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Defence Computing Standardization

Standard Computing systems for Defense Applications Introduction With the advent of Indian CPU designs, it is now possible to define standard SoCs for a wide range of defense applications, leading to lower acquisition costs due to standardization and having designs tailored for defense applications. 4 standard configurations, D1, D2, D3 and D4 will cater to more than 75% of CPUs used in the strategic sector. D1-D4 will be class standard specs and variants can be derived from them for specialized applications while still keeping the base class design intact. This allows custom designs to be realized quickly and with lower cost compared to a full custom design that cannot leverage existing designs. It is also necessary that the computing systems and form factors also be standardized so that standard LRUs can be used across various systems. These will broadly fall into two categories Single board computers Backplane based systems The cabling standards between systems also has to be stand...
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The myth of Chinese Mobile Phone Supply Chain

So lots of folks want to dump Chinese phones for a variety of reasons, I am not getting into the validity of the reasons. But I do advise the  Indian security establishment occasionally, so my cognitive biases are clear ! Someone who does not have an  in-depth knowledge of a mobile phone supply chain should not really comment on this issue. I am not being arrogant here, it is just that it is a complex issue and while anyone can understand the intricacies of the supply-chain, you need to put in the effort to know the subject. I have been designing and setting up mobile phone supply chains for about 2 decades now, so have been around the block. India was actually designing high end mobile phones (by 2002) before the Chinese, a fact that is not common knowledge. So it is not as if the supply chain knowledge does not exist here. On to the present  ... 1. The core semicon part of the phone - Processors, DRAM, NAND, SPI Flash, Camera Sensor, Radio, Power. Not aware of ...

Telecom Travails

 Telecom Travails There are few times in my life when I am at a loss for words and folks who know me will attest to the fact that those moments are exceedingly rare ! Talking about the state of the Indian Telecom industry is one such situation. But writing a blog requires words to be put on paper, so here goes .... To say that the industry is in a mess is to state the obvious. If as a scientist I were to apply the principle of Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is  that Telco  execs  have strong suicidal tendencies and the state of the companies they run can be said to validate the thesis. But a lot of them are good friends of mine and are intelligent, capable and dedicated people. So while the thesis is not a bad one, evidence suggests the cause lies elsewhere ! As with all human  tragedies, the causes are manifold and as is  always the the case, the principal actors had the noblest of intentions. But you know what they say about the road to he...

The Myth of Patent Driven Innovation

This is a minor variant of my article that appeared in The  Hindu on the 8th of April. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/innovation-needs-no-patent-protection/article8447592.ece ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most of the  public objections to the new Computer Related Invention (CRI) guidelines issued by the patent office, clarifying that only software involving novel hardware is patentable, have come primarily from two groups. The first is a small  subset of the legal fraternity , whose primary concern seems to the potential reduction in patent litigation (no patents, no patent litigation). The larger legal community does not seem to share these views. It is puzzling that the legal community is more concerned about innovation in the computer industry than engineers in the industry ! The other group comprises of  MNCs selling proprietary software products and perplexed by the f...

SSD taxonomy

The world  of SSD drives is fast evolving. What started as a opaque replacement of rotating rust in a SATA drive with flash  soon became slightly less opaque with addition of features like TRIM and we move have NVMe drives which dump HDD related semantics and offer significantly more performance. But the world of SSDs is just beginning to evolve and efforts like our own Lightstor effort ( www.lightstor.org , www.bitbucket.org/casl ) indicate the myriad possibilities in the world of SSDs. While all drives get dumped under the rubric of SSDs, it is probably time to have some semi-formal taxonomy for the various types of drives. So I propose the following (very unimaginative but functional) naming convention. I am also assuming the SATA interfaces are irrelevant going forward and hence do not have to be dealt with, teh assumption being that flash and its successors (SCM, NVRAM) will use some SERDES based IO/memory bus or DDR interfaces. Type 1 drives are legacy NVMe drives...