Posts Tagged ‘insights’

Tech Focus: Non-Terrestrial Networks and the Era of Democratised Connectivity

Monday, September 18th, 2023

Dylan McGrath from Keysight Technologies shares how non-terrestrial networks (NTN) represent an exciting new frontier in communications because they extend the reach of 5G into regions lacking terrestrial infrastructure.

NTNs use both satellites and high-altitude platforms such as balloons, airships and pilotless aerial systems in the stratosphere to ensure coverage and reliability in virtually any scenario. Photo by NASA on Unsplash.

NTNs use both satellites and high-altitude platforms such as balloons, airships and pilotless aerial systems in the stratosphere to ensure coverage and reliability in virtually any scenario. Photo by NASA on Unsplash.

Decreased costs and new capabilities in terrestrial 5G are combining to make NTNs increasingly viable, ushering in a new era of true global connectivity and a space-based IoT that will permanently change our perception of communication.

3GPP’s 5G standards recognise NTNs as a part of the 5G connectivity infrastructure.

One of the network’s chief benefits is multi-connectivity, as users connect through both terrestrial and satellite links, with the former handling low-latency traffic and satellites reserved for high-latency traffic.

There are a multitude of fascinating use cases to explore here, including the following.

  1. Augmentation of terrestrial networks
  2. Whole-world connectivity
  3. Remote pipeline monitoring
  4. Image Intelligence

1. Augmentation of terrestrial networks

5G NTNs will fill gaps in cellular coverage, allowing operators to enhance the latter without driving up costs.

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Tech Focus: Energising the Electric Vehicle (EV) Era

Friday, August 11th, 2023

The countdown for automotive players to meet greener energy deadlines is powering towards the end of the decade, when they come into play. In this thought leadership opinion piece, Thomas Goetzl from Keysight Technologies looks at the road ahead in terms of what smart energy must encompass to support the EV future.

Energising the road to the EV Era.

Energising the road to the EV Era.

Accelerating adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and meeting the mandates require significant and sustainable changes.

One area that needs more attention is how to energise the transition to an electric-powered future.

With the demand for electricity expected to grow nearly 20% by 2050 due to EVs and other clean tech initiatives, grids are under immense pressure.

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Tech Focus: Three Trends Shaping the Future of EDA

Wednesday, October 19th, 2022

Niels Faché from Keysight Technologies shares his insights on the key EDA trends impacting the pace of innovation, as more systems companies move to design their own chips and electronic products.

The electronic design automation (EDA) industry is experiencing strong financial growth and is making a vital contribution to the success of much larger semiconductor and electronic systems industries.

The electronic design automation (EDA) industry is experiencing strong financial growth and is making a vital contribution to the success of much larger semiconductor and electronic systems industries.

Trend 1: Domain-Specific Design

Electronic product design is moving toward domain-specific orientation. What impact does domain-specific design have on EDA tool developers and users?

Niels Faché:

It is not enough anymore for product developers to just consider the traditional specifications for a chip or board.

They must also now consider the context in which their products will be integrated and used.

Drivers of design for context in product development teams include increased system complexity, more demanding performance and cost requirement tradeoffs, and shorter development lifecycles.

To address these issues, EDA vendors and users are seeing closer collaboration in the ecosystem from developers of components (such as an RFIC), to a sub-system (such as a radar), and a system (such as an autonomous drive system) to address integration challenges and optimise performance.

Design-for-context raises several challenges and opportunities for EDA tool providers such as:

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Tech Focus: Electric Vehicles On the Road to Industry Adoption

Tuesday, September 13th, 2022

The advent of electric vehicles represents a seismic shift in thinking as well as operations. In this thought leadership opinion piece, Thomas Goetzl from Keysight Technologies shares his insights on how this introduces several challenges like pressure on the power grid and a need for sustainable and environmentally friendly material.

Automakers need to reimagine a decade-old industry to meet modern challenges.

Automakers need to reimagine a decade-old industry to meet modern challenges.

Over the next decade, many automakers plan to transform their fleets to electric power, with some announcing goals for fully electric lineups within five years.

Automakers are making products that meet evolving industry standards for safety, emissions testing, and energy efficiency.

The surge in electric vehicles comes with infrastructure, manufacturing, and regulatory challenges that will impact the automotive industry.

The surge in electric vehicles comes with infrastructure, manufacturing, and regulatory challenges that will impact the automotive industry.

They require Electric Powertrain and HEV/EV solutions that address safety, regulatory, and environmental issues.

