Post-Quantum Cryptography


Quantum computing is increasingly seen as a threat to communications security: rapid progress towards realizing practical quantum computers has drawn attention to the long understood potential of such machines to break fundamentals of contemporary cryptographic infrastructure. While this potential is so far firmly theoretical, the cryptography community is preparing for this possibility by deve... » read more

Security Implications Of Quantum Computing


The US Government just stepped up the push for quantum computing with an award of $625 million in funding to create five quantum information research centers. Industry and academic institutions will contribute $300 million toward this effort with the remainder drawn from the $1.2 billion earmarked in the 2018 law: the National Quantum Initiative Act. The race to quantum computing is a global on... » read more

The Road To Post-Quantum Cryptography


Quantum computing offers the promise of tremendous leaps in processing power over current digital computers. But for the public-key cryptography algorithms used today for e-commerce, mobile payments, media streaming, digital signatures and more, quantum computing represents an existential event. Quantum computers may be able to break the widely used RSA and ECC (Elliptic-Curve Cryptography) alg... » read more

Unexpected Security Holes


Security is emerging as one of the top challenges in semiconductor design across a variety of markets, with the number of security holes growing by orders of magnitude in sectors that have never dealt with these kinds of design constraints before. While security has been a topic of conversation for years in mobile phones and data centers, commercial and industrial equipment is being connecte... » read more

System Bits: April 12


Highly aligned, wafer-scale films Rice University researchers, with support from Los Alamos National Laboratory, have created inch-wide, flexible, wafer-scale films of highly aligned and closely packed carbon nanotubes with the help of a simple filtration process. The chirality-enriched single-walled carbon nanotubes assemble themselves by the millions into long rows that are aligned better... » read more

Quantum Cryptography: A Magic Bullet For The IoT?


Quantum cryptography (QC for this discussion) theory—and it is still just theory—is potentially a very powerful security process that could be implemented for the dissemination of information over communications channels, using the principles of quantum mechanics. This is particularly intriguing because it is impossible to measure a photon, the fundamental element in the creation of QC secu... » read more

Visiting The Future At CLEO


CLEO - The Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics – presents the most comprehensive snapshot of laser and photonics applications. Presented by three professional societies (OSA, APS and IEEE Photonics) it was held in San Jose last month. While few of the topics covered are mainstream today for the semiconductor industry, one doesn’t have to look too far to find impact and potential synergi... » read more