Imperas and RISC-V

Imperas and RISC-V
by Bernard Murphy on 12-06-2018 at 7:00 am

I met Imperas at TechCon this year because I wanted to become a bit more knowledgeable about virtual modeling. That led me to become more interested in RISC-V and a talk given by Krste Asanovic of UCB and SiFive. My takeaway surprised me. I had thought this was an open-source David versus proprietary Goliaths (Intel and ARM) battle… Read More


Webinar: Turnkey Bluetooth True Wireless Stereo Earbuds and Speakers

Webinar: Turnkey Bluetooth True Wireless Stereo Earbuds and Speakers
by Bernard Murphy on 12-01-2018 at 7:00 am

When we were first introduced to earbuds, in-ear speakers connected through thin wires to your phone (and earlier portable music devices), they seemed pretty convenient for private entertainment at work, while walking, exercising, doing almost anything. Until we started to realize those long dangly wires weren’t ideal. They’d… Read More


Security and RISC-V

Security and RISC-V
by Bernard Murphy on 11-30-2018 at 7:00 am

One of the challenges in the RISC-V bid for world domination may be security. That may seem like a silly statement, given that security weaknesses are invariably a function of implementation and RISC-V doesn’t define implementation, only the instruction-set architecture (ISA). But bear with me. RISC-V success depends heavily… Read More


On-Chip Networks at the Bleeding Edge of ML

On-Chip Networks at the Bleeding Edge of ML
by Bernard Murphy on 11-29-2018 at 7:00 am

I wrote a while back about some of the more exotic architectures for machine learning (ML), especially for neural net (NN) training in the data center but also in some edge applications. In less hairy applications, we’re used to seeing CPU-based NNs at the low end, GPUs most commonly (and most widely known) in data centers as the workhorse… Read More


Dover Microsystems Spins New Approach to Security

Dover Microsystems Spins New Approach to Security
by Bernard Murphy on 11-22-2018 at 7:00 am

One of the companies I met at ARM TechCon was Dover Microsystems who offer a product in embedded security. You might ask why we need yet another security solution. Surely we’re overloaded with security options from ARM and many others in the forms of TEEs, secure boots, secure enclaves and so on? Why do we need more? Because defending… Read More


NXP Strengthens Security, Broadens ML Application at the Edge

NXP Strengthens Security, Broadens ML Application at the Edge
by Bernard Murphy on 11-15-2018 at 7:00 am

Security and machine learning (ML) are among the hottest areas in tech, especially for the IoT. The need for higher security is, or should be, blindingly obvious at this point. We struggle to fend off daily attacks even in our mainstream compute and networking environment. How defenseless will we be when we have billions of devices… Read More


Webinar: NVIDIA Talks High Quality Metrics in Power Integrity Signoff

Webinar: NVIDIA Talks High Quality Metrics in Power Integrity Signoff
by Bernard Murphy on 11-09-2018 at 12:00 pm

There’s a familiar saying that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Taking that one step further, the more improvement you want, the more accurately you have to measure. This become pretty important when you’re building huge designs in advanced technologies. Margins are a lot tighter all round and use-cases are massively… Read More


Emulation from In Circuit to In Virtual

Emulation from In Circuit to In Virtual
by Bernard Murphy on 11-08-2018 at 7:00 am

At a superficial level, emulation in the hardware design world is just a way to run a simulation faster. The design to be tested runs on the emulator, connected to whatever test mechanisms you desire, and the whole setup can run many orders of magnitude faster than it could if the design was running inside a software simulator. And … Read More


Wi-Fi Standards Simplified

Wi-Fi Standards Simplified
by Bernard Murphy on 11-01-2018 at 7:00 am

In the world of communications, the industry fairly quickly got a handle on a naming convention for cellular technology generations that us non-communication geeks could understand – 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G, (though some of us could never quite understand the difference between 4G and LTE, at least as those terms are widely and no … Read More


The Cloud-Edge Debate Replays Inside the Car

The Cloud-Edge Debate Replays Inside the Car
by Bernard Murphy on 10-25-2018 at 7:00 am

I think we’re all familiar with the cloud/edge debate on where intelligence should sit. In the beginning the edge devices were going to be dumb nodes with just enough smarts to ship all their data to the cloud where the real magic would happen – recognizing objects, trends, need for repair, etc. Then we realized that wasn’t the best… Read More