Clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis has been around for many years, initially as special checks in verification or static timing analysis, but it fairly quickly diverged into specialized tools focused just on this problem. CDC checks are important because (a) you can lose data or even lock up at, or downstream of a poorly-handled… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
True Random Number Generation
Random numbers are central to modern security systems. The humble password, perhaps the least profound application, is encrypted and verified against using SHA or MD algorithms with a random number salt. You probably remember a college class on how to generate pseudo-random numbers algorithmically, some very sophisticated.… Read More
In Low Voltage Timing, the Center Cannot Hold
When I started discussing this topic with Isadore Katz, I was struggling to find a simple way to explain what he was telling me – that delay and variance calculations in STA tools are wrong at low voltage because the average (the center) of a timing distribution shifts from where you think it is going to be. He told me that I’m not alone… Read More
When Good Standards Get Lost – the UVM Register Model
Some time ago I wrote a DeepChip viewpoint on DVCON 2014 in which I praised a Mentor paper “Of Camels and Committees”. The authors argued that while the UVM standards committee had a done a great job in the early releases, the 1.2 release was overloaded with nice-to-have features with questionable value for a standard, particularly… Read More
Privacy – the Other Face of Security
Security gets a lot of tech press, privacy not so much. A lot of the problem is that while we each know intuitively what we mean by privacy, pinning down an actionable definition is surprisingly tricky, especially when we require that it not intrude in other ways on our rights. Privacy rights are not absolute (you don’t have … Read More
VW at CES – a Mea Culpa and a Bid for Redemption
There must be few less enviable jobs right now than Chairman and CEO of VW. According to Dr. Herbert Diess who has that dubious honor, the VW board debated whether they should attend CES this year and decided that on balance it was better to be visible, face the music and present their technology progress and visions than to lay low.… Read More
My Choice for Coolest Thing from CES 2016 (Day 1)
I’ll admit up-front I’m cheating. I’m writing this from the comfort of my home office without having to go anywhere near the CES madness (I was there last year; 170,000 people packed into the center of Las Vegas, block-wrapping lines to get taxis, never again). I’m relying instead on the Wired preview of the first day and what… Read More
More Medical Tech –Smart Bandages for Wound Management
I have a bias (as you may have noticed) for solutions in a domain that take advantage of technology but are developed within that domain. A recently example is intelligent bandages, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, Purdue and several other research centers. The purpose of such a bandage is to monitor a wound… Read More
A System Spin on IoT Security
A lot of progress has been made in infrastructure to secure edge nodes in the IoT and to secure communications between edge nodes and gateways, all of which is good and necessary to block manifest evil, but it’s never enough. Perfect security is and always will be an asymptotic goal, so there should always be room for new ideas. To a … Read More
How Not To Be Incoherent
The advantage of working with cache memory is the great boost in performance you can get from working with a local high-speed copy of chunks of data from main memory. The downside is that you are messing with a copy; if another processor happens to be working in a similar area, there is a danger you can get out of sync when reading and writing… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay