Manage your software efficiently for significant cost savings!

Ever wondered why you are unable to update your anti-virus software? Chances are that you are running a pirated version of the Windows OS! That itself opens your system and network up to cyber threats and other attacks! Yes, I know! Prices of software, at least the relevant ones, aren't that low! However, you don't have much choice, do you?

Now, if you were using original software in your computer, you won't really face this problem! It means, you are mananging your asset -- in this case, the software. To run your feature rich programs, you need robust software that is sometimes (or, nearly, all the times) expensive!

Okay! Imagine an enterprise using counterfeit or pirated software. Will it face problems? Surely, very serious ones, in the short and long terms. Now what if a public sector undertaking was using pirated software? Perhaps, that would directly impact the services, and in most cases, e-governamce services that it offers.

Keeping all of these in mind, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has launched a SAM (software asset management) program for public sector undertakings (PSUs) based in the Indian state of Karnataka. This is the first SAM initiative for PSUs in partnership with Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka.Dr. D.S. Ravindran, CEO, Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, said: “In the last year, the IT spend by the government was close to Rs. 300 crore. All PSUs are now also coming up with their own IT needs and it is important to adopt this standard of SAM with good IT governance practices in order to enable the state of Karnataka to be more productive and cost-efficient.”

The Centre of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka has two key mandates -- putting in place an entire core network infrastructure across the state for e-governance services, and, to expand the capacity and program of running the e-governance initiatives.

Dr. Ravindran added: "We have connected 30,000 offices across the state thru the wide area WAN. We have done over Rs. 22,000 crores worth of procurement over our e-governance platform."

As for capacity building, the Centre assists the State Government Departments to build e-governance initiatives. The PSUs in the state of Karnataka are among the very significant IT spenders. This makes it necessary to create an awareness on the best practices regarding software usage among the PSUs, as 'there is a persistent move to bring in more IT into governance.'

He said there is a need for the PSUs to adopt the good IT practices. In this regard, M.N. Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary, Department of e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, has been providing excellent leadership. A lot of PSUs within the state are participating in the initiative, while some others are on the path of doing so.

Dr. Ravindran said that the Centre is also working on a Karnataka government portal to offer all kinds of services. The need to bring IT into administration is to improve the internal efficiencies and deliver better citizen services.

Lizum Mishra, director, India, BSA, added that SAM has started as a pilot in Karnataka. Maharashtra has been the second state to get into this activity. Other states should follow thereafter, over a period of time. She said that SAM as a concept is still new to India. SAM is an ISO standard -- ISO/IEC 19770:1-2006, published by the BSI (Bureau of Indian Standards) in 2006.

Keshav S. Dhakad, Chair, India Committee 2010, BSA, highlighted that the BSA has programs running in over 80 countries. In 2009, Karnataka partnered with the BSA for the SAM leadership program. Maharashtra joined the program in 2009-10, becoming the second Indian state to do so.

Dhakad noted that SAM is about people, process and software. Effective management of software can lead to significant cost savings. Yet, many corporatons, of all sizes, simply do little or nothing to manage their software. Time for all that to change!

Semiconductor-IP directory for FPGAs indexes over 17,000 IP blocks and FPGA devices!

Today, I came across a very interesting story, which stated that Parallel Engines has launched the world’s largest semiconductor-IP directory for FPGAs. According to the company, the site -- www.FPGAIPDirectory.com, indexes over 17,000 IP blocks and FPGA devices!

How does this help the global semiconductor industry? Most critically, customers can now search for semiconductor-IP and retrieve IP vendor datasheets, IP meta-information, and FPGA device configurations. Also, the meta-information includes IP interfaces, LUT, BRAM, I/O and embedded IP resources, costs and packages.

According to the release, Parallel Engines is the brainchild of its CEO, George Janac, Electronic Design Automation pioneer, founder of Chip Estimate; High Level Design Systems, and startup investor. “FPGA design has long been served by a disaggregated IP supply chain,” said Janac.

The next thing to do was to get in touch with George Janac and get his thoughts.

First, I quizzed Janac about the need for such a site. He said that today, most IP portals are really the outgrowth of IPs for ASICs and SoCs.

