SemiWiki – Page 591 – The Open Forum for Semiconductor Professionals

December 26, 2016January 27, 2022

CTO Interview: Mohamed Kassem of efabless

CTO Interview: Mohamed Kassem of efabless
by Daniel Nenni on 12-26-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: CEO Interviews, Semiconductor Services

Tell us about your personal vision for efabless
You recall that efabless is building a community of analog and mixed signal designers and providing the crowdsourcing platform that lets them (1) create and market their own new designs and (2) respond to customer requests for on-demand IP and ICs. I see us at the forefront of bringing open innovation and open source to the world of semiconductors and electronics in general.

I think that we are entering an era of countless new smart hardware products, each with its own specific form and function, that will require a whole new way of designing and developing a product – one that embraces the long-tail economics theme with sell less of more products and no prior knowledge of the “killer app”. A community-centered development model is an effective way to bring new innovative solutions to market under the constraints of countless customers and applications. In this world, customers and designers embrace a new risk/reward sharing mode.

Basically, I wanted to build on my past experience with smartphone evolution when I was at TI and adapt the open innovation and community collaboration processes that are so successful in software and inject them into electronics creation. This wave started with the evolution of the smart phone where almost everything was customized to fit in an unprecedented fusion of functions and utilities in an object that sits in the palm of your hand or fits in your pocket. What we see in the IoT world is essentially taking functions of the smartphone (or more), and adapting them for specific applications or markets.

After leaving TI, I spent several years learning from a variety of sources about community-based product development in the software world. I wanted to understand what worked and what didn’t work. I met with innovators in the open source, crowdsource and hardware worlds refining the vision and laying a strong foundation for it to become a reality. Along the way, I met Mike Wishart (our CEO) who had a very similar vision and together we have built a great team to pursue our dream.

Please remind our readers about your recent design challenge with X-FAB and let us know how it is going?
We announced our first customer engagement with X-FAB Silicon Foundries, on November 29. In this project, we are using a design challenge format to engage the community to deliver an ultra-low power band gap IP with restricted process technology options. We and X-FAB chose the challenge process as a tool to educate our community about the X-FAB value proposition and to meet specific innovation and design execution goals.

In thischallenge, all designs that meet the spec can be sold through our marketplace and the three designs with the lowest power consumption will split cash prizes totaling $15,000. X-FAB benefits because its customers will have access to multiple varieties of band gaps and more designers become familiar with their superior analog technology.

On the other side of the coin, our community members benefit through access to X-FAB customers and by retaining the rights to their IPs. It is a unique model for design enablement. It is important to highlight that the prize amount does not represent a sale price of the IP. The designer will set the sale and licensing terms once the IP is in our marketplace.

The punch line is that things are going very well. As of December 20, we had 80 active “solvers”, far more than even we expected. The effect on our overall community has also been very positive. We now have over 900 community members from more than 30 countries, up from about 600 at the time of challenge launch.

How are the next steps in the challenge?
As I said, we launched the challenge on November 29, and people are hard at work. Schematic submissions are due on January 16. The submission process is actually very interesting and showcases a unique capability of efabless. When the designer completes the band gap design, he or she submits the design through an automated verify-to-spec process.

In this process, we highlight where each design passes or fails and specifically show the full spectrum of conditions for each parameter and how the design complied or did not. Once the design is finished, simulated and completed to the designer’s satisfaction, it is submitted for final entry and we can then automatically and quickly confirm compliance with specs and rank order all of the entries by the challenge metric, lowest power.

We will announce the three finalists on the January 20[SUP]th[/SUP]. In order to qualify for the final prizes the designs need to proceed through layout which is due on February 20. We recognize that not all designers may want to complete layout, so finalists can request that efabless complete layout for them, in which case, efabless will retain $1,500 of the prizes.

We would encourage all designers, regardless of whether they make the finals or not, to continue through layout of a finished design. All designs that successfully do so will be made available to X-FAB customers through the X-FAB IP Portal and through our marketplace.

Tell us about your marketplace.
The efabless marketplace is unique as it is not limited to just offering the customer IP search and referral. Because it is integrated with our design platform, our marketplace allows the customer to access the available IP immediately as an integrator without exposing the design proprietary information. From the designer’s perspective, our marketplace enables them to “showcase” their IP differentiation right on the platform while protecting their proprietary information.

Today we offer the X-FAB Analog IP blocks library for its 350 nm process. That’s above and beyond the complete foundation IP. Going forward we will include IP for other nodes and IP from established IP vendors and foundries.

As we move through February, you will see us expand the features and functions of the marketplace to include more IP’s as well as options to bring in existing IP’s or verified open source IP to showcase community members and the IP that they define and design on our site. We will offer user profiles that includes badges and IP ratings earned and derived through our platform. Both users and IP will be searchable by customers looking for off the shelf and custom solutions.

