The Kynix Blog - IC Chips

A new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip has been developed that is virtually impossible to hack.If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn't steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and high-tech burglars couldn't swipe expensive goods from a warehouse and replace them with dummy tags.Texas Instruments has built several prototypes of the new chip, to the researchers' specifications, and in experiments the chips have behaved as expected. The researchers presented their research this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.According to Chiraag Juvekar, a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT and first author on the new paper, the chip is designed to prevent so-called side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks analyze patterns of memory access or fluctuations in power usage when a device is performing a cryptographic operation, in order to extract its cryptographic key."The idea in a side-channel attack is that a given execution of the cryptographic algorithm only leaks a slight amount of information," Juvekar says. "So you need to execute the cryptographic algorithm with the same secret many, many times to get enough leakage to extract a complete secret."One way to thwart side-channel attacks is to regularly change secret keys. In that case, the RFID chip would run a random-number generator that would spit out a new secret key after each transaction. A central server would run the same generator, and every time an RFID scanner queried the tag, it would relay the results to the server, to see if the current key was valid.BlackoutSuch a system would still, however, be vulnerable to a "power glitch" attack, in which the RFID chip's power would be repeatedly cut right before it changed its secret key. An attacker could then run the same side-channel attack thousands of times, with the same key. Power-glitch attacks have been used to circumvent limits on the number of incorrect password entries in password-protected devices, but RFID tags are particularly vulnerable to them, since they're charged by tag readers and have no onboard power supplies.Two design innovations allow the MIT researchers' chip to thwart power-glitch attacks: One is an on-chip power supply whose connection to the chip circuitry would be virtually impossible to cut, and the other is a set of "nonvolatile" memory cells that can store whatever data the chip is working on when it begins to lose power.For both of these features, the researchers—Juvekar; Anantha Chandrakasan, who is Juvekar's advisor and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Hyung-Min Lee, who was a postdoc in Chandrakasan's group when the work was done and is now at IBM; and TI's Joyce Kwong, who did her master's degree and PhD with Chandrakasan—use a special type of material known as a ferroelectric crystals.As a crystal, a ferroelectric material consists of molecules arranged into a regular three-dimensional lattice. In every cell of the lattice, positive and negative charges naturally separate, producing electrical polarization. The application of an electric field, however, can align the cells' polarization in either of two directions, which can represent the two possible values of a bit of information.When the electric field is removed, the cells maintain their polarization. Texas Instruments and other chip manufacturers have been using ferroelectric materials to produce nonvolatile memory, or computer memory that retains data when it's powered off.Complementary capacitorsA ferroelectric crystal can also be thought of as a capacitor, an electrical component that separates charges and is characterized by the voltage between its negative and positive poles. Texas Instruments' manufacturing process can produce ferroelectric cells with either of two voltages: 1.5 volts or 3.3 volts.The researchers' new chip uses a bank of 3.3-volt capacitors as an on-chip energy source. But it also features 571 1.5-volt cells that are discretely integrated into the chip's circuitry. When the chip's power source—the external scanner—is removed, the chip taps the 3.3-volt capacitors and completes as many operations as it can, then stores the data it's working on in the 1.5-volt cells.When power returns, before doing anything else the chip recharges the 3.3-volt capacitors, so that if it's interrupted again, it will have enough power to store data. Then it resumes its previous computation. If that computation was an update of the secret key, it will complete the update before responding to a query from the scanner. Power-glitch attacks won't work.Because the chip has to charge capacitors and complete computations every time it powers on, it's somewhat slower than conventional RFID chips. But in tests, the researchers found that they could get readouts from their chips at a rate of 30 per second, which should be more than fast enough for most RFID applications."In the age of ubiquitous connectivity, security is one of the paramount challenges we face," says Ahmad Bahai, chief technology officer at Texas Instruments. "Because of this, Texas Instruments sponsored the authentication tag research at MIT that is being presented at ISSCC. We believe this research is an important step toward the goal of a robust, low-cost, low-power authentication protocol for the industrial Internet."   