Janac added: “The FPGA IP market really has no central IP place of its own. Also there is a unique need in FPGA to combine both IP and devices. Much of what is ASIC and SoC hard-IP (I/O, PHY, memory, PLL, etc.) is really embedded in an FPGA device. Hence, the need for a specialized portal. Also, many ASIC and SoC suppliers do not sell in FPGA and vice versa.” Very interesting indeed!

If this is the case, why develop such a site now, and why not earlier?

Janac explained: “Timing is driven by the sizes of the new generation of FPGAs, especially the recent announcements of the upcoming 28nm FPGA devices from Altera and Xilinx, respectively. These device will put the FPGA devices two to three generations ahead in IC technology compared to ASIC. It means that more and more systems that were ASIC, could be placed in FPGA.

“Additionally, we are seeing more heterogeneous FPGA devices from companies like Actel. These have high embedded content for analog, and ARM cores. Finding this kind of IP and mapping to these devices needs a new approach.”

Giving FPGA designers visibility of semicon-IP choices
So, how will the FPGAIPDirectory website help the global semiconductor industry?

He added: “Our main goal is to give FPGA designers the visibility of what the semiconductor-IP choices and help them find the best devices for their applications. We also provide FPGA IP-vendors a place where they can congregate around and interact with users.

“There are approximately 17,000 parts in the directory from 300 vendors. We also list devices from Xilinx, Altera, Actel and Lattice Semiconductor.”

What's the roadmap ahead for this website? Janac noted: “Our roadmap is to provide a set of tools that can combine IP into a platform, and map it onto the most appropriate and cost effective FPGA device. This is our FpgaRFQ beta program that we have announced.”

George Janac and the entire team at FPGAIPDirectory need to be congratulated for this commendable effort.

LTE should benefit from WiMAX beachhead!

This is the concluding part of the Maravedis seminar on 4Ggear: Equipment market update and chipset trends, which I had the opportunity to participate late last month. Here is the perspective from Maravedis' LTE and WiMAX Equipment Analysis Service - Q1 2010, presented by Adlane Fellah, Research Director - Maravedis and Robert Syputa, Senior Market Analyst, 4Ggear - Maravedis.

4G equipment executive summary 2009
One, mobile WiMAX chipset shipments surged. Further, there has been a shift in devices. The year 2009 has also down as the year of transition between WiMAX and LTE. In fact, WIMAX has established a beachhead, while LTE has been gaining in momentum. It is apparent that the LTE chipsets landscape is already crowded.

Maravedis also presented some BWA/WIMAX statistics for 2009 -- 5.6 million chipsets, 4.8 million devices, and 3.5 million new subscribers (Source: 4Ggear Quarterly Report –March 2010).

When one looks at the WiMAX chipset breakdown by device during 2009, indoor fixed CPEs segment accounted for 49 percent, followed by USB dongle and PC cards at 42 percent. Embedded PC (netbook, notebook) contributed 4 percent, while outdor CPEs added up to 3 percent and indoor fixed CPEs accounted for 2 percent, respectively.

Now, let us look at some selected LTE and WiMAX key trends, as per the 4Ggear report.

Among WiMAX chipsets, the vendors have offered differentiated chipsets to address the emerged markets. The aggressive chipset prices have led to higher volume and optimized platforms. In case of LTE chipsets, as of now, the early solutions support LTE only. It may be pointed out here that the early suppliers may not be the long term winners.

Turning to devices, in the case of WiMAX devices, there have been diversified deployments of low cost CPEs, dual-mode USB dongles, and smartphones. In the case of LTE devices, the demonstrators have single-mode followed by dual-mode USB dongles.

As for the 4G equipment equipment itself, it is clear that WiMAX has already established a beachhead for technological progress. Definitely, LTE stands to and will benefit from all that.

WiMAX and LTE chipsets trends/landscape
Now, let's have a look at the WiMAX chipset trends as well as the LTE chipsets landscape and challenges. First, WiMAX!

