Domain Crossing Verification Needs Continue to Grow

Domain Crossing Verification Needs Continue to Grow
by Bernard Murphy on 01-29-2016 at 4:00 pm

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


True Random Number Generation

True Random Number Generation
by Bernard Murphy on 01-27-2016 at 4:00 pm

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

In Low Voltage Timing, the Center Cannot Hold
by Bernard Murphy on 01-25-2016 at 7:00 am

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

When Good Standards Get Lost – the UVM Register Model
by Bernard Murphy on 01-20-2016 at 12:00 pm

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

Privacy – the Other Face of Security
by Bernard Murphy on 01-13-2016 at 7:00 am

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

VW at CES – a Mea Culpa and a Bid for Redemption
by Bernard Murphy on 01-10-2016 at 12:00 pm

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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)

My Choice for Coolest Thing from CES 2016 (Day 1)
by Bernard Murphy on 01-06-2016 at 4:00 pm

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

More Medical Tech –Smart Bandages for Wound Management
by Bernard Murphy on 01-06-2016 at 12:00 pm

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 System Spin on IoT Security
by Bernard Murphy on 01-04-2016 at 4:00 pm

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

How Not To Be Incoherent
by Bernard Murphy on 01-01-2016 at 7:00 am

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