IBM is telling the world about something quite ambitious: TrueNorth's neurons could revolutionize system architecture. Dharmendra S. Modha, IBM Fellow, has given us the overview of what TrueNorth is all about in his report in IBM Research.Six years ago, he said, IBM and university partners began their effort to build a brain-inspired computer.Phase 0 turned into Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3— from neuroscience to super computing to a new architecture, to a new programming language to algorithms, applications, and now, new chip, which is TrueNorth.He offered some numbers, which are bit daunting for those not accustomed to the "neuromorphic" world of computer research.Modha said, "we have shrunk the neurosynaptic core by 15-fold in area and 100-fold in power, and have tiled 4,096 cores via an on- IC chip network to create TrueNorth—with one million neurons and 256 million synapses."Cade Metz, Wired senior staff writer, went beyond the numbers to describe on Monday what he saw. "Dharmendra Modha walks me to the front of the room so I can see it up close. About the size of a bathroom medicine cabinet, it rests on a table against the wall, and thanks to the translucent plastic on the outside, I can see the computer chips and the circuit boards and the multi-colored lights on the inside. It looks like a prop from a '70s sci-fi movie, but Modha describes it differently. 'You're looking at a small rodent,' he says. He means the brain of a small rodent—or, at least, the digital equivalent."(The machine at the front of the room is really 48 separate machines, each built around its own TrueNorth processors, Metz wrote.)Not surprisingly, several websites took to the rodent comparison to report that IBM had come up with a "rat brain"-like chip that might power the phones of tomorrow.Modha, meanwhile, spelled out the applications that might result. "The architecture can solve a wide class of problems from vision, audition, and multi-sensory fusion."Making smartphones, as Wired put it, "hyper-smart"? That would be one effect. Modha said, "On one hand, with portable devices: think smart phones, sensor networks, self-driving automobiles, robots, public safety, medical imaging, real-time video analysis, signal processing, olfactory detection, and digital pathology. On the other hand, with synaptic supercomputers: —think multimedia processing on the cloud."Reporter Mike Murphy in Quartz on Tuesday talked about the technology itself which is turning the corner: "While current chips are excellent at analyzing information in sequential order, the new 'neuromorphic' types of chips Modha's team are working on are better suited to finding patterns in information—like the right side of the brain."Traditional chips follow instructions, whereas IBM's new chip manages 'spikes'—rather like spikes in electrical activity in an organic brain," Murphy said.TrueNorth, with all its comparisons, is not a brain but it is a step toward a digital brain. "Let's be clear: we have not built the brain, or any brain," said Modha in the IBM Research report. "We have built a computer that is inspired by the brain. The inputs to and outputs of this computer are spikes. Functionally, it transforms a spatio-temporal stream of input spikes into a spatio-temporal stream of output spikes."Collaboration with Samsung was critical in gaining access to their advanced 28nm foundry process, he said. This allowed balancing the low active power of the architecture with matching low power of the underlying silicon technology.He added, "I am immensely grateful to our 200+ collaborators since 2008—spanning eight IBM labs and fabs, five universities, one start-up, and two Department of Energy laboratories. Finally, DARPA's mandate, metrics, and investment were absolutely vital." 

