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Taking smartphone security to the next level

Asaf Ashkenazi, a senior director at Rambus’ security division, recently gave a keynote presentation about the future of mobile security at the Linley Group’s Mobile and Wearables Conference.

According to Ashkenzai, the demand for trusted applications on mobile devices has increased significantly in recent years.

“As the amount of valuable data stored and communicated across mobile devices continues to grow, the need for robust security solution becomes even more important,” he told conference participants.

EE Times takes a closer look at Rambus’ 14nm R+ DDR4 PHY

Gary Hilson of the EE Times has covered Rambus’ recent announcement about the development of its R+ DDR4 PHY on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 14nm LPP process. As the journalist notes, the silicon is the first production-ready 3200 Mbps DDR4 PHY available on GLOBALFOUNDRIES Inc.’s FX-14 ASIC platform using its power-performance optimized 14nm LPP process.

Motherboard talks security and Rambus

Motherboard’s Michael Byrne recently covered a paper written by Rambus chief scientist Paul Kocher for Communications of the ACM. In the paper, Kocher observes that computer security issues have far exceeded the limits of the human brain. To illustrate his point, the chief scientist points to Ohio’s infamous Silver Bridge, which collapsed during rush hour in 1967.

“Instead of redundancy, the bridge used high-strength steel. The failure of a single eyebar was catastrophic. Today’s computing devices resemble the Silver Bridge, but are much more complicated,” Kocher explained. “They have billions of lines of code, logic gates, and other elements that must work perfectly. Otherwise, adversaries can compromise the system. The individual failure rates of many of these components are small, but aggregate complexity makes vulnerability statistically certain.”

As Bryne notes, Kocher views computer security as a scaling problem.

What if HAL 9000 had been lensless?

The fictional HAL 9000 is a sentient computer that made its infamous on-screen debut in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1968 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, HAL is depicted in the form of multiple camera lenses containing a dot, which are scattered throughout the Discovery One spacecraft.

According to HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, edited by Rambus Fellow Dr. David G. Stork, HAL is capable of speech, speech recognition, facial recognition, natural language processing, lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotional behavior, automated reasoning and playing chess.

R+ DDR4 PHY developed on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 14nm LPP process

Rambus has confirmed the development of its R+ DDR4 PHY on the GLOBALFOUNDRIES 14nm LPP process.

“As part of a comprehensive suite of memory and SerDes interface offerings for networking and data center applications, we have achieved the first production-ready 3200 Mbps DDR4 PHY available on the power-performance optimized 14nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process,” said Luc Seraphin, senior VP and GM of the Rambus Memory and Interfaces Division.

The growing demand for FPGAs in servers and data centers

Jeff Dorsch of Semiconductor Engineering recently noted that there are a number of distinct advantages and drawbacks to various compute engines available on the market today.

“[For example], CPUs offer high capacity at low latency. GPUs have the highest per-pin bandwidth. And FPGAs are designed to be very general,” writes Dorsch. “But each also has its limitations. CPUs require more integration at advanced process nodes, [while] GPUs are limited by the amount of memory that can be put on a chip.”

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