Articles – Page 159

June 28, 2016

“Knowledge Is Good.” – Emil Faber, founder of Faber College

Data is good. So more data is better. Better enough to spend $3 billion, if you’re running ASML.

Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (ASML) is the huge Dutch-based corporation that makes many of the shiny clean-room machines that produce your chips. You could say the company is big in small. But bigger can always get better, right?

Last week ASML announced that it was acquiring Taiwan-based Hermes Microvision Inc. (HMI) for about $3 billion, all in cash. That’s a major outlay, no matter … Read More → "Promises in the Dark"

Is Asymmetric Cryptography Necessary?

Rubicon Labs Promotes Symmetric-Only for the IoT

by Bryon Moyer

June 27, 2016

So… what if you woke up one day and found that some basic tenets of IoT security that you thought to be true might not, in fact, be true?

We did a huge tour through security a while back, including a look at artifacts like keys and certificates, authentication, and Read More → "Is Asymmetric Cryptography Necessary?"

Achronix Accelerates Today’s Data Center

PCIe Board Brings Power-Efficient Networking Performance

by Kevin Morris

June 22, 2016

We’ve talked a lot in these pages about the battle for the future of the data center. FPGAs, we say, represent the path to enlightenment, the power panacea, the key to breaking the energy-hungry tyranny of the von Neumann architecture. Apparently, we are not alone in this line of thinking. Intel, for example, plunked down about sixteen billion votes in favor of an FPGA-based future by acquiring Altera. Xilinx joined a cadre of companies looking to crack Intel’s longstanding dominance of the data center by devising standards to facilitate open-architecture attacks on Intel’s proprietary fortress. Someday, … Read More → "Achronix Accelerates Today’s Data Center"

Zeno’s Paradox and the Chip of Choice

Choosing Processors Isn’t Like it Used to Be

by Jim Turley

June 21, 2016

“?What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.” — Bertrand Russell

There’s an old joke that goes something like this. An engineer and a scientist are standing together at the end of a long hallway. They notice two pretty girls standing at the other end, so the engineer turns to the scientist and says, “I’ll make you a wager. Let’s both walk down the hallway until we’re half the distance to those two girls. Then we’ll walk half of … Read More → "Zeno’s Paradox and the Chip of Choice"

We Have Contact

Applied Materials Improves Connections to Silicon

by Bryon Moyer

June 20, 2016

We spend a lot of time talking about wafer materials and what might be in the future. And we spend a lot of time talking about how to build a transistor on that wafer. And we spend yet more time talking about the metal lines running all over from here to yonder. But what we don’t spend quite so much time on is how everything gets connected to that metal.

That can, of course, be summarized in two words: “contact” and “via.” “Contact” if it’s metal to silicon; “via” if it’s metal to metal. … Read More → "We Have Contact"

A Tale of Two Ventures

Test Your Business Skills with These Two Example Companies

by Jim Turley

June 15, 2016

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘faster horses.’” – Henry Ford (apocryphal)

A lot of business ideas seem obvious only after the fact. Google must have seemed like a crazy idea at the time. You want to do what? Build an entire business around yet another search engine? That’s nuts – how would you compete with Yahoo!, AltaVista, Northern Lights, InfoSeek, Lycos, and all the other generic and undifferentiated search engines? How would you ever make money? Turned out to be a pretty lucrative business, though.

Same goes … Read More → "A Tale of Two Ventures"

I Love DAC

Austin Hosts Annual Nerdfest

by Kevin Morris

June 14, 2016

Trade shows are dead. Engineers are highly rational people, and there is no rational justification for squandering valuable travel budget, time, and other business resources to fly from goodness knows where to Austin Texas in June to attend the 53rd annual Design Automation Conference (DAC). Any information one could hope to gather about the latest wave of electronic design automation software could much more easily and efficiently be gleaned from countless online and other sources. With the entire week and thousands of dollars that each attendee blows on an annual DAC pilgrimage, substantial project progress could be posted. Disrupting … Read More → "I Love DAC"

Precision Medicine and Public Health

Matching Treatment to Patient

by Dick Selwood

June 13, 2016

imec’s Technology Forum in Brussels was strongly attended (by around a thousand people), despite the issues of international terrorism and national industrial disputes. The terrorism alert meant that just getting into the meeting halls required standing in long queues with bag checks and physical screening. The industrial disputes meant that many of the local delegates were delayed in traffic jams around Brussels.

Once in the hall, there was a lot of good stuff provided by senior people from around the semiconductor industry and the wider world. Just a reminder – imec is a Belgium-based research and development … Read More → "Precision Medicine and Public Health"

A Hidden IoT Network

Cirrent Leverages Home Hotspots for Connecting Gadgetry

by Bryon Moyer

June 13, 2016

Alrighty then! You’ve got yourself a handy-dandy new Gadget McWidget! How awesome is that? And it says, “IoT” right here on the packaging! Even awesomer! What does it do, you ask? Well, smart things! Because… connected!

All you’ve gotta do is connect it. Just like… this. Ta-dahhh! No, wait… there! Oops, wait, what happened? Um… hang on, hang on, I got this… must be… this button here. Yeah! No… this button and then that button? No? [Small voice] Halp?

We recently looked at … Read More → "A Hidden IoT Network"

Rethinking System Integration

From Syntax to Semantics – Creating the Language of Machines

by Bryon Moyer

June 9, 2016

For large-scale systems integration, our approach to building software needs a fundamental rethink. We are imposing on machines our human-scale communication methods instead of seeking to enable machines to freely converse. The intent is straightforward: to reduce integration costs by predefining interfaces, providing backward compatibility and forward-capable integration.

When building large-scale systems we focus on how to connect the systems together instead of how they communicate. We push the knowledge of what to communicate into the code blocks that engage with each other and we spend a lot of time ‘simplifying’ communication into a syntactic bit stream, … Read More → "Rethinking System Integration"