Blog Review: Sept. 19


Applied Materials' David Thompson shares the new DARPA program that is focused on using correlated electrons to develop a new type of switch with quantum effects, potentially leading to unprecedented switching speeds. Mentor's Joe Hupcey III argues that for the most effective formal analysis, assertions should be as simple as possible and shares some tips on decomposing big assertions. Ca... » read more

The Security Penalty


It's not clear if Meltdown, Spectre and Foreshadow caused actual security breaches, but they did prompt big processor vendors like Intel, Arm, AMD and IBM to fix these vulnerabilities before they were made public by Google's Project Zero. While all of this may make data center managers and consumers feel better in one respect, it has created a level of panic of a different sort. For decades,... » read more

Enabling Cheaper Design


While the EDA industry tends to focus on cutting edge designs, where design costs are a minor portion of the total cost of product, the electronics industry has a very long tail. The further along the tail you go, the more significant design costs become as a percent of total cost. Many of those designs are traditionally built using standard parts, such as microcontrollers, but as additional... » read more

Open Throttle On Automotive Innovation


Like a race car accelerating out of a turn, the autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle market is expanding faster than a lot of people expected. IHS Markit, for example, reported earlier this year that more than 33 million autonomous vehicles will be sold globally in 2040. The growth rate, IHS Markit suggests, is going to be torrid since the first year of significant volume for autonomous vehic... » read more

Foveated Rendering


Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming increasingly popular due to its ability to immerse the user into an experience. Those experiences can vary from watching a movie in a simulated theatre, having a look at your personal pictures as though they were paintings in a museum or finding yourself in front row seats of a huge sporting event. These specific experiences don’t stress the device hardware to... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 12


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the impact the Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow vulnerabilities will have on future processor design with an overview of speculative execution and why it's important to current architectures. Mentor's Matthew Ballance suggests some ways to find existing information and descriptions that can be used to jump-start the creation of portable stimulus models. ... » read more

Intel Buys NetSpeed for NoC, Fabric IP


Intel acquired NetSpeed Systems, taking in network-on-a-chip and interconnect fabric intellectual property for designing, developing, and testing system-on-a-chip devices. The acquisition gives Intel a key missing ingredient in its plan to develop customized heterogeneous solutions for its customers. The company now has various memory pieces, interconnect bridges, programmable logic and ASIC... » read more

Finding Security Holes In Hardware


At least three major security holes in processors were identified by Google's Project Zero over the past year, with more expected to roll out in coming months. Now the question is what to do about them. Since the beginning of the PC era, two requirements for hardware were backward compatibility and improvements in performance with each new version of processors. No one wants to replace their... » read more

Cache Speculation Side-Channels


This whitepaper looks at the susceptibility of Arm implementations following research findings from security researchers, including Google and MIT, on new potential cache timing side-channels exploiting processor speculation. This paper also outlines possible mitigations that can be employed for software designed to run on existing Arm processors. To read more, click here. » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 5


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at a case of exploding costs – up to $17 million – when the city of Atlanta, Georgia fell victim to the SamSam ransomware, plus the lessons other cities can take to improve their security. Cadence's Paul McLellan traces how a landmark moment in object recognition, the ImageNet database, has spurred increasingly better object recognition algorithms for alm... » read more

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