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No reason for FD-SOI Roadmap to follow Moore’s law!

No reason for FD-SOI Roadmap to follow Moore’s law!
by Eric Esteve on 04-26-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: FD-SOI, Foundries, STMicroelectronics

We in Semiwiki are writing about FD-SOI since 2012, describing all the benefits offered by the technology in term of power consumption, price per performance compared with FinFET, etc. Let me assess again that I am fully convinced that FD-SOI is a very smart and efficient way to escape from the Moore’s law paradox: the transistor cost is increasing for (FinFET) technology node below 20 nm, and that I expect FD-SOI to see market adoption.

But I think that some people are confused when dealing with FD-SOI. When you see some picture like this “SOI Roadmap” (from VLSIResearch), it seems that the picture designer has just made a copy of the Bulk Roadmap and pasted it with 2 years shift. Even if 28 and 22 nm FD-SOI become successful technologies –that I hope- it will take some time for the foundries supporting these nodes to generate enough ROI before investing in a way as described on this graphic.

As of today, the Bulk technology roadmap and the production status is well-known: 28 nm is in full production, 14/16 nm also, chips are in design in 7 and 10 nm and probably taped out in 10 nm. If we focus on 14/16 nm, we realize that the very high runners like application processors for mobile, PC processors and data center SoC probably represent most of the foundries (or Intel) revenues for this node, and these revenues are really high, thanks to Apple, Mediatek, Qualcomm, Samsung (and more).

As of today, the only application processor targeting FD-SOI has been demonstrated by STMicroelectronics in 2013; unfortunately, the company has now exited the mobile market. To make it clear, none of the above listed high runners chips has targeted FD-SOI and the reason is most probably linked with risk aversion. FD-SOI technology for advanced technology node is perceived as completely new (even if this is not true, see IBM) and taking the decision to move such a healthy business to a new technology is just too risky.

As a result, the heavy investment made by foundries to develop new FinFET nodes can be quickly recovered thanks to a fast and large ROI coming from the top semiconductor players who need to design always larger, faster and lower power SoC to keep their market share in the couple of very lucrative application, mobile AP, PC processor and data center SoC. And can afford the incredibly high development cost for 14/16 or 10 nm FinFET technology nodes.

If you look at this problem from another angle, that leave many more chips which will NOT be developed on these too expensive nodes, like SoC addressing application processor for automotive (infotainment, smart vehicle…), for consumer application and many more. These chips need high performance (but not the highest possible), low power (in some case like IoT the lowest possible) and a unit cost as low as possible. Because the addressed market is more in the million or 10’s million units than the 100’s million, the NRE and development cost has to be kept reasonable, and certainly not in the $100’s million like for advanced FinFET SoC.

FD-SOI adoption has started! Samsung forecast 10 tapeouts on 28nm FD-SOI this year, SONY is shipping a GPS chips (announced in Tokyo SOI Forum in January 2015), NXP has adopted 28nm FD-SOI for the two new platform (iMX-7 and iMX-8) and GlobalFoundries is well engaged in 22 FDX process. FD-SOI provides such advantage in term of power consumption, thanks to forward Biasing capability, that we can expect technology penetration in many segments where low power and low cost of ownership (unit price + NRE) is more important than ultimate performance.

But it will take time, and by the way I think that stopping the 28 nm FD-SOI roadmap in 2022 (like on the picture) doesn’t make sense. Because we can expect volume production to start only in 2017 for chips taped out this year, so it will not be surprising if 28 nm FD-SOI production last 10 years (2027). This also means that it will take longer to collect enough ROI to be in position to offer 14 nm FD-SOI. Why not offering 40 nm or even 65/55 nm FD-SOI instead? It would make sense to support SoC integrating mixed-signal and digital, addressing application like low cost IoT edge devices… If you agree with this position, you will also challenge the above forecast, at least the $6B figure for 16/14nm FD-SOI production in 2017 or 2018…

Let’s come back to the initial question: why should FD-SOI technology follow Moore’s law, when the technology has been defined as one option to escape Moore’s law paradox (higher transistor price for lower node)? I think the only reason is a lack of creativity, pushing to duplicate a concept validated for FinFET (roadmap) to FD-SOI, although the market dynamic is completely different. The technology and marketing people who have defined and marketed FD-SOI have tried to think outside the box, analysts should go outside of their comfort zone and not just resale the same framework. Which is valid for FinFET may be completely different for FD-SOI…

Eric Esteve from IPNEST –

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SpyGlass DFT ADV accelerates test closure – Xilinx and Synopsys webinar

SpyGlass DFT ADV accelerates test closure – Xilinx and Synopsys webinar
by Bernard Murphy on 04-26-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA, Synopsys, Xilinx

Fed up with ECOing your way out of test problems? You might want to register for this webinar.When you’re building monster SoC FPGAs, you have all the same problems you have with any other SoC. That includes getting to very high test coverage as quickly as you can with a design targeted to the most advanced processes. We’re not just talking the basic stuck-at coverage – that has to be very high. But you also have to have high at-speed coverage and, in these days of test compression, you have to fix areas of random pattern resistance which otherwise force longer test sequences and therefore longer test chains, undoing a lot of the advantages of compression.