Customers and community members will be able to access this library of IP, and incorporate various IPs in designs and simulate them before buying. Our “try before you buy” concept is a part of our value added to customers, IP vendors and community members and is a valuable element of lowering the constraints to semiconductor innovation.

Other than the great turnout; any surprises?
I don’t know that I would call it a surprise but I am thrilled with how engaged our community has been with their feedback. We encourage and have received lots of questions and comments through our “help” request tab. We have found that community members are actually chiming in during our webinars to share experiences and help one another as questions come up. Webinar and support – community style. Very cool. We will be taking all of the feedback and adding them to our “Knowledge Base” part of the site. Keep in mind that we will be learning a lot more from (and about) community dynamics as we run more challenges.

Let me probe again on “what next”
You should expect to see additional challenges after we get into the New Year. These will include an efabless-defined sponsored challenge series with cash prizes, “points” and badges for work-based recognition. These challenges will be structured to a) grow the community and b) to further enrich our IP library offering.

We also want to encourage the community to search the X-FAB portal and identify areas of opportunity for new IPs. We will be seeking out similar opportunities for the benefit of the community but we are firm believers that the community is the best source of true insight and creativity.

Final thoughts?
I appreciate your support and am excited about your additional awards of $500 apiece for winners that are SemiWiki subscribers as of the first of the year. Happy New Years to you, Dan, and to the SemiWiki community.

Also Read:

IEDM 2016 – Marie Semeria LETI Interview

CEO Interview: Dündar Dumlugöl of Magwel

CEO Interview: Jack Harding of eSilicon

December 25, 2016

Asimo Creator Talks to Waymo

Asimo Creator Talks to Waymo
by Roger C. Lanctot on 12-25-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

It’s been 16 years since the debut of Honda’s Asimo robot. By now, millions of people around the world have seen Asimo and its offspring at trade shows and on television. The robot is still capable of drawing a crowd wherever it is found especially since it is not only capable of walking and running but also of recognizing faces and gestures and interacting with humans.

It is no surprise that Honda is also a leader in factory automation. But it looks like creating humanoid robots and automating factories is way easier than creating robotic self-driving cars now that Honda has turned to Alphabet spinoff Waymo for assistance in that department. The company is already getting an artificial intelligence helping hand from SoftBank. SoftBank is helping Honda develop the NeuV which will be introduced at CES 2017 in two weeks.

The Honda NeuV automated commuter vehicle
Honda’s outreach to Waymo is a huge endorsement of the newly sprung Alphabet refugee. It is one thing for Waymo to marry its self-driving car technology with 100 of FCA’s Pacifica mini-vans. It is quite another to be called to assist a leader in robotic technology to support that company’s internal development. The result of Honda-Waymo talks remain to be seen.

But it is an indication of the magnitude of the automated driving challenge. Multiple automated vehicle wannabees have stumbled including Tesla (multiple fatal crashes), GM (still refining Level 2 Supercruise), and Uber (San Francisco test vetoed by California).

Honda has graduated from making motorcycles and cars (and generators) to making commercial jets, a transportation space where inter-vehicle communications and collision avoidance are already solved problems. Most pilots wave off the prospect of self-driving cars unless they are true Level 4 with no driver control whatsoever. Pilots know the sky is far more forgiving than the land when it comes to transportation safety.

HondaJets with over-the-wing mounted engines
The winner of the race to full automotive automation will be the company with the most data and the most miles driven and Waymo is head and shoulders above the competition. While car makers continue to develop and test their vehicles on test tracks and mini-city mock-ups, Waymo is out riding the real roads gathering real data and putting miles between itself and the competition – albeit at about 25-30 miles per hour.

Honda R&D’s Waymo talks are significant because Honda is one of the most creative companies in the world when it comes to thinking outside or inside the mobility box. Having gotten its start in motorcycles, for example, Honda will be showing robotic motorcycle developments at CES 2017.

Honda has also been fielding an array of personal mobility systems for use at airports, factories, shopping malls and company and college campuses. These, too, could benefit from automation. (The Uni-Cub is reminiscent of Tumi’s ride-able luggage concept.) By day two of CES 2017 attendees will be longing for their own personal Uni-Cub.

For a company as innovative as Honda to reach out to Waymo suggests Waymo’s path to market may be as self-driving car training wheels for car makers desperate to play catch-up. Why pay $1B for some unproven start-up and bring some lunatic entrepreneur into your touchy, corporate, hide-bound organization when you can license a self-driving car data set and get your vehicles on the road along with the 20 other licensed self-driving car testers in California.

