Discovering PERL

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…

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…

Don’t Fail Good Cells: Part of the Weak Write Test Mode Saga

Doug, the P54CS memory design manager, stated numerous times to not fail a good cell. My mantra during the design of the very first weak write test mode circuit became “thou shalt not fail a good cell.” To address this requirement, the boundaries between a good and bad cell needed to be determined. Given the…