Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility With the chip supply so tight it is shutting down automotive production lines, U.S. chip company CEOs signed a Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) letter asking the U.S. president to include funding incentives for the chip manufacturing in U.S. economic recovery plans. The letter references the CHIPS for America Act and asks the president to work with Congress to suppo... » read more

DRAM’s Persistent Threat To Chip Security


A well-known DRAM vulnerability called "rowhammer," which allows an assailant to disrupt or take control of a system, continues to haunt the chip industry. Solutions have been tried, and new ones are being proposed, but the potential for a major attack persists. First discovered some five years ago, most of the efforts to eliminate the "rowhammer" threat have done little more than mitigate t... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Security Microsoft and Synopsys are working together on a secure cloud-based chip development environment for United States Department of Defense’s Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) program. “Through this integration on the RAMP program, Synopsys' trusted design, verification and silicon IP solutions will be available in Microsoft Azure," said Mujtaba Hamid, head of Silicon ... » read more

Four Steps To Resolving Reset Domain Crossing Data-Corruption In Automotive SoCs


By Kurt Takara (Siemens EDA), Ankush Sethi (NXP), and Aniruddha Gupta (NXP) Modern automotive SoCs typically contain multiple asynchronous reset signals to ensure systematic functional recovery from unexpected situations and faults. This complex reset architecture leads to a new set of problems such as possible reset domain crossing (RDC) issues. Conventional clock domain crossing (CDC) veri... » read more

Longer Chip Lifecycles Increase Security Threat


The longer chips and electronic systems remain in use, the more they will need to be refreshed with software and firmware updates. That creates a whole new level of security risks, ranging from over-the-air intercepts to compromised supply chains. These problems have been escalating as more devices are connected to the Internet and to each other, but it's particularly worrisome when it invol... » 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

Bridging The Gap Between Smart Cities And Autonomous Vehicles


Smart city planners and carmakers are wrestling with similar problems and goals, but they are working at very different paces and often with different technologies — despite the fact that these two worlds will need to be bridged in order to be useful. Moving traffic optimally in urban areas is critical for reducing energy consumption and accidents, and for moving emergency vehicles through... » read more

Addressing Power Challenges In AI Hardware


Artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators are essential for tackling AI workloads like neural networks. These high-performance parallel computation machines provide the processing efficiency that such high data volumes demand. With AI playing increasingly larger roles in our lives—from consumer devices like smart speakers to industrial applications like automated factories—it’s paramount ... » read more

SolarWinds Attack Is A Cautionary Tale For Hardware And Its Supply Chain


The recent SolarWinds hacking incident that left many Fortune-500 companies and US government networks exposed is an interesting cautionary tale for unchecked software and hardware supply chain security vulnerabilities. The highly sophisticated software supply chain attack occurred in the SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring system. This system, used by over 33,000 companies, monitors performance acr... » read more

Edge-Inference Architectures Proliferate


First part of two parts. The second part will dive into basic architectural characteristics. The last year has seen a vast array of announcements of new machine-learning (ML) architectures for edge inference. Unburdened by the need to support training, but tasked with low latency, the devices exhibit extremely varied approaches to ML inference. “Architecture is changing both in the comp... » read more

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