Where Industry and Security Intersect
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OPEN SESSION:
1. The ISTAC meeting opened with thanks to Marion McCord for hosting our eighth annual meeting at SPAWAR. The chairman led introductions and solicitation of comments from the public.
2. Mark Staskauskas of Qualcomm made a presentation on the Open Mobile Alliance Digital Rights Management standard v2.0 (OMA DRM v2.0). The essence of DRM is to provide a means for content owners to capture the commercial value of that content. But DRM poses a unique threat model because it must protect against attack by customers seeking to gain access beyond the authorization that they have purchased. The concept of OMA DRM is to separate Rights and Content: thus, the customer is provided with an encrypted Content object and a Rights object that contains the content encryption key and rules for using that content. Currently, the OMA standard support end-user decryption, but there is some consideration of extending the standard to support end-user “encrypt-and-transmit”; it was generally recognized in the following discussions that such “encrypt-and-transmit” capability would be of concern from an export control standpoint.
3. John O’Boyle of QPSemi made a presentation illustrating the myriad differences between military and commercial requirements for integrated circuits. There are numerous specifications and requirements documents that can apply to military-grade ICs, driven by the demands for the highest reliability and long product lifetimes. Major differences between military and commercial are that military ICs undergo 100% acceptance testing, whereas commercial grade are accepted based on process control measurement and statistics. Military applications typically demand hermetic packages whereas commercial applications are satisfied with plastic packages. Another significant factor for military ICs is that volumes, even for comparatively large military projects, are nevertheless extremely small compared to commercial (non-military) demand. This means that it is often economically infeasible to make military-spec ICs, which often forces military system designers to use COTS ICs instead. One disturbing trend noted by John is the emergence of counterfeit parts from Asia.
4. Phil Hester of AMD presented the AMD microprocessor roadmap. He echoed comments made by John O'Boytle about the economic demands which drive the operation of any modern-day chip fab. Key points were: 1) AMD's process technology is on track to deliver 65nm this year and 45mm by 2008; 2) there will be an increasing trend to parallel processing, due to power limitations; 3) whenever silicon is added to a chip (i.e., when the chip is made large), the cost is increased to all purchasers, regardless of whether or not a specific purchases wants or needs the added feature. Thus specially-optimized hardware is only provided when economical to do so. Otherwise, AMD will often seek to add new instructions, instead of more silicon, to provide additional capability. Phil noted that the longstanding relationship between clock rate and performance will break down as a result of increased parallelism. Dual-core designs will lead to quad-core designs and interconnect ports on microprocessor chips will permit even larger "glueless SMP" configurations of as much as 32-chips.
5. Jason Chadora and John Noble of Agilent made a presentation describing the technical aspects of the transition from analog to digital signal synthesis, and the export control implications thereof. This presentation described analog and digital (arbitrary waveform generators and direct digital synthesis) instruments and also explained that the industry trend is to combine these with upconversion capability in a connected solution. With regard to export control, they made the point that 3A2d3, which refers only to frequency switching time, makes sense for analog signal synthesis (where a 1msec. switching time in a PLL-based design is substantial), but makes little sense for digital signal synthesis (where DSP and D/A converter performance may well permit switching times better than 1 usec.). Rather, for digital signal synthesis, they propose controls based on frequency switching time and bandwidth within which the switching can occur, both as functions of carrier frequency.
6. Phil Kuekes of HP Labs provides some thoughts on nanotechnology, its history and development, and possible export control implications thereof. Consistent with previous speakers on this topic (see Don Kania, April 27-28, 2005; see also Tom Theis, July 27-28, 2005), Phil noted that nanotechnology is still very much in the research phase and that it will be many years before products based on nanotechnology are in common usage. The ITRS looks towards nanotechnology in 2020 to solve scaling issues in Silicon-based semiconductors. He noted that GM is one of the largest nanotech customers in their use of exotic materials in some of their SUV runningboards. He envisioned promising applications in biological sensors and solar panels. As an approach towards export control, Phil suggested that it might be worthwhile to consider the equipment used in nanotechnology rather than the raw materials.
7. Hoa Nguyen of SPAWAR made a presentation on robotic and unmanned systems that are being developed at SPAWAR. His organization works as an engineering middle-man between a number of university research labs and the end-users in various military theaters. It was gratifying to learn that SPAWAR can respond quickly to requests from warfighters in the field to develop and deploy robots. Among the 2000 robots deployed in Iraq, a substantial number assist with handling/dismantling of Improvised Explosive Devices. Much of their work focuses on the need to provide robots with the appropriate level of built-in intelligence and autonomy, and they are pursuing a common operator's console to minimize the training and operational differences among various robotic platforms. Where needed, they also add communications relay capability for specialized situations. Hoa noted that today's robots are usually limited by sensors and battery life.
8. Sylvia Zachary of CUBIC made a presentation on the use of FPGAs in defense systems. She noted that in roughly the 20 years since FPGAs because widely available they have experienced two orders of magnitude increase in gate count and one order of magnitude improvement in clock frequency. Defense systems employ FPGAs in rapid prototyping and in production hardware (often for "glue logic"). A particularly interesting and important use is lifetime extension of DoD systems by using mil-spec FPGAs to replace digital logic that has become obsolete and otherwise unavailable.
The meeting was then adjourned.