Articles – Page 168

December 17, 2015

Is the Internet of Things (IoT) anything more than marketing hype – just a rebranding of M2M – or is it a force that will change the way in which organisations will operate and co-operate? My feeling is that it is both. The hype comes from the fact that much of the more public conversation about the IoT, particularly in the general media, is still in the realms of the Internet toaster and similar consumer fripperies.

(We may not yet have a commercially available Internet toaster, but we do have both the WiFi kettle and the WiFi coffee … Read More → "Teaching a Doll to Swear and Other Stories"

The Secret Secret to Secrets

Generating Random Numbers is Harder Than it Looks

by Jim Turley

December 16, 2015

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas

I’m no expert in computer security. But I know some people who are.

Crypto-weenies (as they love to be called) occupy an interesting niche in the engineering ecosystem. Normally, engineering is a clearly understood, aboveboard kind of endeavor. We operate by well-understood laws of physics. Ohm’s Law applies to everyone. We tend to share information, expertise, tips, and tricks. Heck, open-source software is all about sharing and disbursing information and exposing all of your code’s inner workings.

Chaos in the Cloud

The Battle for Data Center Supremacy

by Kevin Morris

December 15, 2015

Storm clouds are building on the horizon. Massive thunderheads darken the sky, their convective currents creating blinding static outbursts as enormous caches of charge follow the shortest path to ground. Change is coming to computing and it’s not going to be smooth or evolutionary. With the IoT driving the cloud and the cloud defining datacenter computing, we are about to be in the midst of perhaps the greatest discontinuous change in the history of computation.

With predictions that the IoT will deploy a trillion sensors worldwide within the next few years, and … Read More → "Chaos in the Cloud"

Is Your Design Process Secure?

Dealing With the Human Factor

by Bryon Moyer

December 14, 2015

[Editor’s note: this is the seventh and final installment in a series on Internet-of-Things security. You can find the introductory piece here and the prior piece here.]

We’ve dedicated lots of pages to lots of technical aspects of Internet of Things (IoT) security. With the “easy” technology bits behind us, it’s now time to address the hard part: the human factor. Ultimately, it’s people that design and … Read More → "Is Your Design Process Secure?"

High-Level Design for Everyone

Xilinx Rolls Out HLx

by Kevin Morris

December 9, 2015

For more than two decades, the promise of high-level design methodologies has been dangled in front of digital hardware designers. High-level design was going to revolutionize our design process. It would make us dramatically more productive. It would make us vastly more agile and adaptable as our design requirements evolved. It would make us into Super Engineers – or it would take away our jobs.

Everyone who has designed at the register-transfer level (RTL) using hardware description languages (HDLs) such as VHDL and Verilog knows, deep down in their bones, that RTL is not … Read More → "High-Level Design for Everyone"

Small Change, Big Difference

How Manufacturing Variations Affect Your Power Consumption

by Jim Turley

December 8, 2015

They say football is a game of inches, and League of Legends is a game of millimeters. Well, making microprocessor chips is a game of atoms.

Most of us aren’t very good at statistics, but we do have an intuitive kind of understanding about the law of averages and the law of large numbers. If you have a big truckload of oranges, losing one or two oranges doesn’t make much difference. But if you have only three oranges in your hand, losing one (or gaining … Read More → "Small Change, Big Difference"

A Step Towards Liquid Cooling

Georgia Tech’s Microfluidics Results

by Bryon Moyer

December 7, 2015

So there you are, slowly creeping up the hill behind 12 other vehicles. Even though the speed limit is 55. Tempers are flaring and horns honking.

And why, pray tell, are you poking along instead of cruising along? Well, guess what’s at the head of this little peloton? Of course: chugging along, resplendent in rainbow colors and peace signs, straining at the bit, is a venerable VW bus, manifesting “I think I can, man” (in German, of course).

As hard as the engine is working, it runs the risk of overheating – except that, like all engines, … Read More → "A Step Towards Liquid Cooling"

Living in a Multi-Screen World

Screens Will Cooperate Rather Than Compete for the Users' Attention

by Dick Selwood

December 3, 2015

What is a K or k? If you are in the world of SI units, then k is the magnitude symbol for 10³ (= 1,000). In computing, we are accustomed to K meaning 1024. So when you see 4K for a video standard should you be expecting 4000 or 4096 pixels horizontally? When you visit the cinema, then the 4K projector uses 4096 pixels, but if you are buying a new television badged as 4K then you will get a screen that is only 3840 pixels wide! The new Ultra High Definition (UHD) screens that TV manufacturers want you to buy this shopping season have … Read More → "Living in a Multi-Screen World"

The Back Side of Moore’s Law

Surfing the New Innovation Wave

by Kevin Morris

December 2, 2015

Consolidation, consolidation, consolidation. If you’ve been following the news in the semiconductor market this past year, you’ve seen acquisition after acquisition. There is no doubt that there is a big consolidation underway in the semi space. And consolidation is nothing new. We have watched little semiconductor companies join to become bigger and bigger semiconductor companies for years.

But this time, it’s different.

The last big consolidation was manufacturing driven. Chasing Moore’s Law at the fab level got so expensive that only the largest, best-funded organizations … Read More → "The Back Side of Moore’s Law"

Robots and Horseless Carriages

Self-Driving Cars Get Closer to Human Drivers, but in a Good Way

by Jim Turley

December 1, 2015

“If I get killed here, will my life insurance cough up money?” – A. J. Baime

This is a story about Thanksgiving. Skip ahead if you’ve had enough.

In every science fiction robot movie, there’s always a scene where our hero has to learn to trust the robot. He’s initially skeptical, of course, and probably has been bad-mouthing said robot throughout the first half of the film. But at some critical juncture, usually in a time of peril, our biological protagonist puts his fate in the hands (end effectors?) of his … Read More → "Robots and Horseless Carriages"