Autonomous Vehicles: Not Ready Yet


The swirl of activity around L4 and L5 vehicles has yet to result in a successful demonstration of an autonomous vehicle that can navigate the streets of a city or highway without incident, and there is a growing body of real-world data showing that much work still needs to be done. Robo-taxi trials in big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and soon San Diego, are proving that autono... » read more

Understanding Memory Protection Units


Let’s talk about the various security measures we take to protect our homes. We use locks, install security cameras to detect any suspicious activities, etc., all to safeguard our loved ones and valuable possessions. In similar sense, the tiny microcontrollers inside our devices have protection units (PU) that safeguard the precious resource: memory. One of the most important types of prote... » read more

Securing AI/ML Training And Inference Workloads


AI/ML can be thought about in two distinct and essential functions: training and inference. Both are vulnerable to different types of security attacks and this blog will look at some of the ways in which hardware-level security can protect sensitive data and devices across the different AI workflows and pipelines. The security challenges encountered with AI/ML workloads can be addressed by i... » read more

Data Leakage In Heterogeneous Systems


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Paul Chou, senior director of security architecture at NVIDIA, to discuss data leakage in heterogeneous designs. What follows are excerpts of that one-on-one interview, which was held in front of a live audience at the Hardwear.io conference. SE: We think about hardware in terms of a chip, but increasingly there is data moving through different systems... » read more

Designing Automotive ICs For Cybersecurity


The day has already arrived when we need to be concerned about the cybersecurity of our cars. An average modern car includes about 1400 ICs and many of them are used in sophisticated applications, like autonomous driving and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. The security of road vehicles is an important issue to automakers and OEMs but is rooted in the IC devices that power the vehicle... » read more

2023 Open Source Security And Risk Analysis Report


The annual “Open Source Security and Risk Analysis” (OSSRA) report, now in its 8th edition, examines vulnerabilities and license conflicts found in roughly 1,700 codebases across 17 industries. The report offers recommendations for security, legal, risk, and development teams to better understand the security and risk landscape accompanying open source development and use. Click here to ... » read more

Causes Of Memory Unsafety


Memory unsafety is a characteristic of many of today’s systems. The root cause of buffer bounds vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and over-reads is unsafe programming. Major software vendors consistently report memory unsafety problems. For example, the Chromium open-source browser project has stated that 69% of CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) reported relate to memory... » read more

Why Using Commercial Chiplets Is So Difficult


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss use cases and challenges for commercial chiplets with Saif Alam, vice president of engineering at Movellus; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; and Craig Bishop, CTO at Deca Technologies. What follows are excerpts... » read more

Integration Challenges For ATE Data


Tighter integration of automatic test equipment (ATE) into semiconductor manufacturing, so that data from one process can be seamlessly leveraged by another, holds significant promise to boost manufacturing efficiency and yield. The challenge is selling this concept to fabs, packaging houses, and their customers. Data involving yield parameters, process variations, and intricate details abou... » read more

Securing Automotive Ethernet Connections With MACsec


Zonal architecture in automotive design has become common in recent years in response to the increasing complexity of in-vehicle electrical systems. Automotive Ethernet is used to connect sensors and actuators to zonal gateways in ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) enabled vehicles. With multi-gigabit links, it further connects zonal gateways to the central compute units that handle ADAS... » read more

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