Blog Review: Sept. 5

Synopsys’ Taylor Armerding looks at a case of exploding costs – up to $17 million – when the city of Atlanta, Georgia fell victim to the SamSam ransomware, plus the lessons other cities can take to improve their security.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan traces how a landmark moment in object recognition, the ImageNet database, has spurred increasingly better object recognition algorithms for almost a decade.

Mentor’s Janusz Rajski takes a look at the unique DFT challenges for automotive ICs and the importance of team culture in developing new solutions.

Arm’s Xiaoqing Xu contends that more research is needed on logic IP design and optimization at 7nm and beyond, and presents new standard cell libraries for academic use.

Silicon Labs’ Kevin Smith digs into timing with a review of making proper output clock measurements and why it’s a best practice to terminate even unmeasured differential outputs.

In a video, SEMI’s Ariana Raftopoulos chats with Tom Salmon about how to make smart manufacturing possible across the supply chain, from semiconductor front-end, packaging and test, to PCB and final product assembly.

ANSYS’ Shawn Wasserman argues that to get autonomous driving systems the 8 billion miles of testing needed to ensure they’re safer than human drivers, simulation must be a major component.

A Rambus writer points to the impact the Foreshadow speculative execution vulnerability could have on Intel’s Software Guard Extensions in consumer products as well as virtual machines and hypervisors.

Plus, get up to speed on a range of topics with the latest videos:

Rambus Chief Scientist Craig Hampel talks about what will drive the next big performance gains after Moore’s Law, from the data center to the edge.

Carlos Maciàn, senior director of innovation for eSilicon EMEA, points to ways to improve the efficiency of AI operations by focusing on the individual operations, including data transport, computation and memory.

Synopsys’ Namit Gupta discusses low-power design techniques at the most advanced process nodes, including how to verify the impact of CDC on power at the register transfer level and how to avoid bugs caused by the post-RTL insertion of low-power devices.

Marvell’s Sathya Subramanian explains the new 802.11ax wireless standard, how it will work with 5G and existing networks, and how to set up an integrated solution to reduce bottlenecks in the home and in the enterprise.