Even basic stuck-at testability problems can be challenging to find in large designs using IPs from multiple sources. Problems limiting at-speed testability and random pattern resistance are simply too hard to track down without automation. That’s where Synopsys SpyGlass™ DFT ADV comes in. This tool will find coverage problems of multiple types and will help you isolate root causes; you can fix these through logic changes or by adding testpoints.

I know something about this technology since I was CTO at Atrenta for 15 years. SpyGlass DFT has become a must-have in many design for test groups in some of the biggest semiconductor and systems companies in the industry.

Learn more about how Xilinx uses this technology on their biggest and baddest SoC FPGAs to save weeks of test problem ECOs . Save the date – April 28, 10am Pacific.

You can register for this event HERE.

Web event: Xilinx and Synopsys Present: Meeting Test Goals Faster with SpyGlass DFT ADV
Date: April 28, 2016
Time:10:00 AM PDT
Duration: 45 minutes

Early detection of testability issues can prevent major bottlenecks downstream and avoid time-consuming design iterations. In this webinar, Synopsys presents new techniques and capabilities available in SpyGlass DFT ADV such as high-impact test points to boost coverage, reduce the number of patterns, and minimize test costs. Our guest speaker from Xilinx discusses test challenges associated with large SoC designs such as the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale chip family, and illustrates how SpyGlass DFT ADV addresses testability issues early in the design flow, saving weeks of complex DFT-related ECOs.

Speakers:

Amitava Majumdar
Principal Engineer, Programmable Platforms Group, Xilinx, Inc.

Amitava (Amit) Majumdar is with the High Speed Products Division of Xilinx’ Programmable Platform Group, responsible for defining unified DFx methodologies for digital and mixed signal IPs across Xilinx’ SOC products. These methodologies include test, silicon and application debug, characterization, yield and error tolerance capabilities in the presence of security and safety and power management features. After a brief stint as an EE faculty member at SIU-C, prior to joining Xilinx, Amit moved into the industry, working on various DFx topics at Crosscheck, Apple, Viewlogic, Synopsys, SUN Microsystems, Stratosphere Solutions and AMD. Amit has worked on 50+ successful tape-outs in various roles, ranging from front-end design to post silicon work as an engineer and manager. He has a wide range of interests, from statistical circuit design to data-compression, machine learning and other multi-dimensional optimization problems. Amit received a BE-Hons degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS, Pilani, an MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UMASS, Amherst and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from USC.

Anthony Joseph
Applications Engineer, Synopsys

Anthony “Al” Joseph has over 30 years of experience in ASIC design and verification – the most recent 15 years focused on the SpyGlass RTL signoff platform. Anthony currently is a Senior CAE for the SpyGlass DFT ADV product family at Synopsys.

Dmitry Melnik
Marketing Manager, Synopsys

Dmitry Melnik is a Product Marketing Manager in Synopsys’ RTL Synthesis and Test group. He has more than 10 years of combined experience in EDA R&D, field applications and product management. He holds an MS degree in Computer Systems Engineering from KNURE, Ukraine.

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Stop the Dashboard Insanity!

Stop the Dashboard Insanity!
by Roger C. Lanctot on 04-26-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Automotive

Speaking as part of the digital track at this week’s NAB confab, John Ellis proclaimed the demise of the dashboard radio in the coming world of automated vehicles. The headline reporting his talk in Tom Taylor’s newsletter was “Radio is on a path to extinction in the vehicle.”There’s no point in being subtle if you’re John Ellis especially if you are addressing the deer in the proverbial digital headlights at NAB.

John makes an essential and legitimate point that the rise of car sharing and ride hailing services and increasingly automated driving machines will steadily nudge the content consuming public toward a BYOD approach to content reception. This means radio needs to make the leap to mobile devices via solutions such as NextRadio – now adopted by every wireless carrier in the U.S. with the sole exception of Verizon.

