Since 2018, an almost endless series of attacks broadly known as Spectre has kept Intel and AMD scrambling to develop defenses to mitigate vulnerabilities that allow malware to pluck passwords and other sensitive information directly out of silicon. Now, researchers say they’ve devised a new attack that breaks most—if not all—of those  on-chip defenses. Spectre got its name for […]

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New Zealand is testing wireless power transmission, first mentioned by Nickolas Tesla. The startup company Emrod has developed a wireless transmission methodology: (1) Collimated RF waves using advanced microwave dish technology. (2) Recognizing birds, or humans might intersect the microwave. (3) Utilizing a recantenna, receiving antenna to convert microwaves back to power. Item (2) would […]

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Engineers love to optimize their designs, but that implies that there are models and stimulus to automate the process.  Process engineers have TCAD tools, circuit designers have SPICE for circuit simulation, logic designers have gate-level simulators, RTL designers use logic simulation, but what is there for the system architects of a processor or SoC design? […]

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The development of caches and caching is one of the most significant events in the history of computing. Virtually every modern CPU core from ultra-low power chips like the ARM Cortex-A5 to the highest-end Intel Core i9 use caches. Even higher-end microcontrollers often have small caches or offer them as options — the performance benefits are too large to ignore, even […]

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Architecture exploration, power and performance analysis early in the design flow are mandatory in modern SoC design flow due to complex multi-threaded applications and multi-core processing requirements. Instruction Set Simulator or ISS of a selected processor plays a very important role. However, Current Instruction Set Simulators (ISS) and platform modelers have detailed functional execution, tuned […]

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