Collaborate Disseminate
Guaranteeing that computer chips, that can consist of billions of interconnected transistors, are manufactured without defects is a challenge. But how to determine if a chip is compromised? Now a technique co-developed by researchers at the Paul Schere… Continue reading New method validates the integrity of computer chips using x-rays
We get it, press releases are full of hyperbole. Cerebras recently announced they’ve built the largest chip ever. The chip has 400,000 cores and contains 1.2 trillion transistors on a die over 46,000 square mm in area. That’s roughly the same as a square about 8.5 inches on each side. …read more
Continue reading Largest Chip Ever Holds 1.2 Trillion Transistors
The human brain is still a far more powerful computer than anything it itself has created so far. It’s no wonder then that engineers have recently focused on trying to emulate the structure of the brain with artificial synapses. Now, a team o… Continue reading Brain-mimicking chip uses different-colored light to learn and forget
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are, so to say, a computer manufacturer’s “Lego bricks”: electronic components that can be employed in a more flexible way than other computer chips. Even large data centers that are dedicated to… Continue reading Scientists uncover vulnerability in FPGAs, affecting cloud services and IoT
There can be few of us who haven’t gazed with fascination upon the work of IC decappers, whether they are showing us classic devices from the early years of mass semiconductor manufacture, or reverse-engineering the latest and greatest. But so often their work appears to require some hardcore scientific equipment …read more
A new computer processor architecture that could usher in a future where computers proactively defend against threats, rendering the current electronic security model of bugs and patches obsolete, has been developed at the University of Michigan. Calle… Continue reading Unhackable? New chip makes the computer an unsolvable puzzle
A vulnerability in Qualcomm chips could be exploited by attackers to retrieve encryption keys and sensitive information from the chipsets’ secure execution environment, NCC Group researchers have found. About CVE-2018-11976 The security of Truste… Continue reading Qualcomm chips leak crypto data from secure execution environment
In early 2018, cybersecurity researchers discovered two security flaws they said were present in almost every high-end processor made and used by major companies. UPEC product development team (l to r): Mo Fadiheh, Wolfgang Kunz, Dominik Stoffel. Known… Continue reading Algorithms can now find bugs in computer chips before they are made
Not every computer is a performance gaming rig. Some of us need cheap laptops and tablets for simple Internet browsing or word processing, and we don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars just for that. With a cheaper price tag comes cheaper hardware, though, such as the eMMC standard which allows flash memory to be used in a more cost-advantageous way than SSDs. For a look at some the finer points of eMMC chips, we’ll turn to [Jason]’s latest project.
[Jason] had a few damaged eMMC storage chips and wanted to try to repair them. The most common failure …read more
A vulnerability in the firmware of a Wi-Fi chipset that is widely used in laptops, streaming, gaming and a variety of “smart” devices can be exploited to compromise them without user interaction. The research and the discovered flaws The di… Continue reading Bug in widespread Wi-Fi chipset firmware can lead to zero-click code execution