Quoth Ellis: “In an autonomous or shared car, there does not need to be a traditional head unit,” including the familiar AM/FM dial. “Occupants will bring in all their own content. Thus, no radio in the vehicle.”

As a solution, among other things, Ellis endorses adopting the standard called “SmartDeviceLink” from Ford and Livio and recently endorsed by Toyota. The point of SmartDeviceLink is to enable digital content acquisition in any car (or anywhere?) with any device.

SmartDeviceLink is specifically for enabling access to smartphone-based apps and services via a smartphone connection in a car. The current landscape of smartphone connectivity solutions encompasses everything from Alphabet’s Android Auto and Apple’s CarPlay to MirrorLink, IviLink, WebLink, PhoneLink, MyLink, IntelliLink, HondaLink and, yeah, the list goes on.

The beauty of SmartDeviceLink is that it has the overt support of both Ford and Toyota, but behind the scenes momentum is building for much wider support. Collaboration has already begun between OEMs – an almost-unheard of phenomenon.

The allure of SmartDeviceLink? A massive roster of already enabled applications and services, compatibility with Apple iOS and Alphabet’s Android and, soon, OEM independence.

But the real core of the SmartDeviceLink solution is differentiation. Car makers are quickly – and finally – learning that undifferentiated solutions conceived by non-automotive suppliers – Apple, Alphabet, Baidu (CarLife) – are nothing more than a dead end.


If you’re Mercedes-Benz, why would you want a dashboard experience that looked like Volkswagen’s? It makes no sense. It makes even less sense when car makers take into account the low priority ascribed to the automotive industry by the Apple’s, Alphabet’s and Baidu’s of the world.

The tipping point may well be J.D. Power’s new report on smartphone mirroring solutions. The press release states:

“Findings from the J.D. Power 2015 U.S. Tech Choice StudySM demonstrated below average preference in Apple CarPlay (92) and Android Auto (90), where 100 is average, even with smartphone ownership taken into account. Compare this to the top rated technology from 2015, Blind Spot Detection and Prevention at a preference rating of 225, to see that there is an uphill battle to communicate the benefits that Smartphone Mirroring provides to consumers.”

Strategy Analytics research has consistently identified safety as a much higher priority than infotainment. But what could be worse than UNDIFFERENTIATED infotainment? That is a negative, not a plus.

SmartDeviceLink, in contrast, allows for connecting Apple and Android-based devices but its key virtue is that it provides a framework within which car companies can create differentiated and brand-specific user experiences. And those experiences can be infused with vehicle sensor data and the related contextual information – something most car makers have withheld from Apple, Alphabet and Baidu.

Something of a footnote in this debate is the impending demise of MirrorLink. Volvo, GM and Daimler have all turned away from the interoperability challenges, the limited roster of compatible phones and the inability of MirrorLink to work with Apple phones. MirrorLink won’t go away, but it will be increasingly difficult to find and even harder for car dealers to explain and sell.

SmartDeviceLink is rapidly emerging as the go-to smartphone integration platform. Competing smartphone integrators such as Abalta and Airbiquity have read the writing on the wall and enabled their own SmartDeviceLink compatible solutions. It’s definitely time to forget the bollocks.

Roger C. Lanctot is Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk

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Fast Track to a reconfigurable ASIC design

Fast Track to a reconfigurable ASIC design
by Don Dingee on 04-25-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: eFPGA, Flex Logix, FPGA, IP

Licensing IP can be a pain, especially when the vendor’s business model has front-loaded costs to get started. Without an easy way to evaluate IP, justifying a purchase may be tough. With more mid-volume starts coming for the IoT, wearables, automotive, and other application segments, it’s a growing concern. Flex Logix is doing something Continue reading “Fast Track to a reconfigurable ASIC design”

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Data Security: Magic vs. Common Sense

Data Security: Magic vs. Common Sense
by Daren Klum on 04-25-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Security

I remember when I was a kid and my dad would perform magic tricks. His magic was so bad but at the time I thought it really worked and was real. You know the trick – get a coin, put it in your hand, wave your other hand over the coin, say ‘abra kadabra’ and then put the coin into the other hand when the person isn’t looking and walla the coin disappears. Then my dad would pretend to pull the coin out of my mouth, nose or ear. IT WAS MAGIC! Well, it was magic until my inquisitive 3-4 year old mind figured out what he was doing. Then it wasn’t magic at all but rather a really stupid trick.