According to Maravedis, shipments of mobile WiMAX chipsets reached 5.2 million units in 2009. There was a surge in Q4-09 accelerating device shipments in H1-10. Notably, the top five chipset vendors had a combined market share in excess of 95 percent. On the technology front, 802.16e owns the lion’s share with a share in excess of 95 percent as well.

There has also been a shift to very integrated and lower cost WiMAX chipset. It started with the nerging of functions -- WiMAX+WiFi, WiMAX+NPU, BB+RF, etc. Next, there was a migration to lower process geometry in order to save cost and power consumption, leading to 65nm boom. Thereafter, a pressure on price has led to fierce competition and market demand.

There is a distinct move toward LTE, leveraging OFDM technology and BWA ecosystem expertise. Mergers and acquisitions are expected in 2010, owing to scale and lack of funding, as well as perhaps, limited market share.

Now to the LTE chipsets landscape and challenges.

For starters, it has been a crowded LTE baseband market with as many as 12 players in the fray durung Q1-10. The incumbents are Qualcomm, Nokia, ST-Ericsson, and NEC/PMC/Fujitsu (and recently Icera). LG and Samsung are the new cellular entrants. The leading WiMAX players include Altair, Beceem, Comsys, Sequans and Wavesat, have also entered this segment.

Obviously, all of these different actors have different strengths, different strategies. The incumbents are focusing on dual-mode and the cellular ecosystem. The new entrants are paying attention to their time-to-market and broader patents portfolio. On the other hand, the WiMAX vendors are looking at OFDM and TD-LTE leadership.

So, what are the key challenges ahead for LTE? Possibly, one, software complexity, with issues such as interoperability, hand-over, and global coverage. Two, as of now, the size of the niche markets unknown -- whether TDD or LTE-only. Lastly, there could be fierce competition ahead for the existing players with potential late entrants such as Broadcom, Infineon, Marvell, and MediaTek, and possibly Intel!

Makes for a compelling year ahead!

Freescale in strategic partnerships with Mentor, Enea and Green Hills

Freescale Semiconductor signed strategic partnership agreements with Mentor Graphics, Enea and Green Hills Software to establish comprehensive enablement solutions for Freescale’s QorIQ, PowerQUICC and StarCore processors.

Freescale and its strategic software partners intend to share IP, invest jointly in product and technology roadmaps, and collaborate on go-to-market activities.

According to Raja Tabet, VP of Systems and Software, Networking Division, Freescale, the company's strategic alliance with Mentor focuses on enabling highly optimized Linux solutions for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors. Mentor and Freescale will use a common Linux distribution for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors.

He said: "Mentor is our strategic partner on Linux, We will be aligning with Mentor around a common Linux development distribution methodology. We will no longer have our own distribution methodolgy. The objective for us is to allow seamless migration for our customers from free Linux to commercially supported Linux.

"With Green Hills -- a premier provider of OS and tools --we are making sure that we have a broad support for our product portfolio. When our products are launched, people will have premium support from our partners such as Green Hills. These are for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors.

"With Enea, the alliance is on enabling the highly optimized versions of OSE, OSEck, Optima Tools and related software for PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors as well as StarCore DSPs."

On the timing of these agreements, Tabet said: "We have been working on a model for quite some time. Ths announcrment, we've been planning it for a while. We wanted to put our silicon out there and add software system partners. The name of the game was pushing the clock speed. We see move from single to multi-core.

"We need to invest much more heavily among ourselves and our partners. We need different partnership strategies. We need to decide what investment to put into software and what investment into our partners."

He added: "We have been working on these strategic alliances for quite some time now and as the leader in providing processors into the networking market wanted to lead the way in setting a high bar for silicon-software vendor collaboration for multi-core devices.

"We believe that effective multicore support necessitates deep, collaborative and early investment between silicon vendors and software partners to truly provide an optimized silicon-software experience. Additionally, given the recent consolidation in the industry, we wanted to reaffirm our commitment to enabling a healthy independent ecosystem of partners and help customers maintain a choice of software vendors for our devices."

So, what do all the three partners -- Mentor, Green Hills and Enea -- stand to gain?

