Blog Review: Nov. 3

In a blog for Arm, Matthew Griffin of the 311 Institute warns that cybersecurity is an increasingly pressing problem, with large criminal organizations raking in large sums of money and attacks able to impact a wide range of physical systems. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out Google's video encoder chip and how it helps lower the CPU recycles required by the vast number of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute. Synopsys' Nikhil Amin and Harsha Vardhan explain the basics of UPF, its importance in the power landscape, how to expand low-power signoff with custom mechanisms, and how to approach things like hard RAM and hard macro where the connectivity of low-power control signals is unclear. In a blog for Siemens, EmLogic's Espen Tallaksen argues that many FPGAs and ASICs could be designed more efficiently and with fewer bug iterations at all levels if more attention is paid to creating a good design architecture from the outset. Coventor's Timothy Yang uses process modeling to identify an ALD thickness that minimizes the type of pattern offset and device non-uniformity that can be caused by self-aligned quadruple patterning.