I share this story because this is how I view the data security industry right now. Most of the solutions in the security space force you to believe in some kind of magic an ordinary person can’t understand but as we are learning the magic has a lot of fatal flaws. In fact, at the rapid pace the magic is getting hacked it’s very clear the days of magic are over. From back-doors in encryption, brute force hacking using super computing, passwords that can be socially engineered, SQL injections, packet sniffing, spear fishing, malware attacks and of course crypto-locking. There is simply no end to the flaws in the current magic we use to secure our data. Sadly the magic that has been our tried n’ true standard – Math (encryption) and Secrets (passwords) are dead!

So what is the answer? To me the answer comes with what I call the four new pillars of data security: (data conversion, data randomization, data segmentation and physical / multi-factor authentication). When you look at the solution my company has built to solve the security problem at Secured2 our very foundation rests on these pillars. For instance, we convert data into a random format, we randomize the data so it’s totally illegible to any hacker and then we have segmented the data into 10k chunks that are randomly delivered to the ‘multiple’ destinations of your choice (multiple clouds, hybrid, or local). Then to restore data so you can use the data you have to ‘physically authenticate through biometric, retinal, voice or other forms of multi-factor authentication. Our solution of simplicity works in huge contrast to the discovered magic tricks of the tired old solutions. Wouldn’t you agree it’s common sense that when data is converted, shredded, randomized and delivered into multiple locations it’s vastly more secure than the magic of today’s solutions that rely on complex math, secrets and aggregating data in single endpoints? Common sense & simplicity always wins!

Even nature has figured out a way to secure better than we do today. Nature ironically uses the same pillars of security we are using at Secured2. Just think of your brain. The data is not sitting in whole as we do today on a hard drive or in the cloud, it’s spread all around your brain in little bits. The minute you want to access ‘secured’ information you simply make a request and your brain gathers all the bits randomly spread all over your brain into the data you choose to share. Your brain then determines what level of information to share based on your level of trust with the person you are sharing information with (always physical identification). So as you look at how we as humans have already dealt with security all we are doing at Secured2 is mimicking this form of security but for a digital world.

It’s my belief that security is going through a major shift and companies like Secured2 have a first glimpse into the future of security. One thing is clear – the definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting a different outcome. What we are using today isn’t working and solutions like Secured2 provide a viable alternative to the mess we find ourselves in today.

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Would Sauron have made the One Ring if he had known about Plasmonics?

Would Sauron have made the One Ring if he had known about Plasmonics?
by Mitch Heins on 04-25-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Silicon Photonics

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel ‘Lord of the Rings’, the Dark Lord Sauron created the “One Ring” as the ultimate weapon to conquer all of Middle-earth. So too it seems that in the world of integrated silicon photonics, the “ring” has become somewhat ubiquitous and powerful. Resonance rings can be made to modulate laser light, act as filters and switches and in some cases even be used as on-chip laser light sources.

Optics are considered to be one of the most viable solutions to the performance limitations of electrical interconnects. Integrated CMOS photonic solutions are arguably one of the most promising approaches for high bandwidth off and on-chip communications. Light modulation is key to any optical interconnection system as it converts electrical data into the optical domain. It is typically realized by changing carrier concentrations (holes and electrons) to affect the refractive index of the waveguide material, which, in turn, is used to modify the propagation velocity of light and the absorption coefficient in the waveguides. Optical modulators can modify phase, amplitude and polarization by thermo-optic, electro-optic, or electro-absorption modulation and they are usually based on interference (Mach-Zehnder interferometers – MZIs), resonance (rings or quantum well resonators) and bandgap absorption (germanium and now graphene-based electro-absorption modulators).

MZIs are probably the most well-known modulators and have played a major role in silicon-photonic based 100 gigabit optical transceivers for data center communication (see www.luxtera.com, www.kotura.com). They work by splitting an optical path into two parallel arms and then changing the index of refraction in one arm to induce a phase shift of the light. The light from the two arms re-unites and interferes either constructively or destructively allowing the light to be modulated. These devices are relatively large (several millimeters) and have energy dissipation of around 1-5 pJ/bit, two orders of magnitude higher than the 2-50 fJ/bit expected for on-chip communications.

Back to “rings”. Resonance-based modulators, are typically made up of silicon wave-guide rings integrated with a PIN junction to enable electronic control of their refractive index. Rings are coupled with linear wave guides data buses. Light from the input waveguide having a wavelength matching the resonance of the ring, will couple into the ring and build up in intensity over multiple round-trips due to constructive interference. This light is then output to a second detector waveguide. If critical coupling is achieved, light of the wave length selected will not propagate past the ring, effectively stopping propagation of that wavelength on the input bus. The PIN junction is used to modulate the ring’s index of refraction enabling it to be used to modulate light on the input bus as well as to act as a switch to move the selected light onto other buses.