For our partners we hope that we will see an expanded market share. They recognize, and end customers are also recognizing the importance of embedded platforms. They know that Freescale is no. 1 in the overall networking market. Additionally, we sit down and have a discussion around the technologies between us and partners. The customers will also have a choice on the number of software solutions."

On Mentor, Tabet added that the EDA provider has had an embedded division for quite some time. "The growth they have had from Linux is more than many of the existing Linux distribution houses. We are alighing with them very strategically. Linux is becoming very important for networking. The same drivers and IP made available to Mentor, are also made available to other two partners."

He said: “Freescale is expected to benefit from these strategic alliances through enabling our partners (IP sharing and close technical collaboration) to provide Freescale device-specific optimizations and deliver software to customers close to silicon availability. Over time, we expect that such close partnerships will deliver unparalled time-to-market, cost reduction and application performance for our mutual end customers."

The key message here is: Freescale opted not to go and create an all inhouse software strategy. "We have enough inhouse capability and are self sufficient. We also felt that a companion strategy would benefit us. The partners woud have their own value add and differentiating technology to offer."

Analog Devices opens new development center in Bangalore

Jerald G. Fishman, president and CEO was recently on a trip to India, apparently, his first ever, to celebrate 15 years of Analog Devices’ presence in India, and to inaugurate its new development center in Bangalore.He said: “We have opened a new development center in Bangalore, India. We are focusing on signal processing. We are a leader in high performance signal processing solutions. We sell our products into virtually every application.”

Commenting on some trends prevailing today, he added: “Everything has to be greener and consume lower power. We also have products for security, video surveillance, etc. Another trend is healthcare. Our technology enables images that doctors need. For example, we have a solution that enables you to see medical imaging of the heart in four dimensions.”

Speaking on the company’s Bangalore center, he said: “For many years, the Bangalore center has been at the forefront of several designs. We have got the capabilities here as good as anywhere. The people here will become more important for us over the years.”

Dr. S. Karthik, engineering director, precision signal processing (ASC), India Product Development Center (IPDC), Analog Devices India Pvt Ltd, said that the India center opened in 1995 to focus on SHARC processors. The SHARC processor family dominates the floating-point DSP market with exceptional core and memory performance and outstanding I/O throughput. He added that the India PDC is home of the SHARC processor.

In 2002, Analog Devices India added analog and mixed-signal design group to the IPDC. In the same year, Analog Devices and IIT-Madras announced India’s first DSP learning center — the ADI-IITM DSP Learning Centre. The IIT-M faculty, in consultation with ADI engineers, designed the course material and the lab experiments. The centre is designed to train approximately 500 students every year, of which about 400 are from various engineering colleges in the region and about 100 are from industries in India, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.

In 2006, Analog Devices opened the IC test development facility. Karthik said that the company has also added the DSP application engineering capability. In the past 15 years, the IPDC has done products from concept to development in India.

LTE will see larger deployments, higher volumes than WiMAX!

Late last month, I had the pleasure of attending a Maravedis seminar on 4Ggear: Equipment market update and chipset trends.

It also included a market perspective from Sequans Communications, presented by Craig Miller, VP, Marketing & Business Development. This post will highlight Craig’s presentation. Maravedis’ post will follow later.

4G trends: Device volumes and devices
During 2010, WiMAX device shipments are on pace to triple vs. 2009. The volume is well balanced in 2010. Key growth drivers include handset adoption, deployments in India as well as continued growth in US, Japan, SE Asia, and the MEA.

As for 4G devices, in the beginning (ca. 2006‐2008), the device shipments were dominated by fixed broadband CPE. Today, the device ‘mix’ is shifting toward mobile broadband devices, netbooks and mass-market multimode handsets. Tomorrow, we shall witness more mass-market handsets, plus mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and other CE devices, as well as the emergence of M2M applications.

According to Miller, mass-market prices are here now, enabled by low‐cost, high integration chipsets.

Technology trends
Coming to the technology trends, he said that there have been innovations in WiMAX chipset solutions. These include continued cost, size and power reductions. He added that Sequans has pioneered 65nm single‐die BB+RF integration.

Integrated applications processors have been another trend. Here, Sequans pioneered dual-CPU integration. Some other related trends include hostless VoIP, networking stack, CM, security and OMA‐DM.

