Earlier this week, Rambus Chief Scientist Craig Hampel gave a keynote presentation at MemCon 2015 that explored the increasingly blurred lines between memory and storage. As Hampel notes, devices used as memory are typically volatile, byte addressable, directly writable, have deterministic latency and have an endurance greater than 1015 operations. In contrast, storage devices are non-volatile, block addressable, require an erase operation, have varied latency and have endurance limits that are much less than memory devices.
Extracting crypto keys from the Cloud
A Worcester Polytechnic Institute research team has confirmed that it managed to successfully extract cryptographic keys from the Cloud. According to a recently published paper, the team built upon previous work by Ristenpart, who demonstrated the viability of co-location and provided the first concrete evidence of sensitive information leakage on a commercial cloud.
Securing 2.5D and fan-outs
Semiconductor Engineering editor-in-chief Ed Sperling recently noted that the long-anticipated move to 2.5D and fan-outs raises a number of familiar questions about security.
Understanding the changing hardware-software paradigm
Hardware-centric platforms and solutions were traditionally designed with minimal input from software engineers. As Brian Bailey ofSemiconductor Engineering recently noted, this approach worked when software content was negligible – and the practice did not significantly contribute to product delays.
Lensless computational sensor clinches “Best Paper Award”
The International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA) recently presented the “Best Paper Award” to a team of Rambus researchers for their work on ultra-miniature, computationally efficient diffractive visual-bar-position sensors.
The 3MB of RAM in William Gibson’s Neuromancer
Neuromancer, a 1984 cyberpunk novel by William Gibson, was the first winner of the science fiction triple crown: the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Hugo Award. Marking the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy, the book tells the story of Case, a washed-up computer hacker hired by an enigmatic employer.