This significant transformation represents a seismic shift in thinking as well as operations and introduces several challenges like pressure on the power grid and a need for sustainable, environmentally friendly material.

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Tech Focus: Spot Your Security Vulnerability Before Hackers Do

Friday, March 18th, 2022

Every network has a security vulnerability – where is yours? In this guest commentary, Keith Bromley from Keysight Technologies shares a three-point plan on how to find your security vulnerability before hackers beat you to it.

Keith Bromley from Keysight Technologies shares his 3-step plan to help you discover your network security vulnerability before hackers do it for you.

Keith Bromley from Keysight Technologies shares his 3-step plan to help you discover your network security vulnerability before hackers do it for you.

One of the top questions on the minds of network security personnel is “how do I reduce my security risk?”

Even for smaller organisations this is important because every network has a weakness. But, do you know where you are the most vulnerable? Wouldn’t you like to fix the problem now, before a hacker exploits it?

Here is a three-point plan that works to expose intrusions and decrease network security risk.

Network security – It all starts with prevention

Inline security solutions are a high impact technique that businesses can deploy to address security threats. These solutions can eliminate 90% or more of incoming security threats before they even enter your network.

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Tech Focus: Raising the Bar on Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Thursday, February 10th, 2022

The fully autonomous vehicles of the not-so-distant future promise tremendous gains in automotive safety and transportation efficiency.

In this guest commentary, Thomas Goetzl from Keysight Technologies shares his insights on how automotive OEMs must move beyond contemporary levels of vehicle autonomy to fulfill this promise.

Keysight's Radar Scene Emulator (RSE) closes the gap between software simulation and roadway testing, and training ADAS and autonomous driving algorithms to real-world conditions.

Keysight’s Radar Scene Emulator (RSE) closes the gap between software simulation and roadway testing, and training ADAS and autonomous driving algorithms to real-world conditions.

SAE International (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers) defines six levels of vehicle autonomy, with Level 0 representing fully manual and Level 5 representing fully autonomous.

Today’s most advanced autonomous vehicle systems rate only Level 3, which means they are capable of making some decisions such as acceleration or braking without human intervention.

“In order to make the leap to the tremendous gains in automotive safety and transportation efficiency that fully autonomous vehicles promise, OEMs will need to overcome a unique set of challenges for testing automotive radar sensors in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems, as well as developing new methodologies for training algorithms that conventional solutions are ill-equipped to address,” says Thomas Goetzl, vice president of automotive and energy solutions at Keysight Technologies.

Getting from Level 3 to Level 5 will require many breakthroughs, including closing the gap between software simulation and roadway testing, and training ADAS and autonomous driving algorithms to real-world conditions.

Keysight’s latest innovation, the Radar Scene Emulator (RSE), goes a long way toward bridging these gaps.

Software simulation plays an important role in autonomous vehicle development.

Simulating environments through software can help validate the capabilities of ADAS and autonomous driving systems.

But simulation cannot fully replicate real-world driving conditions or the potential for imperfect sensor response — something that fully autonomous vehicles will inevitably have to contend with.

OEMs rely on road testing to validate ADAS and autonomous driving systems prior to bringing them to market.

While road testing is and will continue to be a vital and necessary component of the development process, it is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to repeat specifically in the area of controlling environmental conditions.

Relying on road testing alone to develop vehicles reliable enough to navigate urban and rural roadways safely 100% of the time would take decades.

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Tech Focus: Monitoring Battery Temperature by Using a Data Acquisition System or Specialised Battery Test System

Wednesday, January 19th, 2022

In today’s electronics applications, batteries power nearly all of our portable electronic devices. Batteries also serve as emergency power backup systems on large premises. And all-electric vehicles use large cascading battery packs to meet the expected power for the required performance.

In this guest commentary, Bernard Ang from Keysight Technologies shares his insights on specialised battery testing.

Batteries are the key to our portable/mobile electronic gadgets in this digital era.

Batteries are the key to our portable/mobile electronic gadgets in this digital era.

Battery packs need the required specific power (W/kg) to be able to dispense enough current to achieve the electric vehicle speed performance.

They also need the required specific energy (Wh/kg) to achieve longer runtime or travel range.

Why is it important to monitor battery temperature?

Most rechargeable batteries today are lithium ion and have an operating range between 15 °C and 35 °C at which their full performance and capacity kicks in.

