The word of the year: CHANGE
By Gabe Moretti, Editor
As all of you know, the United States is in the midst of a political campaign that will ultimately decide who will be its next President. The word most often used by all candidates is: Change. Everyone is for change, although everyone defines it differently. It seems a bit strange to me that candidates should have to spend so much energy telling everyone that they will bring change. After all, there is an election, the incumbent is not running, and thus there will be change, even if not desired. Yet, someone has figured out that there cannot be progress without change, and so the word of the year has been identified: Change. EDA is one of the most dynamic industries in existence, and its rapid changes are driven by just as dynamic an industry: electronics design. So it will not surprise you that this month's articles are all about change.
DAC Leadership
In her career, Limor Fix has proven to be an outstanding technical manager. You have to be one in order to achieve her present position at Intel. This year she is using her talents to lead her team as they work to transform the Design Automation Conference to take advantage of the latest communication tools while maintaining the very high level of technical content and the vibrant showcase of EDA products that have made it the uncontested primary conference for our industry. As Peggy Aycinena relates in her profile of this year's DAC Chair, those attending DAC-2008 in Anaheim will see a conference that, while retaining the characteristics that have served the industry well in the past, will offer new approaches and new opportunities to learn and network. In addition, Limor introduces the readers to ways in which DAC is transforming itself from an event to a year-round tool for both academics and practitioners in the electronics design industry.
EDA Startups
Ed Sperling sat down with several EDA leaders who have each started more than one EDA company in their careers so far, and asked them to share their views on the prospects and problems new EDA startups face in the present business climate. The answers, at times quite personal, will be very helpful to those considering a startup, as well as those of us looking for insight into the current state of the EDA industry. Let me know what you think; you can be part of this discussion by writing to me. The Letters to the Editor section is always available.
Speaking of the Letters to the Editor, we are publishing two of them this month. They comment on the articles on analog design in last month's issue. As you can read, analog design is receiving a lot of attention, and we have not yet reached consensus on how to improve tools and methods for that segment of electronics design.
Protecting electronics contents
In his Viewpoint, Craig Rawlings of Kilopass Technology explores one way to improve security in digital storage that has proven to be commercially successful. The issue of Property Rights Protection is a critical problem as distribution of all forms of artistic expressions is relying more and more on electronic means as opposed to mechanical ones.
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There are other forms of storage in addition to that mentioned in the Viewpoint. For example, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) is a method that uses a physical analog structure of the phenomena to store the unclonable secret. References include:
[1] R. Pappu, B. Recht, J. Taylor, N. Gershenfeld. Physical One-Way Functions, Science, vol. 297, pp. 2026-2030, 20 September 2002. [This paper proposed the general idea, for a physical material.]
[2] B. Gassend, D. E. Clarke, M. van Dijk, S. Devadas. Silicon physical random functions. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2002: 148-160. [This paper proposed an implementation in silicon.]
People have used PUFs for securing other applications, e.g., RFID and FPGAs:
[3] J. Guajardo, S. S. Kumar, G. Schrijen and P. Tuyls. FPGA Intrinsic PUFs and Their Use for IP Protection. Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES), 2007: 63-80.
[4] L. Bolotnyy, G. Robins. Physically Unclonable Function-Based Security and Privacy in RFID Systems. IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PERCOM), 2007: 211-220.
Using this type of storage for remote activation/disabling of ICs was published at ICCAD-2007:
[5] Y. Alkabani, F. Koushanfar, M. Potkonjak. Remote activation of ICs for piracy prevention and digital right management. International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), 2007: 674-677.
The other IC enabling/disabling approach, based on secure keys and asymmetric crypto, is appearing in DATE in March:
[6] J. A. Roy, F. Koushanfar, I. L. Markov. EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits. To appear in Proc. Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), 2008.
If you have a Viewpoint to share, feel free to get in touch with me. As Limor stated in the article by Peggy Aycinena, DACeZine is a communication vehicle for the electronics design industry.