Or maybe, like Uber, you hunt for a more accommodating venue such as Arizona for your testing activities – at least until someone gets hurt. No, Waymo has you over a barrel Mr. Carmaker at least until you can get more of your cars fitted with the proper array of sensors and you can start gathering data on your own – as Toyota intends to do…eventually.

Until then, not even the robot dreams of Honda will be enough to cross the bridge to automated driving. If Honda and Waymo come to terms does it mean Honda surrenders its own development resources and algorithms, not really. But the licensing of Waymo data opens yet another door to potential automotive industry dominance for Alphabet. (Insert ominous background music, thunder and lightning and boogeyman references HERE.)

Waymo’s willingness to license, though, raises the question of Tesla Motors’ willingness to share its data. Tesla has shared a lot, but is likely to hold its high speed autopilot data set closely – especially now that it has separated from Mobileye. Even if Tesla were to share, would car makers dare? Tesla’s autopilot performance thus far has been both mind-blowing and terrifying.

The irony is that Waymo was created out of Alphabet’s impatience for a payoff. Waymo itself is hoping to leverage the impatience of car companies, like Honda, for an off-the-shelf and on-the-road automated driving solution. The automotive world will be watching Honda…and Waymo…and Tesla.

Honda’s Haneda Robotics Lab

December 25, 2016

What Does Ransomware Sound Like?

What Does Ransomware Sound Like?
by Matthew Rosenquist on 12-25-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Security

Congratulations to the multinational government agencies involved in the takedown of the Avalanche cybercriminal infrastructure! The U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI, Europol, German Police, and others from over 40 countries were involved in disrupting one of the largest support structures for malware, digital money laundering, and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Searches, seizures, and arrests in four countries were conducted to dismantle the sophisticated network of people and technology.

Burying Malware
Avalanche hosted, supported, and distributed dozens of malware families, including Citadel, TeslaCrypt, VM-Zues, bugat, QakBot, and many others. For a complete list, visit the US-CERT announcement page. Most notably, it targeted over 40 major financial institutions and hosted major ransomware malware. According to the U.S. CERT team, it was “used to run money mule schemes where criminals recruited people to commit fraud involving transporting and laundering stolen money or merchandise”.

The Avalanche group has been very active for many years. Back in 2010 it was known for its phishing activities and involvement with various Zeus banking trojan malware variants.

This takedown will have a cascading impact to cybercriminals who have relied on its capabilities. It will likely result in a reduced amount of activity until such time as criminals can replace or rebuild these functions. It is a greatly appreciated reprieve. The absence of money laundering services will also be a painful hit to many criminal groups. With Avalanche down or at the very least impacted, it will force changes on behalf of the criminals it serviced. Those deviations represent opportunities for law enforcement’s future actions.

Hidden Benefits
Depending upon the systems and data captured and the cooperation of the people arrested, there may be some great intelligence benefits. Law enforcement may be able to track down some of the organized criminals behind the various malware families and cyber-fraud campaigns. This could lead to more arrests and impacts to malware generation.

A job well done by the multinational team who cooperated to bring down this malignant structure supporting cybercriminals impacting people, governments, and businesses across the globe. Keep up the good work!

What Does Ransomware Sound Like?
Cybersecurity colleague Christiaan Beek went searching for great wisdom and discovered what ransomware sounds like. Not sexy, not ominous, not dark. More like a pinball machine, when you lose.

With all the money the ransomware cybercriminals rake in from their victims, you would think they could invest a bit more in the sound engineering quality or perhaps get a celebrity voice-over.

I think they would get a much better compliance rate for their extortion demands if this was voice by Morgan Freeman. Who could resist that? On second thought, perhaps James Earl Jones, with the Darth Vader mask, would be more appropriate!

They could even bump up the ransom prices. Something needs to justify the price of 10.5 bitcoins! That is almost $800. Wow, have the prices gone up or it just a premium to listen to this verbal notification from the malware?

Thanks Christiaan for sharing. I look forward to your next ransomware discovery! Follow Christiaan on Twitter (@ChristiaanBeek)

For those of you interested in the other sound of ransomware, it is from the victims, who shout in fear, then rage, followed by a whimper, and sometimes crying. If you are a victim of ransomware, visit the NoMoreRansom.org site. It is a free resource that may be able to help and is supported by some of the most respected cybersecurity organizations. Good luck.

Interested in more? Follow me on Twitter (@Matt_Rosenquist), Steemit, and LinkedIn to hear insights and what is going on in cybersecurity.