Silicon Valley startup Flex Logix Technologies has announced that it is now in the business of selling newly developed programmable chip technology to hardware makers—they believe they have found a new way to produce field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that is both cheaper and more amendable to being added to existing systems.For many years hardware and software have held on to a rigid standard—hardware was designed in a very generic way then set firm—the IC chips were given the ability to do certain things, and that was it. Software was then created to run on the platform that had been developed. But this old-school design strategy has one serious flaw—hardware updates take too long and cost too much money. Into this void steps Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix—he claims that engineers with his company have come up with a new and better way to create FPGAs, paving the way for their use in a variety of specialized applications. FPGAs are identical in most respects to regular old microprocessors, at least in how they function—the difference is that they can be programmed. The reason that all of the microprocessors in our phones, computers, etc. aren't FPGAs is because they cost more to make and consume more energy. Tate claims that his engineers have figured out a way to put all the programmable logic on the same chip, something that other big-name makers have not been able to do. That makes things easier for chip designers and for those on the manufacturing end, making the new chips a viable option for certain applications.Tate says that communications gear is one of the best candidates for the new chip design—standards, needs and new advances mean they could benefit greatly from chips that could be updated when needed, instead of going back to the design table every round. Another area where the chips could prove useful is large data centers—just last year Microsoft announced that it had put FPGAs into its Bing search system and saw a speed-up of 95 percent.Instead of making the chips, Flex Logix plans to license its technology to others in the field or directly to those already making the old-fashioned kind. As a sign of the company's optimism, Tate recently told the media that he expects to see products based on the new technology hitting the market as early as next year. 

Freescale Semiconductor is introducing one of the smallest ARM based Microcontroller Units (MCUs) ever, a chip that is roughly the size of a dimple on a golf ball—the Kinetis KL03. Because of its extremely small size, the company is positioning the MCU as an important step towards the development of the concept known as "The Internet of Things."ARM processors are a group of reduced instruction set processors based on the RISC architecture. As they have evolved, they have come to be used primarily as processors for embedded applications—they do one kind of thing really well, rather than a lot of things reasonably well. One such sub-group of ARM processors are known as Microcontroller Units—very small processors that are intended for a single type of application, such as monitoring an electrical signal, blood pressure or the amount of light in a room. They advantage of having a group type is that it allows for compatibility between similar devices and peripherals, and portability of code. As MCUs have grown smaller, they have become an integral part of the The Internet of Things.The Internet of Things, is an idea that doesn't yet have a formal designation—like the Internet, people define it differently depending on their own perspective. In general, it's a way of describing a world where everyday life is connected to the Internet—where physical objects are seamlessly connected to human activity and the information network. In such a world people and tiny devices will coexist to such an extent they become intertwined—everyone will be connected to everyone and everything else—all the time.The new MCU developed by Freescale is 15 percent smaller than anything the company has made before, yet is just as powerful. Its 32 bit architecture chip measures a mere 1.6 x 2 millimeters—small enough to be embedded in wearable devices (or swallowed as part of a biometric sensor). Onboard it has 32KB flash memory, 8K ROM and 2K RAM. It also has a boot loader and analog comparator and power management software for reducing battery needs. In short, it has everything a device maker might need to create devices that are so small, in many cases, people won't be aware of their presence.Whether such a processor proves to be a harbinger of The Internet of Things remains to be seen. What is likely certain, however, is that MCUs such as the KL03 will very soon be embedded in a whole new world of tiny devices, offering unprecedented capabilities. 

