FinFETs have brought a lot of good things to design – higher performance, higher density and lower leakage power – promising to extend Moore’s law for a least a while longer. But inevitably with new advances come new challenges, especially around optimizing for power integrity in these designs.
One of these challenges is… Read More
When you’re thinking about “what can we do next”, you can think big or you can think small – very, very small. Robert Freitas at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) has such an idea – artificial red blood cells (RBCs). These would be nano-machines which could augment the oxygen and carbon dioxide carrying capacity of … Read More
This topic comes up periodically but for me had always been one of those things I’d get around to understanding better someday. A recent blog in SemiWiki got me looking a little harder and determined to write a blog to get this out of my system, if for no other reason than getting rid of excess tabs on my browser. So here’s my quick review.… Read More
From time to time when talking about security, it is useful to look at the big picture, but not to further lament the imminent collapse of the sky. We all know that the problem is big and we’re really not on top of it. A more productive discussion would be about what we can do to reduce the scope of the problem. And that has to start … Read More
Whenever we push the bounds of reliability in any domain, we run into new potential sources of error. Perhaps not completely new, but rather concerns new to that domain. That’s the case for Single Event Upsets (SEUs) which are radiation-triggered bit-flips, and Single Event Transients (SETs) which are radiation-triggered pulses… Read More
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
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
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
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
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