References:

U.S. Justice Dept announcement: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/avalanche-network-dismantled-international-cyber-operation
U.S. CERT Alert: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA16-336A

December 24, 2016

NetSpeed Leverages Machine Learning for Automotive IC End-to-End QoS Solutions

NetSpeed Leverages Machine Learning for Automotive IC End-to-End QoS Solutions
by Mitch Heins on 12-24-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, EDA, NetSpeed Systems

A couple of weeks back I wrote an article about the use of machine learning and deep neural networks in self-driving cars. Now I find that machine learning is also being applied to help build advanced end-to-end QoS (quality of service) solutions for the automotive IC market. With the advent of self-driving cars comes requirements to be able to deal with all of the data streams coming into the car. Many automotive system designers are turning to heterogeneous multi-core SoCs (system-on-chip) to meet the requirements of increased performance, reduced power consumption and increased overall system reliability.

These new SoCs are not your typical homogeneous multi-core ICs. Instead, they are heterogeneous SoCs with a variety of different compute engines each with widely varying requirements for QoS. Automotive SoCs may include CPU clusters, GPUs, communications cores (Wi-Fi, Blue-tooth, USB, 4G modem etc.), multimedia cores, GPS, DSPs, cameras, gesture processing, display / video and security modules to name a few.

These advanced heterogeneous architectures bring many challenges. The different cores come with dynamic and differing workloads, a mixture of different QoS requirements and the added complexity of having to share memory and interact with each other. Additionally, on-the-fly configurability is also desired to keep power consumption down as the SoC adapts to the different workloads and QoS requirements.

Many applications in self-driving cars also require high performance computing. At the hardware level this means that the multiple cores and modules require cache coherency. Designing coherent systems is hard enough when the data and the architectures are homogeneous but in these new automotive SoCs it’s even harder as the data and architectures are heterogeneous. Additionally, since these applications are running in a car they must be very robust and engineered to be secure and fault tolerant which means designers must architect their systems (software and hardware) to be deadlock free at the application level.

Traditionally system designers have built their own proprietary buses or on-chip communication fabrics. This however has become more difficult due to the use of multi-vendor IPs all of which have different speeds, latency, I/O and QoS requirements. In some cases, system architects have turned to multiple networks or segregated subnetworks to avoid bottlenecks caused by these differences.

So what does machine learning have to do with QoS solutions you ask? Enter NetSpeed Systems. NetSpeed offers a network-on-chip (NoC) synthesis capability. This tool set uses machine-learning algorithms to synthesize and optimize NoCs that are tuned for a user-defined combination of cores and modules with varying workloads and QoS requirements. One of the key benefits of machine learning is that it becomes possible to model the system as a whole, taking into account system interactions and understanding how they affect QoS. NetSpeed’s machine learning technology is designed to optimize performance and power efficiency broadly across use models. The beauty of this approach is that the software has the freedom to build new hybrid network architectures from among different network topologies such as multi-drop bus, ring, tree, and mesh.

Alternatively, system designers can specify a particular topology, overriding the tool’s choices. While human designers are good, humans augmented with fast automated machine learning algorithms are even better. See the diagram for typical bandwidth performance of synthesized networks over those that were manually tuned without the aid of machine learning algorithms.

NetSpeed’s NocStudio software takes experience from the design of much larger scale networks and applies them to the chip level problem. Like other networks, a network-on-chip must ensure QoS for signals traveling from one point on the chip to another within a specified time and without delaying other signals. Because NetSpeed’s NoCs are intended mainly for ARM-based SoCs, they connect directly to IP blocks that support AMBA and AXI protocols. Currently, NetSpeed supports protocols up to AMBA 5 but NetSpeed can also create gaskets for other protocols. At the network level, NetSpeed converts all traffic into a native format called the NetSpeed Streaming Interface Protocol (NSIP).

NocStudio automatically configures NetSpeed’s Orion (non-coherent) or Gemini (coherent) NoC architectures by allowing designers to integrate cores and modules from multiple vendors. As the design evolves, NocStudio updates system performance statistics, enabling designers to make trade-offs. Statistics include the link cost (the number of wires required for the interconnects) and the buffer cost (the number of flip-flops required to implement the necessary FIFO buffers). NocStudio can also automatically add pipeline stages to long wires to meet latency requirements and guarantee QoS. The QoS specifications may include such factors as the data-path bandwidth, transfer latency, service priority, and rate limits.

The end result is a set of synthesis-ready RTL code that implements a full-scale NoC including all of the logic required to ensure cache coherency between modules sharing memory. Not only does NetSpeed enable the automatic synthesis of the network logic but their solution also allows designers to get a first pass feel for the floorplan of the SoC that can be used as a guide for the IC layout team.

In the next week or so look for part II on this subject where I’ll go into more details about NocStudio and how a NoC works and what it looks like. In the meantime, see also:
Gemi-3 press release
NetSpeed raises $10M to bring Machine Learning to SoC Design and Architecture

December 23, 2016

Renewable Energy is On a Roll

Renewable Energy is On a Roll
by Bernard Murphy on 12-23-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: General

Since everything we build in this industry either runs on, stores or produces electricity, we should have a more than passing interest in how we get that power. A couple of organizations, confusingly named the IEA (International Energy Agency) and the EIA (Energy Information Administration – a US agency) provide lots of interesting information in this area.

