Semiconductor & electronics industries

Don’t expect Level 5 Autonomous cars for decades

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Why I don’t expect fully autonomous city driving in my lifetime (approx 25 years).

Paraphrase: The strange and crazy things that people do. .. a ball bouncing in front of your car, a child falling down, a car running a red light, head-down pedestrian. A level-5 car has to handle all of these cases, reliably.

These situations require 1) a giant set of learning data 2) Very rapid computing 3) Severe braking. Autonomous cars today are very slow + very cautious in order to allow more time for decisions and for braking.

My view:

There is no magic bullet that can solve these 3 problems, except keeping autonomous cars off of city streets. And all 3 get worse in bad weather, including fog much less in snow.

Also, there are lots of behavioral issues, such as “knowing” the behavior of pedestrians in different cities. Uber discovered that frequent braking/accelerating makes riders carsick – so they re-tuned their safety margins, and their car killed a pedestrian.

A counter-argument (partly from Don Norman, jnd1er): Human drivers are not good at these situations either, and occasionally hit people. Therefore, we should not wait for perfection, but instead systems that on balance are better than humans.  As distracted driving gets worse, the tradeoff in favor of autonomous cars will shift.

But there is another approach to distracted driving. Treat it like drunk driving. Make it socially and legally unacceptable. Drunk driving used to be treated like an accident, with very light penalties even in fatal accidents.

Finally, I’m not sure if any amount of real-life driving will be good enough to develop  training datasets for the rarest edge cases. Developers will need supplemental methods to handle them, including simulated accidents and some causal modeling. For example, the probabilities of different events change by location and time of day. Good drivers know this, and adjust. Perhaps cars will need adjustable parameters that shift their algorithm tuning in different circumstances.

Source of the quotation: Experts at the Table: The challenges to build a single chip to handle future autonomous functions of a vehicle span many areas across the design process.

Source: Semiconductor Engineering – Challenges To Building Level 5 Automotive Chips

Semiconductors get old, and eventually die. It’s getting worse.

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I once assumed that semiconductors lasted effectively forever. But even electronic devices wear out. How do semiconductor companies plan for aging?

There has never been a really good solution, and according to this article, problems are getting worse. For example, electronics in cars continue to get more complex (and more safety critical). But cars are used in very different ways after being sold, and in very different climates.This makes it impossible to predict how fast a particular car will age.

Electromigration
Electromigration is one form of aging. Credit:  JoupYoup – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, 

When a device is used constantly in a heavy load model for aging, particular stress patterns exaggerate things. An Uber-like vehicle, whether fully automated or not, has a completely different use model than the standard family car that actually stays parked in a particular state a lot of the time, even though the electronics are always somewhat alive. There’s a completely different aging model and you can’t guard-band both cases correctly.

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The First Smart Air Quality Tracker?

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The first microprocessor is almost 50 years old, but microprocessors (MPUs) continue to revolutionize new areas. (First MPU = Intel 4004, in 1971, which Intel designed for a calculator company!) In concert with Moore’s Law and now ubiquitous wireless two-way wireless data transmission (thanks, Qualcomm!). smartphones have become a basic building block of many products.

A companion to explain what’s in your air, anywhere. Flow is the intelligent device that fits into your daily life and helps you make the best air quality choices for yourself, your family, your community.

Source: Flow, by Plume Labs | The First Smart Air Quality Tracker

Here is a quick review I wrote of the “Flow” pollution meter, after using it for a few months.  I wrote it as a comment on a blog post by Meredith Fowlie about monitoring the effects of fires in N. California.

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“My Galaxy Note7 is still safer than my car.” No, it isn’t.

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The odds of dying in a car wreck are twice as high as this thing “exploding.” I’m keeping it.

Source: My Galaxy Note7 is still safer than my car. I’m keeping it

This author does an interesting calculation, but he does it wrong. The 100 Note7s that have exploded, out of 2.5M sold, were all used for 2 months or less since the phone has only been on the market that long. When you correct for this, the rate of fires over a 2 year ownership period is roughly 1 in 1000. (Probably higher, for several reasons.)

Second, lithium battery fires are nasty, smelly, and dangerous because they can set other things on fire. I speak from personal experience. Do you want to leave a device plugged in at night that may have a .1% chance of burning your house down over the period that you own it? I hope not.

His car wreck odds calculation (1 in 12000), by the way, may be per-year, but again he does not realize that it matters. But he is right that cars are plenty dangerous. I once estimate that at birth an American has a 50% chance of being hospitalized due to a car accident during their lifetime.

There are many other TOM issues to do with this Samsung Note7 recall. Clearly they have internal problems, and problems somewhere in management.

Safety Issues for Li-ion Batteries – Reminder

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I have been contributing to the comments section of this article on battery safety. Battery fires from cheap lithium-ion batteries are a genuine hazard, as I know from flying RC aircraft.

Learn what causes Li-ion to fail and what to do in case of fire. Battery makers are obligated to meet safety requirements, but less reputable firms may cheat.

Source: Safety Concerns with Li-ion Batteries – Battery University

Batteries in brand-name electronics (such as phones and laptop computers) with built-in charging systems are well made and are very safe unless physically damaged e.g.  in a car crash. But cheap batteries, which some people are starting to use in flashlights and vaping devices, are much riskier. Among other cautions, do not charge freestanding lithium-ion batteries unattended. The house you save may be your own.

Here is the site’s home page, which covers far more than safety. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/