity of test and validation labs, says NI. Each piece of the workflow is also interoperable with third-party software to maximise code/IP reuse and draws on the LabVIEW Tools Network ecosystem of add-ons and tools for more application-specific requirements.

http://www.ni.com/systemlink

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Government policies helping to drive smart grid growth, says GlobalData

A number of governments are increasingly viewing smart grid technology as a strategic infrastructural investment that will enable their long-term economic prosperity and help them to achieve their carbon emission reduction targets. This need to mitigate climate change for renewable energy development is driving smart grid initiatives across the world, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

The EU introduced a strategic energy technology plan in 2006 for the development of a smart electricity system over the following 30 years. If the EU is to meet its 2020 targets, which are increasing energy efficiency by 20%, increasing its share of renewable energy by 20% and reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20%, it must modernize and liberalize its aging electricity grid, create economies of scale for renewable energy, and promote consumer efficiencies.

Every country, when creating a smart grid roadmap or implementing a smart grid, creates its own Smart Grid Task Force or Smart Grid Asociation with the major stakeholders such as utilities, key equipment manufacturers, electricity market participants and government bodies. International agencies along with the EU have developed standards aimed at helping countries to develop their own individual standards.

Several countries already have net energy metering protocols and equipment in place, and a number of countries are exploring the technology and mechanism. In the US, 45 states and 4 territories have mandatory net metering rules available for solar and wind renewable sources. The number of net metering customers in the US increased from 0.16 million in 2010 to over 1.83 million in 2017. Under advanced metering infrastructure, as of 2017, the country installed around 76 smart meters and is expected to install over 90 million by 2020. In the US, there are now more than 16,000 publicly accessible charging stations, up from 500 in 2008, giving electric car owners more confidence in the range of their vehicles.

In 2016, ANEEL implemented a net metering system in Brazil that would enable customers to connect their micro-generation system to the Brazilian power grid with ease. By May 2017, over 10,000 PV systems had been installed in Brazil under the net metering scheme with a combined capacity of 78 MW. ANEEL is aiming to reach 1.2 million PV systems under net metering by 2024.

India has a target of installing 130 million smart meters by 2021 under Smart City Initiatives. The government has made it mandatory to install the smart meters for consumers whose monthly electricity consumption was 500 units and more at the earliest by December 2017 and consumers with the monthly consumption above 200 units by 2019.

In 2013, China overtook the US and became the largest smart grid market. The country invested $4.3bn in smart grids, which accounted for more than one-quarter of the $14.9bn spent globally in that year. China has the largest number of NEV charging stations in the world with 214,000 public NEV charging points as of 2017. The number of public charging points in China grew by around 51% in 2017. From January to August 2017, over 282,000 electric cars were registered.

Chinese OEMs are likely to emerge as leaders in the pure EV market and is becoming the target of many foreign investors in smart grids. General Electric, Siemens, ABB, and several other enterprises are cooperating with domestic Chinese partners to expand their smart grid business in China.

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Deep learning ASIC is in production qualification

Independent FinFET-class ASIC, custom IP and 2.5D packaging provider, eSilicon, has announced that the deep learning ASIC that taped out last September has moved to production qualification.

The ASIC includes custom pseudo two-port memories designed by eSilicon, TSMC’s Chip on Wafer on Substrate (CoWoS) technology, 28G SerDes, and four second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) stacks. eSilicon’s end-to-end 2.5D/HBM2 structure includes 2.5D ecosystem management, silicon-proven HBM2 PHY, ASIC physical design, 2.5D package design, manufacturing, assembly and test.

The CoWoS interposer is over 1,000 square mm and contains over 170,000 microbumps. The design has successfully passed test bring-up and is in final qualification, reports eSilicon. Four-high and eight-high HBM stack versions are in qualification. This design is in the industry vanguard of ASICs targeting deep learning applications, says eSilicon.

The 2.5D/HBM2 single package implementation gives the ASIC advantages such as orders of magnitude higher total bandwidth in a much smaller board footprint. Another benefit, says eSilicon, is that it affords highly parallel connections to memory stacks inside the package for fast access and a “significant” reduction in power consumption.

“This design greatly expands the possibilities for deep learning, and we are delighted to enter final qualification,” said Ajay Lalwani, vice president, global manufacturing operations at eSilicon. “TSMC’s 2.5D CoWoS packaging technology has been a key differentiater for this advanced design.”

As well as complex FinFET-class ASICs, custom IP and advanced 2.5D packaging solutions, eSilicon provides complete 2.5D/HBM2 and TCAM platforms for FinFET technology at 14,16 and 17nm as well as SerDes, specialised memory compilers and I/O libraries. It has a patented knowledge base and optimisation technology that it provides to customers serving the high-bandwidth networking, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure markets.

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Picture credit – TSMC foundry

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About Smart Cities

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