I’ll start with the EIA who published an analysis of how energy was used in 2014 in the US, by source and by sector. The report covers energy in general, but I’ll just focus on generation of electricity. Electric power accounted for about 38% of all power consumed, of which 22% came from natural gas, 42% from coal, 13% from renewables and 22% from nuclear.

Telling even at that point was that over 90% of the market for coal was in power generation. A primary rule in business is never, ever let your business drift into high concentration with one customer or one market. Because if you do and markets shift, you’ll be in trouble, as coal seems to be now.

Now over to the IEA report, which looks at worldwide use for 2015, but primarily focused on renewables. Total renewable capacity grew by 153 GW thanks in particular to growth in wind power and solar power installations. Renewable installations in 2015 accounted for half of total capacity growth, also cumulative renewables capacity moved ahead of coal for the first time. The cost of new installations is also dropping significantly. Offshore wind power plant install cost is expected to drop ~40-50% within 5 years, onshore wind by ~15% and solar is expected to drop 25% in the same period driving, it would seem, a virtuous cycle for these technologies. Overall, worldwide renewable capacity is expected to grow 42% in the next 5 years.

Earlier in the year I posted a thread on how solar is quickly moving to utility-scale production, running at $50-70 per MWh which compares well with the best natural gas plants at $52-78 per MWh. But still, it’s worth putting this in perspective. In 2015, all renewable sources (including hydroelectric) contributed 13% of total capacity versus 20% for nuclear and 33% each for coal and natural gas (another EIA report).

We’re still a long way from an all-renewables world, if indeed that will ever be possible. The IEA projects that by 2040, 37% of worldwide power will come from renewables, natural gas demand will have grown by 50% (which would put US use at around 50%) and coal demand will essentially remain static, therefore declining quite a bit as a percentage of total demand, a trend already apparent when comparing the 2014 and 2015 stats for coal and natural gas. In other words, it isn’t just renewables that are ringing down the curtain on coal, it’s a combination of natural gas and renewables, and natural gas is the bigger threat to coal producers.

The EIA report is HERE and the IEA report is HERE. The other EIA report is HERE and the IEA 2040 projection is HERE.

Driverless Cars and our Global Economy

Driverless Cars and our Global Economy
by Daniel Payne on 12-23-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Automotive, General

While traveling to California this year I had my first Uber trip after a concierge in Santa Clara recommended it as the best way to get to the airport, instead of the usual and expensive taxi ride. Later in the year I had my first Lyft ride after my road bike broke down and I needed a ride back home. Our transportation choices are shifting, and probably one of the most talked about is the driverless car. This new transition is exciting for the electronics industry because of all the semiconductor, sensor and software involved to enable it.

A futurist named Thomas Frey is actually paid to think about the economic consequences of the driverless car, and he is the founding executive director of the DaVinci Institute. Sure, we know that some companies supplying the technology for the driverless car will see an increase in product and service revenue, however is there any downside? Yes, in April Mr. Frey predicted that the rise of autonomous vehicles will start to impact multiple sectors of our economy, and some of these will actually decrease the number of jobs.

One example of job loss is at the airport where many of us typically park our cars en route to taking a flight. With driverless cars there is a reduced need for airport parking, and therefore the revenues decline for the airport along with the need for those shuttle bus drivers, taxi cab drivers, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers and limo drivers. Another trickle down effect is on the auto dealers themselves, because we may not even need to own a vehicle, instead opting for just-in-time rides from a driverless service, so think about losing jobs in auto sales, auto maintenance, and even in the auto insurance and financing industries.

In a typical year I have my car looked at by the oil change store, tire store and local maintenance shop, but with a driverless car future I may not have need for any of these services anymore. Thinking about driving we need to remember those pesky speeding tickets, but with an autonomous vehicle our local police departments will have reductions in speeding tickets which effect their employment. Even the legal system with lawyers and judges would be trimmed a bit because we have fewer court cases involving auto drivers.

Making our cars smart enough to drive themselves is part of a growing AI trend that is slowly replacing customer service jobs around the globe, even factories are adopting more robotic devices to replace repetitive tasks once done by employees. Here’s a list of dozens of jobs that could down-size as autonomous vehicles pick up business (Source: Futurist Speaker):

Our society’s love affair with the automobile is slowly changing, so expect our economy to adjust for better or worse as driverless cars start to catch on.

