Greetings From Mars


Hello Mars. Congratulations to the amazing engineers and scientists at NASA and Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) for a successful touchdown on the Mars Jezero Crater. In July 2020, NASA launched the Perseverance rover mission, which sought to find signs of habitable conditions, search for biosignatures, and collect samples for future Mars-sample-return missions and human expeditions. Seven months l... » read more

COVID-19 And Cybersecurity: Pay Attention To Exponential Growth!


COVID-19 and cybersecurity – you may wonder what these two seemingly very different topics have in common. I would list two: Both of them are exponential in nature, which, as a society we have difficulties grappling with – making this one of the reasons for our uneven responses. Both of them require a multi-layered solution strategy that, while it does not need to be perfect, must b... » read more

The Best AI Edge Inference Benchmark


When evaluating the performance of an AI accelerator, there’s a range of methodologies available to you. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the different ways to structure your benchmark research before moving forward with an evaluation that directly runs your own model. Just like when buying a car, research will only get you so far before you need to get behind the wheel and give your ... » read more

Over-the-Air Automotive Updates


Modern vehicles are increasingly-connected devices with growing volumes of electronic systems. This systemic complexity means that even an average vehicle design will include over 150 ECUs, which control not just infotainment and communications, but powertrain, safety, and driving systems (figure 1). We see not just a surge in the volume and complexity of electronic hardware, but also software.... » read more

Virtualizing FPGAs For Multiple Cloud Users


Cloud computing has become the new computing paradigm. For cloud computing, virtualization is necessary to enable isolation between users, high flexibility and scalability, high security, and maximized utilization of hardware resources. Since 2017, because of the advantages of programmability, low latency, and high energy efficiency, FPGA has been widely adopted into cloud computing. Amazon ... » read more

Challenges Of Using The Cloud For IC Design


The ‘cloud’ is so ubiquitous that perhaps even your grandmother has heard about it. There are advertisements on TV with various vendors touting their cloud offerings. The cloud is ideal for eCommerce and SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings, as the elasticity on demand provides a convenient way to scale up when demand is high and scale down when it is low. Yet the design community has ... » read more

Water System Hack And The Implications For Hardware Security


Last month we talked about the SolarWinds hack and now this month another disturbing attack has taken place – this time on a water supply system in Florida. Unfortunately, these types of attacks are becoming more frequent, giving us all pause as to how secure the systems that serve our everyday life really are. What lessons can we take from this recent attack that we can implement to make thi... » read more

Making Vehicle Electronics Safe With ISO 26262 Compliance


There are many semiconductor applications with high demands on safety, including spaceborne systems, nuclear power plants, and embedded medical devices. But automotive electronics are probably foremost in most peoples’ minds when they think about safe operation under all conditions. The advent of fully autonomous vehicles is responsible for much of this attention. Like other safety-critical a... » read more

Keeping Key Management Clear And Physical


Fundamental to all digital security systems is the ability to turn sensitive data into what looks like random incomprehensible jibberish and turn it back again into the same original information. But that is not all there is to it. You should be able to do that second bit of getting the original text only if you are allowed to do so. A classic way to deal with this problem is by using another s... » 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

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