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

An Automated Pre-Silicon IP Trustworthiness Assessment For Hardware Assurance


Paper presented by Sergio Marchese & John Hallman of OneSpin Solutions & The Aerospace Corporation. Integrated circuit designs include in-house and third-party intellectual properties that could contain hardware Trojans. An independent, trusted, and complete IP model, suitable for automated formal comparison with the IP register-transfer level (RTL) code using commercially available ... » read more

RISC-V Becoming Less Risky With The Right Verification


RISC-V continues to make headlines across the electronic design industry. You may have seen the recent news that the OpenHW Group is delivering their first RISC-V core, the CV32E40P. If you attended last month’s RISC-V Summit, perhaps you attended “CORE-V: Industrial Grade Open-Source RISC-V Cores” by Rick O’Connor, president of the OpenHW Group. In this session, Rick discussed how the ... » read more

Hidden Costs In Faster, Low-Power AI Systems


Chipmakers are building orders of magnitude better performance and energy efficiency into smart devices, but to achieve those goals they also are making tradeoffs that will have far-reaching, long-lasting, and in some cases unknown impacts. Much of this activity is a direct result of pushing intelligence out to the edge, where it is needed to process, sort, and manage massive increases in da... » read more

Verification’s Inflection Point


Functional verification is nearing an inflection point, brought on by rising complexity and the many tentacles that are intermixing it with other disciplines. New abstractions or different ways to approach the problems are needed. Being a verification engineer is no longer enough, except for those whose concerns is block-level verification. Most of the time and effort spent in verification i... » read more

Trust Is Not A Good Feeling


As a society, we trust in a lot of things in order for our daily lives to proceed. Trust is embedded in our lives. We trust in everything from the products we use to our relationships we have to our government. But when our trust is broken or shaken in something or someone, it is hard very hard for to for us to have confidence in that something or someone again. If we apply the concept to of... » read more

Electronics Supply-Chain Trust Standards Emerge


Creative new ideas for electronics supply-chain trust are in rich supply, whether securing identity, protecting logistics, or establishing provenance. But underlying these efforts are wide-ranging standards in development from a broad set of organizations. Today, no one-stop-shop for supply-chain standards exists. Instead, there is huge fragmentation. It can be difficult to identify all of t... » read more

CEO Outlook: 2021


The new year will be one of significant transition and innovation for the chip industry, but there are so many new applications and market segments that broad generalizations are becoming less meaningful. Unlike in years past, where sales of computers or smart phones were a good indication of how the chip industry would fare, end markets have both multiplied and splintered, greatly increasin... » read more

RISC-V Verification Challenges Spread


The RISC-V ecosystem is struggling to keep pace with rapid innovation and customization, which is increasing the amount of verification work required for each design and spreading that work out across more engineers at more companies. The historical assumption is that verification represents 60% to 80% or more of SoC project effort in terms of cost and time for a mature, mainstream processor... » read more

A Tale Of Two Challenges: From Space Exploration To Unlocking Your Vision


I love a good puzzle, and I’m guessing most engineers do as well. After all, engineers spend their days solving complex problems to deliver the most advanced products to the world or to perform mission-critical tasks. We kicked off this season of merriment with the latter in mind at this year’s Nokia FPGA Conference and “Mission to Mars” Hackathon in late November. Now, just in time for... » read more

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