December 22, 2016

The transport systems of Science Fiction will be here sooner than you think

The transport systems of Science Fiction will be here sooner than you think
by Vivek Wadhwa on 12-22-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

Picture the commute of the future: You live in Palo Alto, Calif., but work 350 miles away in Los Angeles. After your morning latte, you click on a smartphone app to summon your digital chauffeur. An autonomous car shows up at your front door three minutes later to drive you to a Hyperloop station in downtown Mountain View, where a pod then transports you through a vacuum tube at 760 mph. When you reach the Pasadena station, another self-driving car awaits to take you to your office. You reach your destination in less than an hour.

That is the type of scenario that Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) chief executive Dirk Ahlborn laid out for me as we were preparing to speak together on a panel at the Knowledge Summit in Dubai on Dec. 5. He was not talking about something that would happen in the next century; he expects the first of these systems to be operational in the United Arab Emirates by 2020. The Abu Dhabi government has just announced that it has been working with his company to connect Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, two UAE cities separated by 105 miles, using the Hyperloop system.

A proposal for this mode of transportation came from Elon Musk in August 2013, in a paper titled “Hyperloop Alpha.” Musk envisaged a mass transit system in which trains travel as fast as 760 mph in pressurized capsule pods. These would ride on an air cushion in steel tubes and be driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. He claimed that the system would be safer, faster and cheaper than trains, cars boats and supersonic planes, for distances of up to at least 900 miles, and said that it would be resistant to earthquakes and generate more energy through its solar panels than it would use.

Straight out of science fiction it may be, but two start-ups took up Musk’s challenge to develop the technology: HTT and Hyperloop One. These companies have raised more than $100 million each and say they will have operational systems in three to four years and that they have governments backing them. Hyperloop One demonstrated elements of the technology in the Las Vegas desert in May 2016. The sheiks I spoke with in Dubai were most excited about HTT’s system.

Even if the Hyperloop technology doesn’t pan out, the digital chauffeurs surely are coming. Self-driving cars such as the Tesla that I drive can already take control of the wheel on highways and are able to monitor traffic around them better than humans can — because their sensors enable them to see in 360 degrees and communicate with each other to negotiate rights of way.

By 2020, self-driving cars will have progressed so far that they can drive safely at speeds as fast as 200 mph in their own partitioned lanes on highways. In these circumstances, the commute to Los Angeles from San Francisco would take only an hour and a half — without the need to catch a connection to a supersonic pod. From Abu Dhabi to Al Ain or Dubai could take the car 30 to 40 minutes, door to door. In other words, Elon Musk’s self-driving cars and HTT’s short-haul Hyperloops may be competing with each other. I’m one of those who would prefer the convenience of having their car come with them so that they can keep extra stuff in the back and be working uninterrupted on the commute. In any case, for longer journeys, say from New York or San Francisco to Miami, catching a Hyperloop will make more sense than riding in the self-driving car.

The point, though, is that we are on the verge of a revolution in transportation. For decades — actually, centuries — we have been dependent on locomotives and, more recently, airplanes to take us long distances. The technologies have hardly advanced. The entire industry is about to be disrupted. Many of us will choose to take the shared cars and Hyperloops; others will own their own cars. But we will take fewer rides in trains and planes.

That is why new rail-based transportation systems, such as the one that California has long been debating, are not sensible investments to make. By the time they are complete, our modes of mass transportation will have changed. The California project aims to move 20 to 24 million passengers a year from downtown L.A. to downtown San Francisco, through California’s Central Valley, in 2 hours 40 minutes. It is projected to cost an estimated $64 billion when completed by about 2030. By then, we will be debating whether human beings should be allowed to drive cars, and public rail systems will be facing bankruptcy because of cheaper and better alternatives.

The wise investment to make will be in accelerating adoption of self-driving cars and in reserving lanes for them, and in building energy-efficient long-distance transportation systems that do not consume even more time, money and arable land than we have lost already. For distances in the hundreds or thousands of miles, we’d do well to explore Hyperloops and other environmentally sensitive modes of mass transportation. They may be far more cost-effective than laying new railways.

For more, follow me on Twitter: @wadhwa and visit my website: www.wadhwa.com

December 22, 2016

7 Trends of IoT in 2017

7 Trends of IoT in 2017
by Ahmed Banafa on 12-22-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: AI, IoT

IoT is one of the transformational trends that will shape the future of businesses in 2017 and beyond. Many firms see a big opportunity in #IoT uses and enterprises start to believe that IoT holds the promise to enhance customer relationships and drive business growth by improving quality, productivity, and reliability on one side, and on the other side reducing costs, risk, and theft. By having the right IoT model companies will be rewarded with new customers, better insights, and improved customer satisfaction to mention few benefits.

