The Week In Review: Design

IP
Cryptographic flaws have been discovered in the IEEE P1735 standard for encrypting IP and managing access rights. A team from the University of Florida found “a surprising number of cryptographic mistakes in the standard. In the most egregious cases, these mistakes enable attack vectors that allow us to recover the entire underlying plaintext IP.” The researchers warn that an adversary could recover electronic design IPs encrypted using the P1735 workflow, resulting in IP theft or analysis of security critical features, as well as the ability to insert hardware trojans into an encrypted IP without the knowledge of the IP owner.

Tools
Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is now licensing its Power and Thermal-Aware Electronic System Level Platform (PT-ESL) to companies who will bring it to market. PT-ESL is an architectural level modeling and simulation solution for analyzing power consumption, performance bottlenecks, and thermal hotspots. According to ITRI, PT-ESL power simulation in an industrial case is on average 1,700 times faster than traditional gate-level simulation solutions, with an accuracy of between 92.5% and 97.4%. Thermal simulation, in the same case, is more than 2,000 times faster than commercial products based on finite element method, with an accuracy of higher than 98%.

Deals
HiSilicon used Cadence’s Tensilica Vision P6 DSP to add imaging and vision processing capabilities to its 10nm Kirin 970 mobile application processor, which debuted in Huawei’s new Mate 10 Series mobile phones. HiSilicon cited low energy and high efficiency as part of the choice.

Shenzhen Intellifusion licensed ArterisIP’s FlexNoC Interconnect IP for use in machine learning visual intelligence SoCs that will target both data center and embedded applications. Intellifusion cited bandwidth and latency requirements as well as low power consumption and performance efficiency.

Qualcomm based its Centriq 2400 server SoCs on the Arm architecture. Qualcomm touts the chip’s performance per watt and active power below 120W TDP. The chip is built on Samsung’s 10 nanometer finFET process.

Intel and AMD teamed up on a laptop-focused multi-chip processor package which includes an Intel Core H-series processor, a Radeon semi-custom discrete graphics chip from AMD, and HBM2. The whole thing is tied together with Intel’s Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), which uses a small bridge die rather than a silicon interposer for 2.5D package integration.

Events
ICCAD: Nov. 13-16 in Irvine, CA. The conference features papers, tutorials, and workshops on the latest EDA trends and research. Keynotes feature Krysta Svore of Microsoft Research introducing why quantum computing is revolutionary and Todd Austin of the University of Michigan speaking on research that could slash the cost of future hardware designs.

Empowering Leadership with WIT and WISDOM: Nov. 28 at 6 p.m. in Milpitas, CA. The ESD Alliance will host a panel discussion featuring women executives from the technology sector who will address career choices for women and men, including personal branding, leadership, negotiation, networking and mentoring. The evening will be held at SEMI and begin with dinner and refreshments.