Glossary
Key Terms
Agile SDLC methodology is based on collaborative decision making between requirements and solutions teams, and a cyclical, iterative progression of producing working software. Work is done in regularly iterated cycles, known as sprints, that usually last two to four weeks. In Agile, you often don’t design for needs that could come up in the future, even if they seem obvious. This is a point where development teams and security teams tend to struggle. Security teams aim to anticipate attacks, attackers, and risks. As needs emerge and are refined over time, security requirements can emerge that weren’t anticipated at the beginning of the process. This is normal and natural in Agile, but it can be disorienting to security people who aren’t able to secure against various likely attacks. A key takeaway from a security perspective is that Agile is all about the sprint. If a security requirement isn’t in the backlog, it won’t be scheduled for delivery in a sprint. If it isn’t scheduled in a sprint, it won’t get done. When security needs are articulated in the backlog, they’re prioritized alongside everything else.
An AI accelerator is a high-performance parallel computation machine that is specifically designed for the efficient processing of AI workloads like neural networks.Traditionally, in software design, computer scientists focused on developing algorithmic approaches that matched specific problems and implemented them in a high-level procedural language. To take advantage of available hardware, some algorithms could be threaded; however, massive parallelism was difficult to achieve because of the implications of Amdahl’s Law.
AI-driven chip design involves the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning in the tool flow to design, verify, and test semiconductor devices. For example, the solution space for finding the optimal power, performance, and area (PPA) for chips is quite large. There is a substantial number of input parameters that can be varied and lead to different results. Essentially, it is not humanly possible to explore all these combinations to find the best results in a given timeframe, which leaves some performance on the table. AI can come up with the right set of parameters that delivers the highest ROI in a big solution space in the fastest possible time. In other words, better (and faster) quality of results than otherwise possible. By handling repetitive tasks in the chip development cycle, AI frees engineers to focus more of their time on enhancing chip quality and differentiation. For instance, tasks like design space exploration, verification coverage and regression analytics, and test program generation—each of which can be massive in scope and scale—can be managed quickly and efficiently by AI.
Whether your application is security, edge computing, high-performance data centers, mobile, or any other advanced design, today’s semiconductors are smarter, faster, and more sophisticated than ever. Often built with multi-die components, they are comprised of distinct technologies optimized for specific functions through a web of sophisticated interconnects in a single package.
Analog design in the context of integrated circuit (IC) design is a discipline that focuses on the creation of circuits that operate in and are optimized for continuous time-domain behavior.Typical objectives of analog design include:
API security testing entails testing the endpoints of an application program interface (API) for security, and reliability, to ensure that it complies with an organization’s best practices.
Battery management system (BMS) is technology dedicated to the oversight of a battery pack, which is an assembly of battery cells, electrically organized in a row x column matrix configuration to enable delivery of targeted range of voltage and current for a duration of time against expected load scenarios.
Big data analytics is the process of analyzing large amounts of collected data to draw conclusions useful for technical or business purposes. This is a transformative technology that is being broadly adopted for many applications, including electronic design automation (EDA).
BSDF stands for Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function, which is a mathematical function that characterizes how light is scattered from a surface.
It is mathematically defined by the following formula:
Formula BSDF | Synopsys
Where:
L is the luminance on the sample surface at the observer direction
E is the illuminance on the sample surface from the source direction
Λ is the wavelength
It is mathematically defined by the following formula: In practice, this phenomenon is usually split into reflected and transmitted components, which are then treated separately as BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) and BTDF (Bidirectional Transmittance Distribution Function).
Development teams use CI software tools to automate parts of the application build and to create a document trail of the development process. There are several things to keep in mind when choosing the right CI tool for your projects. When selecting a CI software solution, consider whether it should be on-premises or hosted, whether it supports Docker, and whether the user interface (UI) is intuitive and easy to use.
Circuit simulation is a process in which a model of an electronic circuit is created and analyzed using various software algorithms, which predict and verify the behavior and performance of the circuit. Since fabrication of electronic circuits, especially integrated circuits (ICs), is expensive and time-consuming, it is faster and more cost-effective to verify the behavior and performance of the circuit using a circuit simulator before fabrication.
Clickjacking is an attack that fools users into thinking they are clicking on one thing when they are actually clicking on another. Its other name, user interface (UI) redressing, better describes what is going on. Users think they are using a web page’s normal UI, but in fact there is a hidden UI in control; in other words, the UI has been redressed. When users click something they think is safe, the hidden UI performs a different action.