Automotive Designs Have No Room for Error!

Automotive Designs Have No Room for Error!
by Daniel Nenni on 07-02-2024 at 6:00 am

Automotive electronics

Automotive designs demand a high level of fault tolerance, and one of the methods to achieve this is to use error correcting codes (ECC). This Wikipedia page ECC Memory gives a flavor, though that article concentrates on memory and we are interested in wider applications using a form of forward error correction. This technique … Read More


NIST Standardizes PQShield Algorithms for International Post-Quantum Cryptography

NIST Standardizes PQShield Algorithms for International Post-Quantum Cryptography
by Kalar Rajendiran on 10-20-2022 at 6:00 am

Signature Schemes Standardization Process

News of cyberattacks is routine these days in spite of the security mechanisms built into widely used electronics systems. It is not surprising that entities involved with ensuring safe and secure systems are continually working on enhancing encryption/decryptions mechanisms. Recently NIST standardized cryptography algorithms… Read More


Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs

Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs
by Bernard Murphy on 07-16-2019 at 5:00 am

The use of safety-centric logic design techniques for automotive applications is now widely appreciated, but did you know that similar methods are gaining traction in the design of enterprise-level SSD controllers? In the never-ending optimization of datacenters, a lot attention is being paid to smart storage, offloading… Read More


Supporting ASIL-D Through Your Network on Chip

Supporting ASIL-D Through Your Network on Chip
by Bernard Murphy on 09-20-2018 at 7:00 am

The ISO 26262 standard defines four Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs), from A to D, technically measures of risk rather than safety mechanisms, of which ASIL-D is the highest. ASIL-D represents a failure potentially causing severe or fatal injury in a reasonably common situation over which the driver has little control.… Read More


Safety in the Interconnect

Safety in the Interconnect
by Bernard Murphy on 04-26-2018 at 7:00 am

Safety is a big deal these days, not only in automotive applications, but also in critical infrastructure and industrial applications (the power grid, nuclear reactors and spacecraft, to name just a few compelling examples). We generally understand that functional blocks like CPUs and GPUs have to be safe, but what about the … Read More


Concluding Inconclusives

Concluding Inconclusives
by Bernard Murphy on 03-01-2018 at 7:00 am

Formal methods are a vital complement to other tools in the verification arsenal, but they’re not without challenges. One of the more daunting is the “inconclusive” result – that case where the tool seems to be telling you that it simply gave up trying to figure out if a particular assertion is true or false. Compounding the problem,… Read More


A Functional Safety Primer for FPGA – and the Rest of Us

A Functional Safety Primer for FPGA – and the Rest of Us
by Bernard Murphy on 07-27-2017 at 7:00 am

Once in a while I come across a vendor-developed webinar which is so generally useful it deserves to be shared beyond the confines of sponsored sites. I don’t consider this spamming – if you choose you can ignore the vendor-specific part of the webinar and still derive significant value from the rest. In this instance, the topic is… Read More


Why using new DDR4 allow designing incredibly more efficient Server/Storage applications?

Why using new DDR4 allow designing incredibly more efficient Server/Storage applications?
by Eric Esteve on 08-04-2016 at 12:00 pm

The old one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work anymore for DDR4 memory controller IP, especially when addressing the enterprise segments, or application like servers, storage and networking. For mobile or high end consumer segments, we can easily identify two key factors: price (memory amount or controller footprint) … Read More


The CyberSecurity Emperor Has No Clothes

The CyberSecurity Emperor Has No Clothes
by Bill Montgomery on 06-11-2016 at 7:00 am

In the past year, I’ve written numerous articles that have a common theme: the security world is badly broken as crypto schemas developed in the 90’s are no defense for today’s sophisticated hackers. For the most part, my blogs have been very well received, and have been picked up and posted by multiple sites and publications worldwide.… Read More


Crypto Key Exchange …like taking candy from a digital baby

Crypto Key Exchange …like taking candy from a digital baby
by Bill Montgomery on 01-31-2016 at 4:00 pm

For those among you who have read my previous SemiWiki articles, you will no doubt see a theme: the security of our connected world is badly broken, and for the bad guys, violating our online lives – both business and personal – is as easy as taking candy from the proverbial baby.… Read More