As Rick Buskens and I ventured back from eating ice cream on N Craig St street I shared my thesis topic and the simulation challenge it presented. To explore the topic of analog fault modeling I needed to simulate 1000’s of circuits. For every operational op-amp I would be inserting shorts modeled as a 1-ohm…
Category: Their Stories
Creating Your Own Work- 1973 Oil Shock and Silicon for Space
When you’re working for a big company, like Union Carbide, they will have a big project of interest. The management has certain goals they want you to achieve- –very specific business goals. They’ll assign you the engineers you might need. You have a defined budget you have to keep within. You begin work on the…
Becoming an Engineer Who Can Write
Editor’s note: It takes risk to move to a new country where you don’t speak the language. Yet, Hiroshi Morihara comes from a family that had a history of risk taking. Risk taking is essential for innovation. He eventually taught technical writing to engineering students as an adjunct professor. My mother told me in high…
Dealing with Bits Flipped- From the Weak Write Test Mode Saga
In Circuits and Systems I, Prof Emad informed the class that sign matters. A student requesting to receive partial credit on an exam question because she only got the sign wrong would receive no mercy. “What’s the difference between + 5 Volts and – 5 Volts?” Prof Emad pointedly stated, “10 Volts.” Ever since Ben…
The Long Path to 20 Bytes of Firmware
When I began my approach for a By-Pass Lock screen solution, I knew that the USB/PCI Express Bridge chip I was using had the capability to enable DMA attacks. But I wasn’t sure how to configure it properly. In the end 20 Bytes of firmware did it. But getting to the 20 bytes of firmware…
Make it Light
So a while ago I put together a hardware security project. The device I was building was a PCIExpress device to do DMA (Direct Memory Access) attacks on a computer. The idea being you would have a card that you could put in a slot into the computer. Then this card would basically use its…
Three Patents for PLD–That was Good
Let me share my experiences with Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs). Intel had a small group down in Folsom working on this technology. Because of re-orgs, my wife and I moved to Folsom and we lived down for eight years (1988-1994). As part of that team I came up with three patents. And it was just…
Hardware to Bandwidth to Software Flipped Around
So here’s another occasion with a similar scenario where a small kludge solution turns a complicated design into something really easy but it requires a separate perspective on the problem. This is from my work on the CPU debug team at Intel, circa 2007. Engineers in my group were trying to resolve a problem. We…
First Week Impact
My approach to engineering craft has evolved to knowing when the easy solution exists and grabbing that instead of going with a complicated solution. Sometimes that’s a hack or sometimes it’s a different perspective. A newbie’s perspective can often provide that different perspective. Within my first week at Intel I surprisingly contributed immediately to my…
Six Months to Satisfaction- Large Team Frustrations
Q: What’s your most frustrating experiences as an engineer? A: Basically not being listened to. Like most people as an engineer not being listened to ranks up at the top of my frustration. While it’s easy to manage this in a one on one working relationship it becomes much harder in a larger team. Let…