category: Design Bytes

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Self-Driving Cars In San Francisco
By Paul McLellan - 04 Mar, 2021 - Comments: 0

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
By Paul McLellan - 04 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 0

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
By Paul McLellan - 07 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

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
By Paul McLellan - 03 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

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
By Paul McLellan - 05 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

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
By Paul McLellan - 08 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

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

Establishing Connectivity Between Die and BGA
By Tyler Lockman - 03 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

The BGA component serves the primary role of redistributing the signals from the die it protects to an interface pattern (the BGA’s balls) compatible with the host PCB it mounts on. As a result, many IC package designs are among those who do not use a front-end schematic. Even if you have a schematic, you may find yourself making logic swaps in the layout where the additional context of the r... » read more

Accellera Tackles Functional Safety
By Paul McLellan - 06 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

During DAC, Accellera had a workshop about functional safety. In case you don't know, Accellera has a relatively new working group (WG) on Functional Safety. The chair is Cadence's Alessandra Nardi, who coincidentally also received the Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA during DAC (you can read more about that in my post Alessandra Nardi Receives Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA). But ... » read more

New Design For Trusted Data
By Paul McLellan - 01 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Recently, I wrote about Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE from now on) which I think is going to be something big that you will hear lots about in the future. Here's the reason I think it is going to be big. The people who care the most about security, such as financial institutions, governments, and companies with huge amounts of valuable data (such as semiconductor companies, or social m... » read more

AI Drives A New Wave For Semiconductors
By Paul McLellan - 04 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 0

In Cadence's recent earnings call, Lip-Bu Tan, our CEO, talked about the five waves that are hitting us simultaneously. Here's what he said: First of all, I'm excited about this industry, because it's very unusual to have five major waves happening at the same time. You have the AI machine learning wave and you have 5G is starting to deploy and then you have the hyperscale guy, the really mas... » read more

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