Author's Latest Posts

Silicon Photonics Begins To Make Inroads

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling - 09 Jul, 2019 - Comments: 1

Integrating photons and electrons on the same die is still a long way off, but advances in packaging and improvements in silicon photonics are making it possible to use optical communication for a variety of new applications. Utilizing light-based communication between chips, or in self-contained modules, ultimately could have a big impact on chip design. Photons moving through waveguides ar... » read more

Edge Complexity To Grow For 5G

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling - 02 Jul, 2019 - Comments: 0

Edge computing is becoming as critical to the success of 5G as millimeter-wave technology will be to the success of the edge. In fact, it increasingly looks as if neither will succeed without the other. 5G networks won’t be able to meet 3GPP’s 4-millisecond-latency rule without some layer to deliver the data, run the applications and broker the complexities of multi-tier Internet apps ac... » read more

Creating A Roadmap For Hardware Security

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling - 02 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

The U.S. Department of Defense and private industry consortiums are developing comprehensive and cohesive cybersecurity plans that will serve as blueprints for military, industrial and commercial systems. What is particularly noteworthy in all of these efforts is the focus on semiconductors. While software can be patched, vulnerabilities such as Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow need to be de... » read more

Spreading Intelligence From The Cloud To The Edge

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling - 04 Apr, 2019 - Comments: 0

The challenge of partitioning processing between the edge and the cloud is beginning to come into focus as chipmakers and systems companies wrestle with a massive and rapidly growing volume of data. There are widely different assessments of how much data this ultimately will include, but everyone agrees it is a very large number. Petabytes are simply rounding errors in this equation, and tha... » read more

Next Wave Of Security For IIoT

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling - 07 Mar, 2019 - Comments: 0

A rush of new products and services promise to make the famously un-secured Industrial IoT (IIoT) substantially more secure in the near future. Although the semiconductor industry has been churning out a variety of security-related products and concepts, ranging from root of trust approaches to crypto processors and physically unclonable functions, most IIoT operations have been slow to adop... » read more

VCSEL Technology Takes Off

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling - 07 Feb, 2019 - Comments: 1

By Kevin Fogarty and Ed Sperling Vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) technology, a proven but mostly niche technology until recently, is suddenly a very hot commodity thanks to the introduction of facial recognition in phones and other mobile devices. VCELS primarily have been used as a low-cost way of tracking movement and transfering data in computer mice, laser printers and ... » read more