Eric Raymond, prominent voice in the open-source movement and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, stated it well: “Any security software design that doesn’t assume the enemy possesses the source code is already untrustworthy.” Decades earlier, Claude Shannon was even more succinct: “The enemy knows the system.” Security experts call this Kerckhoffs’ Principle, in honor of a 19th century mathematician who first formulated it for cryptosystems. The underlying assumption is that any security-critical flaw will be found and exploited sooner or later, so at best, secrecy buys you only some delay.</ … Read More → "Obscurity and the Illusion of Security"

I’m always suspicious when a PowerPoint slide says we’re at a turning point in history. It strikes me as egotistical to think that today is somehow qualitatively different from yesterday. Sure, chips always get faster and software always gets more complex – how is that an inflection point? You’re just trying to sell me something, aren’t you?

The exception to this self-imposed rule is multicore microprocessors. I really do think that multicore is a game-changer. It makes hardware design different, it makes software design different, it makes EDA and … Read More → "What Do We Do About Multicore?"

Picture this architecture – a high speed application processor doing control coupled to an accelerator comprised of a mass of processing elements ready to power-parallelize compute-intensive components of a complex problem. Sound familiar? Supercomputers have taken advantage of acceleration using schemes like this for a while. People using FPGAs for co-processors do it all the time.  

Now, picture a new chip with 1.4 billion transistors, an array of 240 cores, and a processing throughput equivalent to about 1 TeraFLOPS.  Many readers of this publication would probably guess … Read More → "A Passel of Processors"