Banner 800x100 0810

Who Left the Lights On?

Who Left the Lights On?
by Bernard Murphy on 01-03-2017 at 7:00 am

I attended a Mentor verification seminar earlier in the year at which Russ Klein presented a fascinating story about a real customer challenge in debugging a power problem in a design around an ARM cluster. Here’s the story in Russ’ own words. If you’re allergic to marketing stories, read it anyway. You might… Read More


Crowd-Sourcing Morality for Autonomous Cars

Crowd-Sourcing Morality for Autonomous Cars
by Bernard Murphy on 01-03-2017 at 7:00 am

Questions are being raised on how autonomous vehicles should react in life-or-death situations. Most of these have been based on thought experiments, constructed from standard dilemmas in ethics such as what should happen if the driver of a car or an autonomous car is faced with either killing two pedestrians or killing the occupants… Read More


Qualcomm Hit With $853M Penalty for Patent Licensing Practices

Qualcomm Hit With $853M Penalty for Patent Licensing Practices
by Tom Simon on 01-02-2017 at 12:00 pm

Qualcomm was hit in December with a $853M fine by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) for not fairly sharing patents related to mobile phone chipsets. In setting the standards for CDMA, WCDMA and LTE, agreements were struck that enable sharing technology to advance the standard. Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND)… Read More


Executive Interview: Joe Rowlands, Chief Architect at NetSpeed Systems

Executive Interview: Joe Rowlands, Chief Architect at NetSpeed Systems
by Daniel Nenni on 01-02-2017 at 7:00 am

Joe has devoted his career to understanding and designing cache coherent systems and has been granted over 95 patents on the subject. For the past four years, he has been Chief Architect at NetSpeed, a developer of network-on-chip SoC interconnect.… Read More


Vox Clamantis in Deserto

Vox Clamantis in Deserto
by Roger C. Lanctot on 12-30-2016 at 4:00 pm

If you are headed to Las Vegas for your New Year’s celebration, the annual Consumer Electronics Show or just a good time, beware! According to some estimates Nevada is the fourth most dangerous state for pedestrians and Las Vegas is ground zero for what the city calls an ePEDemic of roadway fatalities.

It’s difficult… Read More


Biggest Cybercriminal Ad-Fraud Rakes in Millions per Day

Biggest Cybercriminal Ad-Fraud Rakes in Millions per Day
by Matthew Rosenquist on 12-30-2016 at 12:00 pm

AAEAAQAAAAAAAAc0AAAAJDkxMjIwYmFhLWE2Y2EtNGViZi1hM2M4LTljYTMxYmFjMmI3OA

Methbot is a state-of-the-art ad fraud infrastructure, capable of hosting legitimate videos and serving them to 300 million fake viewers a day. Each view earns the criminals about $13, translating to around four million dollars a day. Over the past few months, Methbot has pulled in an estimated $180 million. It represents one … Read More


AI vs AI

AI vs AI
by Bernard Murphy on 12-30-2016 at 7:00 am

You might think that one special advantage of AI systems is that they should be immune to attacks. After all, their methods are so complex and/or opaque that even we can’t understand how they work, so what hope would a hacker have in challenging these systems? But you would be mistaken. There’s nothing hackers like better than a challenge.… Read More


IBM Demonstrates Blockchain Progress and Clients

IBM Demonstrates Blockchain Progress and Clients
by Alan Radding on 12-29-2016 at 4:00 pm

IBM must have laid off its lawyers or something since never before has the company seemed so ready to reveal clients by name and the projects they’re engaged in. That has been going on for months and recently it has accelerated. Credit IBM’s eagerness to get blockchain established fast and show progress with the open community HyperLedger… Read More


NetSpeed Bridges the Gap Between Architecture and Implementation

NetSpeed Bridges the Gap Between Architecture and Implementation
by Mitch Heins on 12-29-2016 at 11:30 am

This is part II of an article covering NetSpeed’s network-on-chip (NoC) offerings. This article dives a little deeper into what a NoC is and how NetSpeed’s network synthesis tool, NocStudio, helps system architects optimize a NoC for their system-on-a-chip (SoC) design.

Traditionally IC designers have used proprietary buses,… Read More


They Kill Pedestrians, Don’t They?

They Kill Pedestrians, Don’t They?
by Roger C. Lanctot on 12-28-2016 at 4:00 pm

I came upon the scene of a crash investigation yesterday afternoon in my hometown of Herndon, Va. A mother and two children were hit by a 20-year-old motorist making a right turn at an intersection. I did not see the crash, but I strongly suspect the motorist was looking left to anticipate oncoming traffic and never noticed the pedestrians… Read More