Finding Security Holes In Hardware


At least three major security holes in processors were identified by Google's Project Zero over the past year, with more expected to roll out in coming months. Now the question is what to do about them. Since the beginning of the PC era, two requirements for hardware were backward compatibility and improvements in performance with each new version of processors. No one wants to replace their... » read more

Hardware Security Threat Rising


Martin Scott, senior vice president and CTO of Rambus, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about an increasing problem with security, what's driving it, and why hardware is now part of the growing attack surface. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: With Meltdown and Spectre, the stakes have changed because the focus is not on using hardware to get to software. It'... » read more

Safety, Security And PPA Tradeoffs


Safety and security are emerging as key design tradeoffs as chips are added into safety-critical markets, adding even more complexity into an already complicated optimization process. In the early days of semiconductor design, performance and area were traded off against each other. Then power became important, and the main tradeoffs became power, performance and area (PPA). But as chips inc... » read more

Security Holes In Machine Learning And AI


Machine learning and AI developers are starting to examine the integrity of training data, which in some cases will be used to train millions or even billions of devices. But this is the beginning of what will become a mammoth effort, because today no one is quite sure how that training data can be corrupted, or what to do about it if it is corrupted. Machine learning, deep learning and arti... » read more

CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. Part two is here. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: Securit... » read more

Right-Sized Security


Security is a key design consideration of any connected product. Nefarious parties can and will attempt to exploit security flaws in order to capture sensitive data, gain device control, or for a myriad of other reasons. When considering security needs and implementation in their systems, Device OEMs must balance a number of factors. Security is obviously a very important factor; however, de... » read more

Designing Hardware For Security


By Ed Sperling and Kevin Fogarty Cyber criminals are beginning to target weaknesses in hardware to take control of devices, rather than using the hardware as a stepping stone to access to the software. This shift underscores a significant increase in the sophistication of the attackers, as evidenced by the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown by Google Project Zero in 2017 (made public in Ja... » read more

Tech Talk: HW Security


Ben Levine, senior director of product management at Rambus, explains how to minimize the risk of attacks on chip hardware, why design for security is becoming more critical for connected devices, and strategies for making devices less vulnerable. https://youtu.be/twgHcdqvyjU » read more

New Market Drivers


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changing market dynamics with Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22926" e_name="Achronix"]; Apurva Kalia, vice president of R&D in the System and Verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Mohammed Kassem, CTO for [getentity id="22910" comment="efabless"]; Matthew Ballance, product engineer and techn... » read more

The CryptoManager Root Of Trust


In January 2018, Meltdown and Spectre were independently disclosed by multiple security researchers, including senior Rambus technology advisor Paul Kocher and senior Rambus security engineer Mike Hamburg. The two security flaws exploit critical vulnerabilities across a wide range of modern processors, including Intel, ARM and AMD. Notably, however, existing RISC-V processors remain unaffected ... » read more

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