Research Bits: March 28


Modeling how the nose smells The first 3D molecular-level picture of how an odor molecule binds to and activates an odorant receptor (OR) on olfactory cells in the nose may help us understanding and eventually be used to build a map of all the receptors. Scientists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which UCSF developed, to take a moving picture of the wiggly r... » read more

Dealing With Performance Bottlenecks In SoCs


A surge in the amount of data that SoCs need to process is bogging down performance, and while the processors themselves can handle that influx, memory and communication bandwidth are straining. The question now is what can be done about it. The gap between memory and CPU bandwidth — the so-called memory wall — is well documented and definitely not a new problem. But it has not gone away... » 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

Microarchitectural Side-Channel Attacks and Mitigations on the On-Chip Mesh Interconnect


This new technical paper titled "Don't Mesh Around: Side-Channel Attacks and Mitigations on Mesh Interconnects" was presented by researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MIT, and Texas Advanced Computing Center at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston in August 2022. Abstract: "This paper studies microarchitectural side-channel attacks and mitigations on the on-chip mes... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 11


Everything’s faster in Texas The Frontera supercomputing system was formally unveiled last week at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The system was deployed in June on the University of Texas at Austin campus. It is the fifth-fastest supercomputer in the world at present and the world's fastest academic supercomputer. Dell EMC and Intel collaborated on fitting out Frontera. Work beg... » read more

System Bits: July 10


Light waves run on silicon-based chips Researchers at the University of Sydney’s Nano Institute and Singapore University of Technology and Design collaborated on manipulating light waves on silicon-based microchips to keep coherent data as it travels thousands of miles on fiber-optic cables. Such waves—whether a tsunami or a photonic packet of information—are known as solitons. The... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 3


Gamma-ray inspection The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started a program to develop gamma-ray inspection techniques. The effort, called the Gamma Ray Inspection Technology (GRIT) program, is aimed to develop gamma-ray radiation sources in compact form factors for use in national security, industrial, and medical applications. [caption id="attachment_24151285" alig... » read more