The real power of the ring is that it enables wave length division multiplexing (WDM). WDM uses different wavelengths of light to simultaneously send multiple independent data signals down the same waveguide, effectively multiplying bus bandwidth by the number of wavelengths employed. Ring resonators are uniquely suitable for WDM as each resonator interacts only with wavelengths that correspond to its resonant modes. These devices have extremely small footprints (several microns) which results in low power operation as well as permitting integration of thousands of them on a single die.

Dense WDM modulation can be accomplished by cascading microring modulators on the same waveguide. Columbia University experimented with multiple different ring-cascade architectures for a TDM-based bus connecting multiple cores on the same die and showed effective bandwidths of up to 600 Gbps depending on the number of cores sites per switching cluster.

Now the thing that would make Sauron possibly rethink the “ring” as his ultimate weapon, at least for light modulation, is an electro-absorption modulator (EAM); specifically, an Indium-Tin-Oxide (ITO) hybrid plasmonics EAM. This class of transparent conductive oxides have been found to allow for unity index changes which is 3 to 4 orders of magnitude higher compared to classical electro-optical materials, such as Lithium Niobate. George Washington University has shown that when an electrical voltage bias is applied across this device it forms an accumulation layer at the ITO-SiO[SUB]2[/SUB] interface, which increases the ITO’s carrier density and raises its extinction coefficient. They were able to obtain an extinction ratio of –5 and –20 dB for device lengths of 5 and 20μm, respectively. This record-high 1 dB/μm extinction ratio is due to the combination of the hybrid plasmonics mode enhancing the electro-absorption of the ITO and ITO’s ability to change its extinction coefficient by multiple orders of magnitude when applied with an electric field. This change stems from an increase in the carrier density in the ITO film (by a factor of 60) due to the formation of the accumulation layer in the MOS capacitor, which was verified via electrical metrology tests and analytical modeling. In summary they were able to achieve deep sub-λ 3D optical confinement in a single-mode cavity with bandwidths approaching the THz range and power consumption in the atto-joule regime, which is about 3–5 orders of magnitude lower compared to other state-of-the-art devices.


While the “ring” is still the dominant structure for photonic design because of its versatility in filtering and switching, Sauron or any silicon photonics engineer for that matter, would be wise to continuing using them. However, when it comes to modulators, EAMs, and especially those employing hybrid plasmonics, would definitely be worth looking into.

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Intel Got Fit At CES 2016 And Even Reached Some New Heights At X-Games

Intel Got Fit At CES 2016 And Even Reached Some New Heights At X-Games
by Patrick Moorhead on 04-24-2016 at 8:00 pm
Categories: Foundries, Intel Foundry, IoT

You may have noticed this weekend that Intel was all over the X-Games. You couldn’t turn on the TV, web video or Twitter without seeing the company on and around the X-Games. Intel’s love affair with sports started when Brian Krzanich took the reigns as Intel’s CEO and has been amplified at nearly corporate event since. Krzanich has had a BMX bike soar over his head a few times at CES which to me is a physical embodiment of just how committed Intel’s CEO is to changing the company’s perception. At this year’s CES, Intel devoted a lot of time to their latest technologies and how they enable four key experience areas: sports, health and wellness, creativity and what they’re calling the “human experience”. In fact, Intel has been spending these past few CESs and IDFs (Intel Developer Show) showing how the company is diversifying its computing capabilities and platforms beyond just PC. What we’re seeing at Intel is part brand campaign to improve its perception amongst millennials, but ultimately to get younger developers to choose Intel for their IoT projects without hurting their brand in PCs and datacenter.


IoT: making up for mobile
As Intel has said on numerous occasions, they “missed” the mobile market entry window and have been over-investing ever since. They don’t want to miss the window on IoT. Even though most all of Intel’s profits comes from their datacenter and PC chip and platform franchises, the company is making major investments in its IoT (internet of things) offerings which as end points include the company’s low power Curie modules with Quark processors inside. Intel drove these processors into many big-brand fitness and sports applications as modules and or wearables that allow athletes to gather more information about their exercise and to improve using big-data analytics. Now let me talk about what Intel is doing.

