Breakfast Bytes Blogs

Every year, in early March, Embedded World takes place (or embedded world, as they like to call it, all in lower-case). It is always in Nuremberg, a couple of hours north of Munich. It was completely virtual the last couple of years, and it was postponed this year. That's why I'm writing about it now in June. It is one of those huge German conferences that fills hall after hall of exhibits. There are 20,000 people attending, with 700 exhibitors spread over 200,000 square feet of exhibit space.

Booth

You can see some of the Cadence booth in the picture above. Above the counter, the graphic is actually a big TV monitor. Around the booth there were about four demo pods and a counter with an espresso machine that made pretty good coffee.

Keynote

The opening keynote to the conference was by Matthias Klauda, Executive Vice President of R&D at Robert Bosch. They are the largest of the so-called "Tier-1s" in the automotive industry. However, a large part of his presentation was about how the industry is changing and the very concept of a tier-1 is going away. In many ways, the presentation seemed familiar since I have seen several about this. Indeed, I have written about this more than once, for example in my post Automotive Industry Basics. I even have one about a presentation by Bosch (although not Matthias): Bosch: Future of Connected Mobility.

One thing that has changed since I wrote those posts is that Bosch has started to manufacture its own semiconductors and now has three fabs and two semiconductor design groups.

Matthias's theme was that there are three changes in progress:

• One is technical, driven by ADAS and autonomous driving, and the corresponding move to centralized architectures
• One is a change in how companies need to be organized to develop products in this new world
• One is a change in how participants in the industry need to cooperate and partner for success

In the past, a vehicle had ~100 loosely connected electrical control units (ECUs). Designing a vehicle was about release to production, since vehicle software was never updated after the vehicle was manufactured. That has been changing, and the architecture is more centralized, with updates (even over the air or OTA) since the car is always connected to the cloud. Note that "E/E" above stands for "electrical/electronic."

In the Q&A someone asked if this wasn't all ten years too late. Given that I have been writing about these changes for almost that long then I could say "yes." But on the other hand, it is not my job to reorganize the whole industry and make everything stick.

Awards

Embedded world gives awards out in six categories. We succeeded in getting to the final three in two of the categories, for tools with the Protium X1 (ignore the fact that it says "safety and security" at the top) and for embedded vision with the Tensilica Vision P1 DSP. The other categories were hardware, software, safety and security, and startups,

Always On (AON)

Just after the awards, Amol Bokar took to the stage to present on the Tensilica Vision P1 DSP. This is his "always on" presentation that I wrote about in my post Always On at D&R. But he is on a world tour having presented it again at the Embedded Vision Summit. Then at CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley. Now in Germany. I think it will be presented in Japanese and Chinese at the upcoming CadenceLIVE events in Asia, as well.

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