![]() ![]() Some vendors offer access to high-specification FPGAs as a pay-as-you-use service, opening a product that previously would have had very high upfront costs, to a much wider market. Offering something ‘as a service’ has become de rigueur in the world of cloud computing, and FPGAs are no exception here. Lattice’s implementation isn’t open source but claims to have ‘demonstrated state machine-based algorithms that offer Nanosecond response time in detecting security breaches into the SPI memory.’ …as a service (aaS) ![]() Intel’s open-source implementation, targeted at their MAX10 device performs functions including validating board management controller (BMC) and platform controller hub (PCH) firmware, as well as monitoring the boot flows of these critical components to ensure they complete in a timely fashion. These guidelines provide a series of technical recommendations that go beyond the traditional definition of ‘root of trust’ to ensure that the lower-level components of a computer system (typically, the hardware and firmware components) can protect, detect and recover from attempts to make unauthorized changes to the systems. Platform Firmware Resiliencyīoth Intel and Lattice are using FPGAs to underpin their implementations of NIST’s Platform Firmware Resiliency Guidelines (SP800-193). Recent FPGA security vulnerabilities and researchįirst, let’s consider some of the more recent applications of FPGAs that we have observed.How the technology landscape has changed.In this blog post we will consider the following themes: It is possible in the near future that we will see further migration to FPGAs as the microchip supply shortage begins to bite, with some advocating FPGAs as a logical solution to the issue of chip shortages, however the shortage of substrates will still pose a problem for FPGA manufacturers. We’ve also noted that FPGAs help to faciliate the development of significant open-source hardware projects such as RISC-V and OpenTitan. In recent years, we have noticed a trend amongst our clients using FPGAs in areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT), accelerated cloud services, machine learning and platform firmware resilience. The increased availability of low-cost development boards, open-source hardware and tooling, as well as the ability to rent a high specification FPGA in the cloud has considerably lowered the entry costs. ![]() ![]() However, since then the use of FPGAs has expanded. “ The most common uses of FPGAs are areas within automotive, medical, factory equipment and defence equipment that required rapid concurrent processing.” Our previous research publication on FPGAs noted: In terms of flexibility, they fall somewhere between ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) which have a high engineering cost and cannot be modified once produced, and software running on a microprocessor which can be rapidly developed on the fly. They can be configured at startup, or at runtime (using a technique called ‘partial reconfiguration’). They are typically paired with a separate traditional microprocessor (or as part of a combined system-on-chip (SoC)) but can operate standalone as well. For the uninitiated, an FPGA is a field-programmable array of logic that is typically used to perform or accelerate some specific function (or functions) within a computer system.
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