X-Games
At CES 2016, Intel showed off some interesting new technologies as well as major announcements. One of the biggest announcements Intel made at CES was the partnership with the X-Games which just happened this past weekend. At the X-Games, Intel helped measure real-time data of Men’s Snowboard Slopestyle and Men’s Snowboard Big Air events, giving unique real-time data with Curie modules measuring things like speed, air time and height. This gives both the riders and the viewers more data than ever before and make the X-Games experience more modern and data-driven than ever before. Oh, and every time you saw the real-time stats, you saw that it was brought to you by Intel.

Red Bull
In addition to the X-Games partnership, Intel also announced a new partnership with Red Bull Media House. This relationship should help Red Bull and all of their various sponsored athletes the ability to collect tons of valuable data about their performance. And because Red Bull Media Group is one of the leaders in implementing new technologies in sports, it is not much of a stretch to see them using Curie technology in ways that enhance the viewing experience as well. Imagine a space-walk in virtual reality. That would be cool.

Curie IoT end points
The Curie modules used in these extreme sports scenarios include a low-power 32-bit Intel Quark micro-controller, 384KB flash memory and 80KB of SRAM. It also has a low-power DSP sensor hub with what Intel is calling “proprietary pattern matching”. For connectivity, it is using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which helps give it long battery life and the ability to share data. It also has a 6-axis combo sensor with accelerometer and gyroscope, something you would expect to be standard for tracking someone’s movement. Last but not least, it also has a PMIC for battery charging built into the Curie to enable smart charging capabilities.

Oakley face wearable
In addition to the major sports announcements, Intel at CES also talked about some new wearable fitness technologies they helped build. Intel had three-time Ironman Champion Craig Alexander talk about the Oakley Radar Pace. The Oakley Radar Pace is essentially a wearable activity tracker and coach that is designed to track and train the user in real-time using voice activated commands and embedded computing. It monitors a user’s performance as they go along and provide feedback on their technique in order to improve their training in whichever sport they are competing in. Intel and Oakley did not give details about the internal components of the Radar Pace, but it will be available later this year.

Marketing and branding with a long-term point
Intel continues to push forward on its IoT strategy, products and marketing, giving us a better view into how Intel plans to place its chips in the ever growing world of wearables. Intel is using sports and exercise as its primary, visibleentry into the wearable space, a sub-segment of IoT wearables. Let me be clear- these products don’t all have 100% Intel silicon inside, some have none, and if you are wondering about that, you could be missing the point. This very visible sports effort is a brand play with ties to some real products today with the objective to attract developers to use Intel Curie and data platforms for their future products. It’s also to look really cool to millennials who Intel believes it needs to attract for their future growth.

Future sports and fitness data play?
With their new partnerships with the X-Games and Red Bull Media Group Intel should also learn even more about what athletes and fitness junkies need at all levels. They already own Basis, which is a maker of some of the best wearable fitness trackers and heart rate sensors, but it appears clear that Intel wants to make further investments and improvements to their position in the wearable space. These investments may be how Intel plans to gather data about the human body and our capabilities to better understand how to better interpret and gather data. After all, if Intel can learn things in the most extreme conditions, pushing the human body to its absolute limits there’s no saying what they could do with data from day to day activities. Oh and there’s a lot of value in that.


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Intel And Qualcomm Partner (Yes, Really)

Intel And Qualcomm Partner (Yes, Really)
by Patrick Moorhead on 04-24-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Foundries, Intel Foundry, Mobile

For the longest time, the 802.11ad space, also known as WiGig by others, was a conglomeration of different 60 GHz Wi-Fi technologies. There have been many companies that have announced technologies utilizing 60 GHz Wi-Fi technologies including Intel, Nitero, Peraso, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and SiBEAM. Even though many of these companies are members of the Wireless Gigabit Alliance which has a certification process, there is still a certain level of proprietary technology that most of these companies don’t share with each other. However, today, Qualcomm and Intel, the two biggest leaders in 802.11ad 60 GHz Wi-Fi, have announced multi-gigabit interoperability between each other’s devices.


Qualcomm’s Mark Grodinsky, product management director, shows off Intel-Qualcomm WiFi AD interoperability at industry analyst event

What makes this partnership all the more interesting is that Intel and Qualcomm have been at one another’s throats for many years in the smartphone space. This competition was not just limited to the smartphone space, as once Qualcomm bought Atheros they also became competitors in the Wi-Fi space. But the reality is that both companies realize the importance of making 802.11ad 60 GHz Wi-Fi an interoperable technology that can be considered reliable enough to be truly commercialized beyond a couple docking and display solutions. Intel and Qualcomm haven’t announced any new products that utilize WiGig as a result of this announcement, however there were a few announced at CES. Those announcements from Qualcomm included the LeTV Le Max Pro, which features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 as well as a router from TP-Link and a laptop from Acer.