With all this in mind, let’s explore some of the trends of IoT impacting business and technology in 2017:

1) IoT and Blockchain Will Converge
Blockchain is more than a concept now and has applications in many verticals besides FinTech including IoT. #Blockchain technology is considered by many experts as the missing link to settle scalability, privacy, and reliability concerns in the Internet of Things. Blockchain technology can be used in tracking billions of connected devices, enable the processing of transactions and coordination between devices; allow for significant savings to IoT industry manufacturers. This decentralized approach would eliminate single points of failure, creating a more resilient ecosystem for devices to run on. The cryptographic algorithms used by Blockchain would make consumer data more private. In 2017 IoT will converge with Blockchain for better security and privacy opening the door for a new category in applications, hardware, and talents.

2) IoT Devices and More DDoS Attacks
Forrester thinks that the recent #DDoS attack that hit a whopping 1600 websites in the United States was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the threat that the connected device poses to the world. That attack confirmed the fear of vulnerability of IoT devices with a massive distributed denial of service attack that crippled the servers of services like Twitter, NetFlix, NYTimes, and PayPal across the U.S. on October 21st, 2016. It’s the result of an immense assault that involved millions of Internet addresses and malicious software, according to #Dyn, the prime victim of that attack. “One source of the traffic for the attacks was devices infected by the #Mirai botnet”. All indications suggest that countless Internet of Things (IoT) devices that power everyday technology like closed-circuit cameras and smart-home devices were hijacked by the malware, and used against the servers.

3) IoT and Many Mobile Moments
IoT is creating new opportunities and providing a competitive advantage for businesses in current and new markets. It touches everything—not just the data, but how, when, where and why you collect it. The technologies that have created the Internet of Things aren’t changing the internet only, but rather change the things connected to the internet. More mobile moments (the moments in which a person pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants, immediately and in context) will appear on the connected device, right from home appliances to cars to smartwatches and virtual assistants. All these connected devices will have the potential of offering a rich stream of data that will then be used by product and service owners to interact with their consumers.

4) IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Containers
In an IoT situation, #AI can help companies take the billions of data points they have and boil them down to what’s really meaningful. The general premise is the same as in the retail applications – review and analyzes the data you’ve collected to find patterns or similarities that can be learned from so that better decisions can be made.

The year 2017 would see Internet of Things software being distributed across cloud services, edge devices, and gateways. The year would also witness IoT solutions being built on modern #Microservices (an approach to application development in which a large application is built as a suite of modular services. Each module supports a specific business goal and uses a simple, well-defined interface to communicate with other modules) and #containers (lightweight virtualization) that would work across this distributed architecture. Further, machine-learning cloud services and Artificial Intelligence will be put to use to mine the data that would be coming in from IoT devices.

5) IoT and Connectivity:
Connecting the different parts of IoT to the sensors can be done by different technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Low Power Wi-Fi , Wi-Max, Ethernet , Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the recent promising technology of #Li-Fi(using light as a medium of communication between the different parts of a typical network including sensors). In 2017, new forms of wireless connections, such as 3GPP’s narrowband #NB-IoT, #LoRaWAN, or #Sigfox will be tested. Forcing IoT decision-makers to evaluate more than 20 wireless connectivity options and protocols, which is one step in the right direction of having standards for connectivity.

6) IoT and Talent-Shortage
Organizations launching IoT projects including smart cities and industrial facilities face a tougher time in recruiting talent. Complicating matters is that it remains a challenge to find enough workers to secure the Internet of Things. 45 percent of IoT companies struggle to find security professionals, according to a TEKsystems survey. 30 percent report having difficulty finding digital marketers. In 2017, industrial major vendors will invest in IoT training and certifications and make it part of the mainstream training programs in the tech industry.

7) IoT and New Business Models
The bottom line is a big motivation for starting, investing in, and operating any business, without a sound and solid business models for IoT we will have another bubble, this model must satisfy all the requirements for all kinds of e-commerce; vertical markets, horizontal markets, and consumer markets. A new business model including sharing cost of devices with consumers, reducing the cost of ownership and making UX less hassle and more joyful. 2017 will see new categories being added to smart markets. One key element is to bundle service with the product, for example, devices like Amazon’s #Alexa will be considered just another wireless speaker without the services provided like voice recognition, music streaming, and booking Uber service to mention few.

The Road Ahead
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ecosystem of ever-increasing complexity; it is the next level of automation of every object in our life and convergence of new technologies will make IoT implementation much easier and faster, which in turn will improve many aspects of our life at home and at work and in between. From refrigerators to parking spaces to smart houses, IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future. One possible outcome in the near future is the introduction of “IoT as a Service” technology. If that service offered and used the same way we use other flavors of “as a service” technologies today the possibilities of applications in real life will be unlimited. But we have a long way to achieving that dream; we need to overcome many obstacles and barriers at many fronts before we can see the benefits of such technology.

