Articles – Page 72

April 26, 2021

Physics teaches us that distance is time. Light travels at a finite speed, so looking at a faraway object is, in a sense, looking back in time. Even the nearest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 lightyears away, so the light we see now is 4 years and 3 months old. You can’t look at it now because “now” is relative.

Sitting in the back row of an auditorium, you can hear an audio simulcast or livestream sooner than you’ … Read More → "Time, Ethernet, and White Rabbits"

High Entropy is the Foundation for High Security

by Max Maxfield

April 22, 2021

Perhaps not surprisingly in the light of all the cyber-attacks and data breaches we’ve been seeing recently, the topics of cyber-security, cyber-resiliency, and securing one’s supply chains are at the forefront of our minds.

Several of my own columns have touched these topics in recent months, such as Yay! Finally! A Way to Secure the Supply Chain! and Read More → "High Entropy is the Foundation for High Security"

Wine Wi-Fi Finds Fine Vines

Two Tech Companies Help Wineries Sell “Bottled Poetry”

by Jim Turley

April 21, 2021

Winemaking is an occupation steeped in tradition, to mix my metaphors. Winery websites feature richly sepia-toned photos of rugged Old World types squeezing the soil through their hands, gazing at grape clusters, and extolling their great-great-grandfathers’ foresight in planting head-trained Zinfandel vines with original rootstock in the rich alluvial soil of Napa Valley. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

It’s also a business that seems immune to technology – indeed, that deliberately shuns and avoids it, at least publicly. But there’s some tech in the back room, … Read More → "Wine Wi-Fi Finds Fine Vines"

Xilinx Introduces Kria SoMs

Raising the Level of Integration

by Kevin Morris

April 20, 2021

Integration is the fundamental fuel that drives technical innovation. Each new node of Moore’s Law has allowed us to “Cram More Components” onto our integrated circuits, facilitating greater and greater levels of integration on chunks of silicon. But even in today’s “System on Chip” era, we do not truly have “systems” on a chip.

Sure, we can pack processors, a lot of close peripherals, and some memory onto a single chip, but even our most integrated ICs pose challenges for bringing them into modern systems. The latest memory and data interfaces place heavy demands on … Read More → "Xilinx Introduces Kria SoMs"

Is an Instruction Set an API?

Recent Google v. Oracle Ruling Raises Questions as Well as Answers

by Jim Turley

April 19, 2021

No less an authority than the United States Supreme Court just ruled that a program’s application programming interface can be copied under the doctrine of copyright “fair use.” Google copied thousands of lines of Oracle’s code in order to implement its own version of the Java API without actually licensing the official Java API. The Court ruled that Google didn’t need a license because it’s okay to duplicate the API without … Read More → "Is an Instruction Set an API?"

Predictive Maintenance Evaluation Kit for Smart Buildings

by Max Maxfield

April 15, 2021

One of the myriad problems I face — in addition to (a) being persistently pursued by gaggles of groupies and (b) the fact that all of my groupies are cranky, cantankerous, and curmudgeonly old engineers of the male persuasion — is that of being inundated by barrages of information from companies scattered around the globe.

Being only human (although it pains me to say so), I tend to focus on whomever is jumping up and down and shouting the loudest. As a result, companies who aren’t “pinging” me on a regular … Read More → "Predictive Maintenance Evaluation Kit for Smart Buildings"

Clever Hack Finds Mystery CPU Instructions

Enterprising Programmer Uses x86 Microcode to Reveal Itself

by Jim Turley

April 14, 2021

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a team of doctors and scientists gets miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a human patient. They and their yellow submarine navigate past heart valves, battle corpuscles, and swim in tear ducts. It provides an inside look into biological workings most of us never see.

An enterprising Hungarian engineer, Can Bölük at Verilave, has … Read More → "Clever Hack Finds Mystery CPU Instructions"

The First Emulators of Spring

New Capabilities Address Verification Challenge

by Kevin Morris

April 13, 2021

It’s the season of rebirth. The sun is out. Flowers are in bloom. Birds busily build nests while semiconductor verification teams emerge from their long winter hibernation, ready to tool up for the challenges of the next process generation. Billions of unverified gates give shelter to countless bugs awaiting anxious design teams as they prepare for summer’s tape-outs and struggle to bring new software up on wobbly legs.

Yep, the first emulators and prototyping platforms of spring have arrived, and – failing to be greeted with their own shadows – … Read More → "The First Emulators of Spring"

Parsing Google v. Oracle: What’s It Really Mean?

Long-Running Code Copyright Case Seems Finally Settled

by Jim Turley

April 12, 2021

It’s okay to duplicate an API, even if you have to snarf 11,500 lines of somebody else’s code to do it.

That’s the gist of the ruling from the United States Supreme Court in the long-running case of Google v. Oracle. Left unanswered is the larger question of whether software is even protected by copyright in the first place. But if it is, cloning an API falls under the heading of “fair use.”

It may seem a bit odd to us amateur … Read More → "Parsing Google v. Oracle: What’s It Really Mean?"

ID for the IoT? We Need the IDoT!

by Max Maxfield

April 8, 2021

When most people hear the term “counterfeiting,” their knee-jerk reaction is to think of currency, the counterfeiting of which is as old as the concept of money itself. Around 400 BC, for example, metal coins in Greece were often counterfeited by covering a cheap-and-cheerful material with a thin layer of a more precious metal.

Or take the original American colonies. Throughout northeastern America, Native Americans would employ shell beads known as wampum as a form of currency. White shells came from quahog (a large, rounded edible clam found on the Atlantic coast of North America), while blueish/purplish-black … Read More → "ID for the IoT? We Need the IDoT!"