This announcement is probably the biggest announcement for Wi-Fi in 2016 because it finally means that 802.11ad 60 Ghz Wi-Fi can finally become a broadly available commercial technology. WiGig or 802.11ad is no longer a multitude of different Wi-Fi silos with each company creating their own vertical solutions. The reason why Intel and Qualcomm partnering together is such a big deal is because both Qualcomm and Intel own a significant market share of the Wi-Fi connectivity solutions today. Also, both companies have been the first to ship commercial WiGig solutions to their customers and can actually be used for wireless docking and streaming today.

With Intel and Qualcomm now working together to deliver interoperability, that means that Intel’s 60GHz WiGig in laptops and tablets can find its way onto a network with an access point utilizing Qualcomm’s 60 GHz 802.11ad. It also means that smartphones using Qualcomm’s 60 GHz Wi-Fi solution can communicate with docks or displays that utilize Intel’s 60 GHz 802.11ad Wi-Fi solution. And vice versa. Future solutions that utilize 60 GHz gigabit wireless like wireless displays, AR and VR headsets and other low latency high resolution solutions finally have the ability to exist outside of certain companies’ chipset silos. The breaking down of these different technology silos finally means that 802.11ad can stop being just a bunch of technology demos and narrowly commercialized solutions and become a broadly adopted consumer and enterprise solution.

Thanks Intel and Qualcomm for making this very good decision.


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Quantum Code-Cracking Takes Another Hit: Lattice-based Cryptography

Quantum Code-Cracking Takes Another Hit: Lattice-based Cryptography
by Bernard Murphy on 04-24-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Security

Public-key crypto-systems rely these days on approaches founded in mathematical methods which are provably hard to crack. The easiest to understand requires factorization of a key based on the product of two large prime numbers. Much has been made recently of the ability of quantum computers to crack this style of encryption. A more complex method requires solving b[SUP]k[/SUP] = g where b and g are real number elements of a finite group and k must be an integer. This is the discrete logarithm problem in elliptic curve cryptography. A quantum computing algorithm has also been developed for this case. Therefore, in theory, widely known public key methods are crackable unless perhaps the key is unmanageably large.

But encryption systems are now turning to another method – lattice-based cryptography with noise. The approach rests in effect on solving linear equations – a very well studied problem for which excellent solutions exist – but then adds noise to the values. It turns out that Gaussian elimination, the foundation to any of these solutions, is very brittle in the presence of even small amounts of noise in the sense that it is difficult to extract a correct or even approximate solution in these cases.

The method is based on something called Learning with Errors which was derived in the course of studying a machine-learning problem. This has been adapted to something even more cryptically :rolleyes: called Ring Learning with Errors which operates over the ring of polynomials in a finite field (which, it turns out, is related to solving optimization problems on lattices, which, it turns out, is related the linear equation problem). Public key exchange involves exchanging two polynomials: a(x) and b(x) = a(x).s(x) + e(x) where s(x) is the secret and e(x) is a small random error polynomial. In a return exchange, the two parties can come to agreement on the key. I’m not even going to attempt to explain the detail of the exchange here – I’m still inching my way through the paper.

Cracking lattice-based methods is provably as hard as some other hard problems in lattice theory, and you can dial in ever higher levels of difficulty by increasing the rank of the polynomials and other factors. I haven’t seen comparisons with complexity in factoring large numbers but I assume you can dial up the lattice method to a point that it becomes just as computationally hard to solve. But what is most important is that quantum computing has not been shown to offer any advantage in speeding up attacks on this style of encryption (some believe it may be impossible for QC to provide any speedup though this has not been proven). In effect, before quantum computing has had a chance to make a dent on encryption code-cracking, it has quite probably become obsolete (for this purpose).

This is no longer limited to academic research. Quantum-hardened encryption was added to OpenSSL in 2014 and a freeware version is available on GitHub so it’s reasonable to assume that more implementations are out there.

If you are determined to wade through the math (as I said earlier, I am still inching my way through this article), click HERE. A broader view of post-quantum cryptography is HERE.

More articles by Bernard…

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10 Predictions for the Future of IoT

10 Predictions for the Future of IoT
by Ahmed Banafa on 04-24-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: IoT, Security

A Google search for “Internet of Things” term reveals over 280,000,000 results, thanks to the media making the connection between the smart home, wearable devices, and the connected automobile, IoT has begun to become part of the popular parlance. But that’s not the complete picture, according to Gartner’s Nick Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst “The IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many organizations have yet to master,” he added “A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services and of the vendors providing them. Architecting for this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for organizations exploiting the IoT. In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges.”