Ahmed BanafaNamed No. 1 Top VoiceTo Follow in Tech by LinkedIn in 2016

References:
http://www.iotworldnews.com/author.asp?section_id=508&doc_id=727678&
http://www.indianweb2.com/2016/11/08/internet-things-iot-2017-predictions-forrester/
http://www.ioti.com/iot-trends-and-analysis/11-iot-predictions-2017
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-standardization-implementation-challenges-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wake-up-call-iot-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/securing-internet-things-iot-blockchain-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-mile-iot-artificial-intelligence-ai-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iot-implementation-challenges-ahmed-banafa?trk=mp-author-card
http://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/cry

December 22, 2016

Floki Bot is Becoming an International Sensation with Cybercriminals

Floki Bot is Becoming an International Sensation with Cybercriminals
by Matthew Rosenquist on 12-22-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Security

Floki Bot, a new financial oriented malware, is popular with English, Portuguese, and Russian speaking underground criminal markets, winning over cybercriminals with new features and functionality. It is currently being used by a number of different cybercrime groups around the world and is being sold on the dark market for about $1,000 according to Flashpoint and Cisco Talos.

Improvements Abound
Floki Bot is a great example of evolutionary release-reuse tactics of hackers. Based upon the venerable Zeus Trojan 2.0.8.9 source code, which was released many years ago, this new bot variant sports many different technologies to bypass detection and eradication by security tools. It has an updated engine to avoid Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a method for cybersecurity used to detect malicious software, and extensibility to use The Onion Router (TOR) network for masking network traffic sources. It uses a number of obfuscation techniques to hide its sensitive code. Floki Bot also sports advanced methods to capture data from one of their primary targets, Point-of-Sale (PoS) devices. Overall, it keeps many of the Zeus banking Trojan tricks while adding upgrades to stay current with the latest security controls and tactics.

Alternate Engineering
Based upon communication traffic analysis, it is believed that several different parties, possibly of different languages, might have contributed to the creation of this malware. As hackers do collaborate well, the result brings together a capable new malware to the stage. This is becoming more common. Bits of code and various experts working together to develop the next generation of malware.

In some cases, it is not intentional. There are several examples of when Nation States have conducted cyberattacks and other parties intercepted their well-developed code, only to reverse-engineer it, and use the parts they found interesting in their own projects. This is the way of the next generation malware author. They don’t need to know everything themselves. They can leverage a community for assistance and even reuse the best parts of other groups code for maximum effect.

Protections Must Adapt
If Floki Bot is any indication of the evolution for malware, we should expect faster cycles of release for more virulent code and methods. Teamwork will increase as groups work together to monetize efforts and fleece victims in more efficient and creative ways. The cybersecurity industry is not only fighting the malicious technology, but also the people who are innovating and collaborating to undermine the security, safety, and privacy of us all.

Interested in more? Follow me on Twitter (@Matt_Rosenquist), Steemit, and LinkedIn to hear insights and what is going on in cybersecurity.

December 21, 2016

Predictions for the IOT in 2017

Predictions for the IOT in 2017
by Bill McCabe on 12-21-2016 at 2:00 pm
Categories: IoT, Security

Although we are a far cry from Nostradamus, there are some fairly reliable predictions that can be made about 2017 and beyond.

The first bold prediction is that 2017 will see a bump in security, and a demand for skilled workers. Since there will be a growing demand for AI and the containers that are utilized to transmit information, there will be a need for individuals who can operate these core foundations.

Prototypes for certain financial transactions will be released. These transactions will utilize blockchain technology, and they will help to expedite and simplify several different types of transactions.

At some point, a massive large scale IoT security breach will occur. This will lead to most industries repairing their coding so that it becomes unbreakable in the future. The potential for better security systems will become a bigger part of this.

Further DDos attacks will then continue to happen. As hackers realize that they can do damage with the DDoS attacks by tapping into the internet of things, there will continue to be older devices that are used for these attacks, until they are remove from the internet. As more devices connect, there will be a need for additional security to take place. Fortunately, places like IBM and Cisco will step in and help to create certifications for devices to help ensure that that the security that is in place is of the highest caliber.

These firms will also likely begin to offer training that is either free for those in the industry, or offer it at a low enough cost that it offers value to developers who need professionals with this level of expertise.

All of this may be taken a step further with industry certified devices. Since the need for security protection will vary from one industry to the next, there is a chance that several certification vendors will come into play and help to ensure that each of the different industries will have what it needs for the IoT technology that it is providing.

What we see is that there is a potential for different advancements within the internet of things. While the actual results of what takes place may vary slightly, there is no denying that we are set to experience another year of growth and advancement in the industry. We can only hope that it continues to be as fascinating as 2016 has been and the years that follow continue to build off that momentum also.

Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the folks at @IoTRecruiting – and www.internetofthingsrecruting

iot, Internet of things, Bill McCabe