When a global leader in providing equipment, services and software used for manufacturing semiconductors makes an announcement, industry players sit up and listen, as the technologies are going to impact market activity in devices such as smartphones, flat screen TVs and solar panels. Tuesday's announcement from Applied Materials was big. The Santa Clara, California based equipment supplier announced the launch of its Endura Volta CVD Cobalt chip making machine. This is the only tool capable of encapsulating copper interconnects in logic chips beyond the 28nm node by depositing precise, thin cobalt films, said the company. The news is in the word "cobalt." The company sees cobalt as a superior metal encapsulation film. "Applied Materials announced that the Endura Volta CVD Cobalt system represents the first material change in more than 15 years of copper barrier/seed (CuBS) development, "a new materials era" for extending copper interconnect technology. It is not only the first material change but an important change in materials for microchip wiring. Actually, the news is in the word "cobalt" and in the word "wiring." The reliability and performance of the wiring that connects the billions of transistors in a chip is critical to achieve high yields for device manufacturers. "As wire dimensions shrink to keep pace with Moore's Law, interconnects are more prone to killer voids and electromigration failures," said Dr. Randhir Thakur, executive vice president and general manager of the Silicon Systems Group at Applied Materials.Writing in the Applied Materials blog, Kavita Shah, global product manager, commented on the announcement: With today's dimensions, she said, "it becomes exceptionally difficult to achieve perfect copper fill in 100% of the trenches and vias that make up the circuitry of a device. Other performance-degrading effects, such as electro-migration, which can cause movement of copper that leaves voids in the wiring, also become significantly more problematic. The smallest defect can kill a device; interconnect performance and reliability begin to suffer under these conditions."The announcement said that complete envelopment of copper lines with cobalt creates an engineered interface that demonstrates over 80x improvement in device reliability.Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Don Clark said the company has announced a way "to head off defects that are becoming a stumbling block as manufacturers keep shrinking the size of transistors that act as tiny switches on chips." Customers who want to make the shift will buy the production machine to apply the cobalt, using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD).According to the article, Sundar Ramamurthy, Applied's vice president and general manager of metal deposition products. said 75 of the CVD chambers for processing individual wafers are already in customer hands for testing purposes. Clark said, "The machines aren't likely to be introduced in large volumes "until manufacturers are ready for their next process change to create smaller transistors."    

Vendors and consumers can agree: connectivity matters, and not just poetically speaking, or in the context of social networking. As for many, staying digitally connected is quite real a requirement and has become a lifeline of its own, in terms of ability to do work and in terms of access to vital information. San Diego-based Ethertronics is a business that provides connectivity via antenna and RF systems solutions. On Tuesday the company announced news of an active steering IC, with embedded processor for Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) applications. This is the EC482, with potential impact on cable and satellite markets. The company said its team can integrate EC482 products, including access points, set-top boxes, WiFi clients, WiFi extenders, wearables and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices.Translating what this means, Gigaom's senior writer Kevin Fitchard, who covers mobile broadband, carriers and wireless technologies, said that the new chip from Ethertronics "will bring its active steering algorithms to Wi-Fi antennas, increasing their range and boosting their throughput in less than optimal conditions." Ethertronics Chief Scientist Jeff Shamblin told Firchard that with the new version of the EtherChip, "active steering helps signals navigate multiple walls and ceilings which often separate a router from a Wi-Fi device."Quoted in RCR Wireless News, Shamblin, referring to the Active Steering technology, said, "Now that we can dynamically control the radiation pattern, not only can we improve the communication link you're trying to establish, we can start to null out interfering sources, so it brings interference mitigation."The EE Times explained that the company was leveraging its experience developing embedded antennas to create a line of dedicated beamforming chips. "Algorithms on EC482's processor monitor RF link performance on a wireless device to generate up to four radiation patterns and select the optimal antenna for the best performance," wrote Jessica Lipsky, associate editor. "The company's EtherChip EC482 aims to improve RF signal for Wi-Fi and 5 GHz backend applications."The company said the EtherChip EC482 had "superior single- and multi-antenna performance at frequencies even beyond the WiFi high-band." The operating frequency range is 100 MHz to 7000 MHz. The small footprint is just 3.0 x 3.0 x 0.75 mm3 in a QFN 24-pin package. Very low power consumption is required for operation, said the news release, which makes the EC482 suitable for even battery-operated systems.Ethertronics will show its new EtherChip EC482 and "Active Steering" solutions during Mobile World Congress next month in Barcelona.Laurent Disclos, Ethertronics CEO, shared his predictions in January for the new year in RCR Wireless News. "Regardless of the application – streaming a favorite show via a 5 GHz set-top box, keeping tabs on one's health via a wearable, or simply placing a voice call via a smartphone – the antenna is the only RF sensor in a wireless device, and those of us working to make that heartbeat stronger will have an exciting year in 2015, and beyond."