Securing Offload Engines For A Robust Secure SoC System


Welcome to the Securing Offload Engines blog series where we will explore different approaches to security implementations and look at system examples involving Cadence Tensilica Xtensa Processors. In this blog, we will look at why it is important to build a robust secure SoC and introduce some of the common approaches to securing the offload engines. In subsequent posts, we will look at each o... » read more

Fluid Dynamics Of Sonic Booms From Supersonic Aircraft


The return to supersonic flight is amongst the hottest topics in aviation today, as several companies (Boom Supersonic and Aerion, among others) are actively developing new supersonic commercial airliners targeted to enter in service in the coming years. In this context, a quiet flight over land is one of the major challenges to ensure the regulatory compliance of such airliners. Several resea... » read more

Using In-Design Analysis Flows To Resolve Signal Integrity Issues


In today’s ever-shrinking IC package design cycles, it is almost imperative that we catch and correct routing issues as early as possible, which makes simulation an integral part of the design cycle. Layout engineers want a quick and accurate way to find out the layout mistakes by looking at the changing impedance values and high coupling due to nearby signals. Unfortunately, layout engineers... » read more

Preventing Online Fraud


I attended a webcast on Anti-Fraud organized by the RSA Conference in the leadup to the conference itself. The anti-fraud webcast was split into two sections. First was Steve Winderfield, who is advisory CISO at Akamai, titled "How We Can Keep up with Cyber-Criminals' Evolving Business Models?" The second part was by Michael Tiffany of White Ops and Chris Ott of Rothwell Figg, titled "Dete... » read more

Self-Driving Cars In San Francisco


You probably have heard that Waymo has completely driverless (no safety driver) taxis serving Phoenix. 600 of them. But you can't go and buy one. Why is that? Paul Graham, the founder of the incubator Y Combinator, is celebrated for many reasons, but two things he has said have become mantra in the startup world: Build something people want. Do things that don't scale. When it comes ... » read more

The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium Outlook


In mid-January, SEMI organized the two-day Industry Strategy Symposium. Presentations ranged from the outlook for the overall global economy, to purifying gases and materials to parts per quadrillion, to how TSMC took the leading-edge process crown from Intel. The first day was focused on the economy and business environment, along with its impact on the semiconductor supply chain. The secon... » read more

Security Breaches And The Defensive Mindset


Over the Christmas break, the biggest security breach ever came to light. It is assumed to be instigated by a foreign entity. The breach is known mostly as SolarWinds. SolarWinds produces network management software called Orion that is used by...well, almost everyone. The attackers inserted a backdoor into an Orion software update. You know how the operating system on your PC or Mac gets autom... » read more

Capabilities In CAP, CHERI, And Morello


At the recent Arm DevSummit, one of the presentations mentioned CHERI and the Arm Morello board in passing. This was in the context of using capabilities (perhaps) in some future Arm processors to increase the amount of memory safety, and to protect against vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown. I'd never heard of either, so I was intrigued and decided to look into the details. But the f... » read more

Electronics In Agriculture


In my post Jobs: Farmer I wrote about my experience as a teenager working on the farm owned (actually rented from the Duke of Badminton) by the father of one of my school friends. Electronics were nowhere to be found in those days. I recently watched some YouTube videos that show just how hi-tech farming has become now that Moore's Law has made accessible electronics that would have seemed ma... » read more

One SerDes Solution Doesn’t Fit All


Way back in the 1960s, E. Rent, who was working at IBM at the time, noticed a connection between the number of pins P on integrated circuits being used and the number of gates G on the integrated circuits. It was a power law, where the number of pins was cGR where c and R are constants. Actually, traditionally a Greek rho is used instead of R. It usually has a value between 0.5 and 0.8. If R... » read more

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