In the coming years, IoT will look completely different than it does today. IoT is a greenfield market. New players, with new business models, approaches, and solutions, can appear out of nowhere and overtake incumbents. But business is the key market. While there is talk about wearable devices and connected homes, the real value and immediate market for IoT is with businesses and enterprises. The adoption of IoT will be much more similar to the traditional IT diffusion model (from businesses to consumers) than the consumer-led adoption of social media and personal mobility.


Source: dzone.com

The top 10 trends of IoT:

1. Platforms. The platform is the key to success. The “things” will get increasingly inexpensive, applications will multiply, and connectivity will cost pennies. Keeping in mind that IoT platforms bundle many of the infrastructure components of an IoT system into a single product. The services provided by such platforms fall into three main categories:

[LIST=1]

    • Low-level device control and operations such as communications, device monitoring and management, security, and firmware updates.
    • IoT data acquisition, transformation and management.
    • IoT application development, including event-driven logic, application programming, visualization, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.

    2. Standards and Ecosystems. Gartner noted that as IoT devices proliferate, new ecosystems will emerge, and there will be “commercial and technical battles between these ecosystems” that “will dominate areas such as the smart home, the smart city and healthcare. Organizations creating products may have to develop variants to support multiple standards or ecosystems and be prepared to update products during their life span as the standards evolve and new standards and related APIs emerge,” according to Gartner. There will be a battle for IoT application mind share. With billions of devices projected to be spewing out petabytes of data, application developers will have a field day launching thousands, or even millions, of new and cool apps. But, similar to the smartphone world, all of these apps will be fighting for mind share, and only a few will rise to the top to be valued by businesses and consumers.


    Source: Booz Allen

    3. Event Stream Processing    . According to Gartner: “Some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates that must be analyzed in real time. Systems creating tens of thousands of events per second are common, and millions of events per second can occur in some telecom and telemetry situations. To address such requirements, distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) have emerged. They typically use parallel architectures to process very high-rate data streams to perform tasks such as real-time analytics and pattern identification.”

    4. Operating Systems    . There’s a wide range of systems out there that have been designed for specific purposes.

    5. Processors and Architecture. Designing devices with an understanding of those devices’ needs will require “deep technical skills.”

    6. Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks. Current solutions are proprietary, but standards will come to dominate. According to Gartner: “Traditional cellular networks don’t deliver a good combination of technical features and operational cost for those IoT applications that need wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life, low hardware and operating cost, and high connection density. The long-term goal of a wide-area IoT network is to deliver data rates from hundreds of bits per second (bps) to tens of kilobits per second (Kbps) with nationwide coverage, a battery life of up to 10 years, an endpoint hardware cost of around $5, and support for hundreds of thousands of devices connected to a base station or its equivalent. The first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were based on proprietary technologies, but in the long term emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will likely dominate this space.”

    7. Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks. Short-range networks connecting IT devices will be convoluted. There will not be a single common infrastructure connecting devices.

    8. Device (Thing) Management    . IoT things that are not ephemeral — that will be around for a while — will require management like every other device (firmware updates, software updates, etc.), and that introduces problems of scale.

    9. Analytics. According to Gartner, IoT will require a new approach to analytics. “New analytic tools and algorithms are needed now, but as data volumes increase through 2021, the needs of the IoT may diverge further from traditional analytics,” according to Gartner. The currency of IoT will be “data.” But, this new currency only has value if the masses of data can be translated into insights and information which can be converted into concrete actions that will transform businesses, change people’s lives, and effect social change.

    Source: SIA

    10. Security    . According to Gartner, threats extend well beyond denial of sleep attacks: Those are attacks using malicious code, propagated through the Internet of Things, aimed at draining the batteries of your devices by keeping them awake. According to Gartner “The IoT introduces a wide range of new security risks and challenges to the IoT devices themselves, their platforms and operating systems, their communications, and even the systems to which they’re connected. Security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms from both information attacks and physical tampering, to encrypt their communications, and to address new challenges such as impersonating ‘things’ or denial-of-sleep attacks that drain batteries. IoT security will be complicated by the fact that many ‘things’ use simple processors and operating systems that may not support sophisticated security approaches.”


    Source: Security Intelligence

    What is next?
    The market is endless. It’s exciting but you need to build great software and hardware with a sophisticated backend with multiple security levels and to bring order and sophistication to data and understanding that security is an art that involves cryptography. Most companies don’t have the talent they need to develop secure products.