Chip Industry Week In Review


BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development. Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Absolics, an affiliate of Korea materials company SKC, will receive up to $75 million in direct funding under the U.S. CHIPS Act for the construction of a 120,000 square-foot facility in Covington, Georgia, for glass substrates in advanced packaging. imec will host a €2.5 billion (~$2.72B) pilot line for researching chips beyond 2nm, partially funded through the EU Chips Act. imec CEO Luc ... » read more

Security Research: Technical Paper Round-Up


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at recent conferences, including the August 2022 USENIX Security Symposium and IEEE’s International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses (including on-chip mesh interconnect attacks), heterogeneous attacks on cache hierarchies, rowhammer attacks and mitig... » read more

Side-Channel Attack “Binoculars” Exploits Interactions Between HW Page Walk Operations & Other Memory Operations


New technical paper titled "Binoculars: Contention-Based Side-Channel Attacks Exploiting the Page Walker" was presented by researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Tel Aviv University at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston in August 2022. Abstract: "Microarchitectural side channels are a pressing security threat. These channels are created when programs modulate hardw... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Dec. 31


Three-valued memory Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo developed a new three-valued memory device inspired by solid lithium-ion batteries which could potentially serve as low power consumption RAM. The new device consisted of a stack of three solid layers made of lithium, lithium phosphate, and gold. This stack is essentially a miniature low-capacity... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 13


Keeping tabs on crops University of Missouri researchers collaborated with the Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture on pairing a regular digital camera with a miniature infrared camera for a novel system providing temperature data and detailed images of crops. “Using an infrared camera to monitor crop temperature can be tricky because it is difficult to diff... » read more