Always On, Always At Risk


Always-on devices are everywhere, and each of them is a potential target for hackers. While many people associate always-on devices with smart speakers such as an Amazon Alexa or Google Home, or a connected security camera, that's only one component in a system. There's a broader infrastructure behind those devices. So even if you power down a digital assistant/smart speaker, everything it's... » read more

Servers And The Drive To DDR5


This IDC Technology Spotlight Study, sponsored by Rambus, discusses server demands on DRAM and different workloads. DRAM must dynamically adjust to the needs of these disparate workloads. The history of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) is characterized by the ability of the technology to adapt to the increasingly specialized real-time memory requirements of the applications that utilize it. ... » read more

Lowering Energy Per Bit


Energy is emerging as a focal point in chip and system design, but solving energy-related issues needs to be dealt with on a much broader scale than design teams typically see. Energy is the amount of power consumed over a period of time to perform a given task, but reducing energy is a lot different than reducing power. It affects everything from operational costs and system performance to ... » read more

GDDR6 Memory On The Leading Edge


With the accelerating growth in data traffic, it is unsurprising that the number of hyperscale data centers keeps rocketing skyward. According to analysts at the Synergy Research Group, in nine months (Q2’20 to Q1’21), 84 new hyperscale data centers came online bringing the total worldwide to 625. Hyperscaler capex set a record $150B over the last four quarters eclipsing the $121B spent in ... » read more

Has Computational Storage Finally Arrived?


The idea behind computational storage is not new. It’s just that like so many concepts, the idea has been well ahead of the technology. In a nutshell, computational storage brings processing power to the storage level. It eliminates the need to load data from the storage system into memory for processing. Moving data between storage and compute resources is inefficient and computational sy... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Marvell will acquire Innovium, a provider of Ethernet data center switches, in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.1 billion. Innovium's switching architecture is optimized for ultra-low latency, optimized power, high performance, and telemetry in cloud applications and will join Marvell's portfolio of data center products to provide "architectural choice and flexibility to meet a diverse set... » read more

Auto Displays: Bigger, Brighter, More Numerous


Displays are rapidly becoming more critical to the central brains in automobiles, accelerating the adoption and evolution of this technology to handle multiple types of audio, visual, and other data traffic coming into and flowing throughout the vehicle. These changes are having a broad impact on the entire design-through-manufacturing flow for display chip architectures. In the past, these ... » read more

Securing The SoC Life Cycle


Over the course of its life, an SoC (system on chip) goes through multiple life cycle states which are different in character and have varying and sometimes contradictory security requirements. In each state, the SoC may be under different ownership in the supply chain. Also, as it transitions through different manufacturing phases, it is subject to a different set of possible attacks, which sh... » read more

Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design


Data centers are undergoing a fundamental change, shifting from standard processing models to more data-centric approaches based upon customized hardware, less movement of data, and more pooling of resources. Driven by a flood of web searches, Bitcoin mining, video streaming, data centers are in a race to provide the most efficient and fastest processing possible. But because there are so ma... » read more

New Power, Performance Options At The Edge


Increasing compute intelligence at the edge is forcing chip architects to rethink how computing gets partitioned and prioritized, and what kinds of processing elements and memory configurations work best for a particular application. Sending raw data to the cloud for processing is both time- and resource-intensive, and it's often unnecessary because most of the data collected by a growing nu... » read more

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