IoT permeates every aspect of our lives, in payment systems, access authorization, vehicles, utilities, factories, hospitals, and in so many other fields. Which makes these systems attractive targets for hacking and social disruption while also challenging to protect given the highly constrained resources that many such… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Effective Defense Against Hacks at the Edge
Calibrating Quantum Computing Activity in Financial Services
I was invited to listen in on an event hosted by Fujitsu and Quantum Insider on the reality of Quantum Computing (QC) in financial services today. This market is a good test for QC since multiple possible high value applications have been suggested. The panel was chaired by Brian Lenehan, (Founder and Chair, Quantum Strategy Institute),… Read More
Accellera Updates at DVCon 2026
Lu Dai (chair of Accellera) and I had our regular chat at DVCon U.S. 2026. Accellera also hosted a reception in the exhibits hall, with free snacks and drinks, very well attended. We talked about what’s new in Accellera, with a particular emphasis on the recently released standard for CDC and RDC tool interoperability, also Lu’s … Read More
An Upper Bound on Effective Quantum Computation?
You may think that quantum theory is fully understood but that view is not quite right. There remain open questions around the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, measurement collapse, and harmonizing quantum mechanics and gravitation. These concerns may seem very abstract and irrelevant to everyday applications… Read More
Nuclear Power and Design Automation
A couple of folks have asked me to write on nuclear power. Nuclear offers additional sources for power generation, a pressing concern thanks to demand from giant data centers. Also, investment by Microsoft, Sam Altman and others signals their urgency to accelerate past slow moving utilities plans. I have some background in this… Read More
Post-Silicon Validating an MMU. Innovation in Verification
Some post-silicon bugs are unavoidable, but we’re getting better at catching them before we ship. Here we look at a method based on a bare-metal exerciser to stress-test the MMU. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A)… Read More
Trust in Verification with AI
These are stressful times in functional verification. We are being pushed to more aggressively embrace AI-based automation, knowing we will continue to be held accountable for quality of results. Verification misses could upend careers, maybe enterprises. It is tempting to believe that sanity will prevail and we will ultimately… Read More
Siemens Fuse EDA AI Agent Releases to Orchestrate Agentic Semiconductor and PCB Design
Though terminology sometimes get fuzzy, consensus holds that an agent manages a bounded task with control through a natural language interface. An agentic orchestrator, itself an agent, manages a more complex objective requiring reasoning through multi-step actions and is responsible for orchestrating those actions. By… Read More
Breker Hosts an Energetic Panel on Spec-Driven Verification
I was fortunate to be asked to moderate an evening panel adjacent to the first day of DVCon 2026, on AI-Driven SoC Verification starting from specs. You know my skepticism on panels, finding they rarely generate insights or controversy. This panel was quite different. Panelists were Shelley Henry (CEO, Moores Lab AI), Adnan Hamid… Read More
The Next Hurdle AI Systems Must Clear
AI isn’t having an easy ride. The media and Wall Street swing wildly between extremes on any hint of a shift in AI sentiment. Dickens saw this coming: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of … Read More
Intel, Musk, and the Tweet That Launched a 1000 Ships on a Becalmed Sea