  • If the battery and its ambient temperature is below 15 °C, you may experience sluggish electrochemical reactions within the battery and as a result, lower battery performance and reduced charge capacity.
  • If the battery or battery pack operates above 35 °C in ambient temperature, battery degradation can accelerate over time. As a result, you may notice shorter battery life, non-uniform aging due to thermal gradients, greater exposure to safety issues, and higher life cycle costs. At extremely hot temperatures, batteries can break down and cause leakage, smoke, fire, and even explosions.

The power map chart below shows the power limits of your lithium-ion battery or battery packs across the temperature range.

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Tech Focus: Looking Ahead – High Speed In-Vehicle Display and Sensor Connections (Part 2 of 2)

Friday, December 17th, 2021

In this two-part guest commentary, Carrie Browen and Kevin Kershner from Keysight Technologies share their insights into the future of high speed in-vehicle display and sensor connections. You may find Part 1 here.

Automotive display use-case. © 2021 MIPI Alliance, Inc.

Automotive display use-case. © 2021 MIPI Alliance, Inc.

For this second half of our commentary, we begin with an introduction of SerDes.

In today’s infotainment systems, it is common for in-vehicle cameras and displays to be connected to the image-processing electronic control unit (ECU) via a SerDes (serializer/deserializer) connection.

Today, they are delivered by individual vendors using closed, proprietary standards.

Extending the reach of feature-rich SerDes links can require operating at lower Baud rates and higher order modulations (e.g. PAM-4).

In addition, it will require higher bandwidth Ethernet links as primary interconnects between zones, perhaps with 802.3ch support up to 10 Gbps throughput.

Emerging SerDes standards like mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) A-PHY (MIPI A-PHY is a physical layer specification targeted for ADAS/ADS surround sensor applications and Infotainment display applications in automotive) and Automotive SerDes Alliance (ASA) will be implemented by multiple silicon vendors.

This will create a competitive market that acts to drive down the cost while delivering application specific features.

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Tech Focus: Looking Ahead – High Speed In-Vehicle Display and Sensor Connections (Part 1 of 2)

Thursday, December 16th, 2021

In this two-part guest commentary, Carrie Browen and Kevin Kershner from Keysight Technologies share their insights into the future of high speed in-vehicle display and sensor connections.

A conceptual diagram of a zone-based in vehicle network architecture. Image: Keysight Technologies.

A conceptual diagram of a zone-based in vehicle network architecture. Image: Keysight Technologies.

It is no secret the pace of innovation in the automotive industry is exploding.

If the last 20 years have been linear in the development of electrification, the last two to three years have been exponential.

It used to be that a car was a means of getting from A to B.

Now, we can safely say that is not true for the vehicles of today and certainly not for the new vehicles of tomorrow.

Just about every new car on the market has a backup camera, park assist, and blind spot monitoring.

Some offer a 360-degree view.

Other features offer real-time traffic updates, cellular connection to potential hazards, other road users, vehicles, or pedestrians.

There are features that can detect if a driver is distracted or tired.

Meanwhile, the people in the car are often unaware of driving conditions, while they enjoy infotainment systems.

These features are delivered through a mixture of sensors, cameras, and networks.

As demands go up, next-generation advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) require camera and radar systems with increasingly high resolution.

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Tech Focus: C-V2X Certification – Necessary or Just Nice to Have?

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Fewer accidents and greater road safety are central to the vision for automated vehicles (AVs). Enabling that vision requires greater situational awareness and the ability to inform the car and its drivers what is happening a mile in front of them, foreseeing what’s likely to happen next, and automatically taking preemptive actions.

In this guest commentary, Cheryl Ajluni from Keysight Technologies shares her insights into C-V2X certification.

C-V2X Applications (Image courtesy of Qualcomm).

C-V2X Applications (Image courtesy of Qualcomm).

Cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technology provides see-through, 360-degree, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) sensing in good, as well as adverse weather conditions to enhance the functionality and safety of autonomous driving (see the cover illustration).

C-V2X complements line-of-sight (LOS) sensors such as radar, lidar, camera, with information beyond their reach, and allows the vehicle to make more informed and coordinated decisions.

Whereas LOS sensors cannot indicate vehicle or driver intent, C-V2X conveys intent by sharing sensor data – resulting in a higher level of predictability in traffic situations such as lane changes, variable speeds, or road hazards.

Day one use cases include safety features such as emergency electronic brake light and forward collision warning, ‘do not pass’ warning, blind spot and lane change warning, vulnerable road user, road works warning, and intersection movement assistance.

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