Layered Security Offers Best Embedded Hardware Security


The importance of building a secure and rigid foundation in SoC and system designs has never been so true as it is now, given not only the garden variety of software vulnerabilities existing today, but also micro-architectural attacks on CPUs like Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow. Design engineers should embrace two security-related tenets when selecting a security processor: one is depth o... » read more

Bolstering Security For AI Applications


Hardware accelerators that run sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms have become increasingly prevalent in data centers and endpoint devices. As such, protecting sensitive and lucrative data running on AI hardware from a range of threats is now a priority for many companies. Indeed, a determined attacker can either manipulate or steal training data, inf... » read more

Spreadsheets In Virtuoso


The looming tape-out deadline is the nightmare that keeps most design managers up at night. Managing schedules and tracking progress is always a black art that few, if any, can master. Various project management tools and methodologies have been developed that can help, if followed diligently. However, the learning curve of the tools, or the training and overhead of the process, often result in... » read more

Advantages Of BFloat16 For AI Inference


Essentially all AI training is done with 32-bit floating point. But doing AI inference with 32-bit floating point is expensive, power-hungry and slow. And quantizing models for 8-bit-integer, which is very fast and lowest power, is a major investment of money, scarce resources and time. Now BFloat16 (BF16) offers an attractive balance for many users. BFloat16 offers essentially t... » read more

Coordinating Automotive Embedded Software Development Requires A Unified Approach


The rising intelligence and connectivity of vehicles are making the interactions between software and physical systems more complex, exposing the deficiencies of current processes, tools and methods. To compete in the technological race for the future of mobility, companies must evolve their software development processes today. A common digital thread connecting software and physical systems t... » read more

New Vision Technologies For Real-World Applications


Computer vision – the ability of a machine to ‘infer’ or extract useful information from a two-dimensional image or an uncompressed video stream of images – has the ability to change our lives. It can enable self-driving cars, empower robots or drones to see their way to delivering packages to your doorstep, and can turn your face into a payment method (Figure 1). To achieve these advan... » read more

No Mess, No Stress


A clean and tidy working environment is often a productive environment. Imagine a desk with a lot of clutter. One may lose precious work minutes every time we go searching for a lost paper on a cluttered desk. The same is true if you are working on your designs. During the course of a design project, spirited and fast thinking design engineers run several experiments. Some of them are more s... » read more

In-System Networks Are Front And Center


This year’s HotChips conference at Stanford was all about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and what particularly struck me, naturally because we’re in this business too, was how big a role on-chip networks played in some of the leading talks. NVIDIA talked about their scalable mesh architecture, both on-chip and in-package, meshes connecting processing NN processing el... » read more

Advantages Of LPDDR5: A New Clocking Scheme


Earlier this year, JEDEC released the new standard, JESD209–5, Low Power Double Data Rate 5 (LPDDR5). Those that contributed to the development of the standard come from a diverse technology background and represent both manufacturers and consumers of SDRAM memories. Now we have a new memory standard to help enable the future that requires more compute power, higher reliability, and lower pow... » read more

Machine Learning For Autonomous Drive


Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is arguably the biggest technical innovation of the last decade. Although the algorithms for AI have been in existence for many years, the recent explosion of both data as well as faster compute made it possible to apply those algorithms to solve many real life use cases. One of the most prominent of these use cases is fully aut... » read more

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