Roots Of Distrust Spread


For most of the history of semiconductors there has been a persistent fear that someone would steal intellectual property from one company and sell it to another. There have been innumerable lawsuits involving corporate secrets that cross from one company to the next, and from one country to the next. The biggest concerns always were at the leading edges of technology, where those secrets w... » read more

How To Scale IoT For “Time To Money,” Security


When it comes to design, IoT can be boiled down to “time to money.” It’s more complex than that, of course, but the unique, dynamic nature of the segment is changing the way we design systems and how we think about security. “IoT is not a device. It’s delivering service across the cloud to connected devices,” said Nandan Nayampally, vice president of marketing with ARM. “In the... » read more

OTP Memory For Mobile Payment Applications


The trend toward mobile banking and payments as a way to replace debit or credit cards, or integrate a part of their functions into a mobile device, is moving faster than most industry analysts predicted. In China, for example, mobile payment systems Alipay and WeChat pay are popular and well used, and a great way for easy account monitoring and ditching the wallet. It is a fundamental change t... » read more

Grappling With Auto Security


It’s a changed world under the hood of automobiles today, as vehicles become increasingly connected to infrastructure and each other. But that connectedness also is creating new security risks. Growing complexity is one piece of the problem. There are upwards of 80 electronic control units (ECUs) and more than 100 million lines of code in an average vehicle. On top of that, there are m... » read more

Securing Chips During Manufacturing


David Lam, chairman of Multibeam, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how next-gen lithography tools can be used to prevent cyber attacks and counterfeiting of hardware. SE: How did you get into the anti-counterfeiting business? Lam: About three years ago we were working with some customers that were troubled by the counterfeiting problem. We became aware of that sense o... » read more

Building Smart Homes On A Secure Foundation


News outlets recently covered the new paper, “Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications,” and its findings about the security vulnerabilities in common “smart home” applications. Originally published in the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the paper describes the operation of, and potential issues with, the programming framework in smart home devices on the marke... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, opens up on the next big things, what will drive them, and what will change to make that happen. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the biggest changes in the semiconductor industry over the past year? Tan: The whole system approach to designing hardware and software is really happening now. It will continue to expand fr... » read more

IC Industry Waking Up To Security


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling Many people pay lip service to the concept of security in Internet of Things devices, software, and networks. That oversight is beginning to fade away, however, as companies begin digging into one of the broadest and most complex problems in the IoT age. Unlike other technology issues, which have been solved in increments, security is all-inclusive. While ... » read more

Lawyers, Insurance And Self-Driving Cars


Self-driving cars are drawing semiconductor companies into legal and regulatory issues for the first time, adding a new level of scrutiny on cutting-edge chip technology. It also opens up a whole new field for legal interpretation, case law, and regulation. While most liability cases in the past never crossed below the system vendor/supplier level, that could change with autonomous vehic... » read more

System Bits: May 31


In automaton we trust? It is widely believed that there are two kinds of robots: friendly and helpful; or sinister and deadly. But do humans place too much trust in robots? According to the work of Harvard University senior Serena Booth, a computer science concentrator at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the answer is as complex and multifaceted as robots themsel... » read more

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