Articles – Page 148

February 9, 2017

There’s a memory access technology out there that makes some pretty bold promises. If you take only the top-level messaging away, it sounds like, well, magic. And if you think through it a bit more, you start to squint your eyes and go, “Hmmmm… How is that even possible?”

The technology is called “scatter/gather,” and my goal was to ferret out exactly what this means and what you should expect when using it – and, in particular, understanding the promise of “single-cycle access.”

We’ll start with a quick review of the concept, sharpen … Read More → "How Does Scatter/Gather Work?"

Robot Penguins Zap Cyber-Threat!

University Research Reveals Animal-Based Coding Practices

by Jim Turley

February 8, 2017

“It’s practically impossible to look at a penguin and feel angry.” – Joe Moore

The headline was straight out of click-bait heaven. “Hungry penguins keep self-driving cars safe from hackers.” It had everything: cute animals, cyber-threats, and scary autonomous vehicles. Throw in a few UFOs and a long-dead mobster and you’d have the perfect Facebook meme.

The reality proved somewhat less sensationalistic, though more useful to actual programmers. A university research team … Read More → "Robot Penguins Zap Cyber-Threat!"

“Swimming in Sensors, Drowning in Data”

Mil-Aero Challenges Go Mainstream

by Kevin Morris

February 7, 2017

As is often the case, the system design challenges faced by the defense industry were harbingers of issues to come for the rest of us. In 2010 Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, was quoted as saying, “We’re going to find ourselves, in the not too distant future, swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” This was less than one year after Kevin Ashton, executive director of the Auto-ID Center, reportedly coined the term, “Internet of Things.” Many of those “things,” it turns out, are sensors of various types, pumping … Read More → "“Swimming in Sensors, Drowning in Data”"

Multi-Layer Security

Do You Have to Do Them All?

by Bryon Moyer

February 6, 2017

As the discussion of internet security rages, you may have noticed that much of the conversation focuses on TLS (aka Transport Layer Security) vs. so-called end-to-end encryption in the application layer.

What the heck does it mean, and what difference does it make? We’ll cover this quickly because our focus will be on yet other layers of security. And the best way to set all this up is by reference to the standard network stack. The app-vs-TLS debate focuses on where the security should happen.

TLS happens on the transport layer, layer 4, as a … Read More → "Multi-Layer Security"

What Part of the Elephant Do You Recognise?

National Instruments Passes an Historic Milestone

by Dick Selwood

February 1, 2017

After forty years at the helm of National Instruments, founder Dr. James Truchard (Dr. T.) is stepping down. Given that NI was founded before most people working in electronics today entered the profession, it is one of those companies everybody knows – but what “everybody knows” varies from person to person. Do you know NI for test and measurement, for system design, or for system control? Or VST? What does LabVIEW mean to you?

Firstly, NI was started in 1976 as a spinoff from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. T., along with Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin, … Read More → "What Part of the Elephant Do You Recognise?"

Rock & Roll Engineering

MIPI Alliance’s New I3C Interface Looks Set for Stardom

by Jim Turley

February 1, 2017

“This goes to 11. It’s one better.” – Nigel Tufnel, “This Is Spinal Tap”

They say there are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don’t. Over at the MIPI Alliance, they’ve gone one better, too.

If you’re not a follower of MIPI, this is the nonprofit group that defines interface standards for small, mobile, and handheld devices. (BTW, MIPI stands for… nothing at all. They just liked the way it looked, apparently.) It’s not the only such group, for … Read More → "Rock & Roll Engineering"

Making COTS Real

VITA Embedded Tech Trends

by Kevin Morris

January 31, 2017

COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) seems like a great idea on the surface. Rather than designing custom, one-off complex electronic systems from the ground up for each new application, we can save considerable time, money, and mistakes by taking advantage of pre-engineered, open, standards-based components and technologies for the bulk of our project. Then, we can spend the majority of our precious engineering time and talent adding the “special sauce” that makes our application unique.

However, the COTS concept is a bit more complex in practice than in theory. Realizing COTS means boiling … Read More → "Making COTS Real"

3 Tales of Hardware Hacking

Creating and Detecting Compromised Hardware

by Bryon Moyer

January 30, 2017

We’ve talked a lot about security lately (a trend that’s not likely to diminish anytime soon). But much of the hard work of encryption and authentication and the like are done by software stacks – middleware that you can purchase or acquire as open source. Concerns about hacking also tend to focus on software vulnerabilities – the good news there being the patchability of software (as long as your system can be upgraded).

But what if you can attack hardware? What probably comes to mind are so-called side-channel attacks, where you listen to EMI transmissions and watch … Read More → "3 Tales of Hardware Hacking"

Information Monoculture

How Instant Access to Information Might be Making Us Dumber

by Jim Turley

January 25, 2017

?“When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.” – Richard Dawkins

A reference book about reference books. It doesn’t sound like page-turning summertime beach reading, but Jack Lynch’s book, “You Could Look It Up,” is actually pretty interesting. In it, he describes the historical attempts to create dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, codices, and every form of reference work, catalog, compendium, list, and litany that … Read More → "Information Monoculture"

Sequential and Parallel Universes

The Real Challenge of Next-Generation Computing

by Kevin Morris

January 24, 2017

There are two alternative realities out there in computation: the sequential universe – which is where our brains naturally conceptualize most algorithms, and the parallel universe – which is the way actual hardware works. These two realities have always co-existed, but the von Neumann architecture shielded us from them. Since our processor architecture was based around a program counter, we could conceive that our machine was doing one instruction at a time.

Therefore, when we wrote our software – even at a much higher level of abstraction than the instructions the machine was executing, the notion … Read More → "Sequential and Parallel Universes"