The evolving requirements of IoT security
Ed Sperling and Jeff Dorsch of Semiconductor Engineering recently penned an article about the future of IoT security. Specifically, the two journalists highlighted the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against Dyn which saw waves of attacks created by Mirai malware.
“Connected devices of all sizes can [now] be amassed into an army of bots that can bring even giants like Amazon and Netflix to a dead stop,” they explained. “This attack was predicted and warned against by numerous security experts since [Mirai] was published as open source code several months earlier, but that did little to stop its progression.”
The evolution of embedded FPGAs
Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering observes that systems on chip have been manufactured with numerous processing variants ranging from general-purpose CPUs to DSPs, GPUs and custom processors which are highly optimized for certain tasks.
“When none of these options provide the necessary performance or consumes too much power, custom hardware takes over. But there is one type of processing element that has rarely been used in a major SoC— the FPGA,” he explained. “Solutions implemented in FPGAs are often faster than any of the instruction-set processors. In most cases they complete a computation with lower total energy consumption.”
Design-led marketing with SVEN
Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel recently curated a Silicon Valley Executive Network (SVEN) event that convened at Accenture’s Redwood Shores Liquid Studio to explore how design thinking can create a truly competitive advantage.
Nadel, who has a background in psychology and scientific research, as well as experience in both design and marketing, opened the conference by noting that design-led marketing is characterized by a logical sequence and cadence.
“Marketing should start upstream during the strategy and ideation stage and continue during prototyping, launch and downstream promotion,” he explained. “Understanding user experience (UX) is especially critical because UX and marketing are inexorably interrelated. The connection between UX and product marketing was reinforced with the Design Council’s Double Diamond, diagraming that both focus on designing (or developing) the right thing and designing things right.”
Looking beyond Dennard Scaling
Robert H. Dennard co-authored his now-famous paper for the IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits way back in 1974. Essentially, Dennard and his engineering colleagues observed that as transistors are reduced in size, their power density stays constant. Meaning, power use stays in proportion with area, as both voltage and current scale (downward) with length.
Semiconductor Engineering highlights side-channel attacks
Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering recently penned an article highlighting the danger side-channel attacks pose to connected devices and systems.
“As the world begins to take security more seriously, it becomes evident that a device is only as secure as its weakest component. No device can be made secure by protecting against a single kind of attack,” Bailey explained. “Encryption and root of trust can add additional layers of protection. But even then, the system may not be secure.”