Improved mobility is another trend, with enhancements such as improved handover performance, and mobile VoIP support. There have been PHY enhancements as well. In fact, Sequans was first to champion 2Tx for the mobile device. This is said to close the uplink vs. downlink budget imbalance. Uplink MIMO (Matrix A) and improved OTA performance: 64QAM UL, Cat 5/6 HARQ, etc., are also among the PHY enhancements.

There is room for improvement! Areas include: RF front‐end — with FEMs (front-end modules) that support 2Tx, improved PA efficiency, and reduced size and cost. Another area is multi‐radio co-existence and interworking. Here, in the WiMAX‐WiFi space, TDM co-existence solutions are required. Also, an improved handover performance is required for 3G + WiMAX.

There is also a need to focus on production test and calibration, with a definite requirement to improve the test and calibration times.

Complex LTE chipsets to come later!
Presenting some thoughts on LTE, Miller said that Sequans is already providing LTE chips to China Mobile for its TD‐LTE activities, as well as to operators in India, Japan, US and Europe. However, industry‐wide, LTE is still a work‐in‐progress.
Here’s why! One, chipsets are numerous, but aren’t optimized. Two, the IOT (interoperability test) is complex and incomplete. Also, devices are currently scarce, and networks are few and far between. Finally, the frequency plans are extremely complex.

Expect the early LTE devices to be data‐centric, he added. These could be LTE ‘thin modems’ or co‐processor designs. The complex 2G/3G/4G chipsets and products will surely come – but later!

Miller added that LTE will eventually see larger operator deployments and higher volumes than WiMAX — something, which is acknowledged. The volume crossover vs. WiMAX will take place in 2012 or 2013.

As of now, WiMAX is ‘mass market’. The volumes are ramping: in the region of well over 10 million units this year. Also, the product mix is shifting away from CPE. Compelling consumer devices are available. Costs too, have fallen significantly. Finally, chips are maturing, and innovations are in the market.

On the other hand, LTE is coming! While it will be a much bigger ecosystem, the volume crossover is not likely until 2012 or later.

Symantec's Internet threat security report on India has few surprises!

Actually, no surprise, really! India is definitely shooting up — in the wrong direction — as far as Internet threats are concerned! The India edition of Symantec’s Internet threat security report, presented by Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Symantec India, has several key findings that will make you sit up and think! Let’s start!!Here are just two among the many data points. One, India, Brazil and Poland — all witnessed growth in malicious activity. In 2009, India accounted for 15 percent of all malicious activity in the APJ region, an increase from 10 percent in 2008. Also, 19 percent of attacks targeting India, originated in India itself in 2009. So, India is rising — both as the country of origin and a target for attacks! Wonderful!

Another one: after the US, Brazil and India are prominent in countries where Web-based attacks originate. Okay, India was also one of the highest ranked countries for Zeus infections in 2009!

So, the key findiings of the threat landscape are as follows: The underground economy remains unaffected by the global economy. Hence, users are still plagued by Web-based attacks. Targeted attacks focus on enterprises — no surprise! Next, attack kits make it easier for novices to indulge in information theft. Finally, malicious activity takes place in emerging countries (read India, among them). I will deal with all of these a bit later.

Dhupar elaborated on some best practices as well that we all — enterprises and end users need to follow. These include:
* Defense-in-depth strategies
* Proactive policy based approach to security
* Test security, and update definitions and patches.
* Educate management on security.
* Emergency response procedures with backup and restore.

As for the way ahead, cybercriminals will continue to innovate to fuel the underground economy. New age Internet technologies and usage will encourage novel propagation vectors. The global scale and origin of attacks requires international co-operation.

The threat landscape
Let's start with the threat landscape first! Credit card information and bank accounts still top advertised items on the underground economy. Credit card dumps actually saw a marked increase in advertisements. Next, multi-tiered commercial model is exploiting the innocent and needy, and their PCs. The cyber mafia is also increasingly mashing up new and old criminal techniques.

There are targeted attacks focused on enterprises. We all know this, don't we? These attacks are frequently carried out by advance persistent threats (APTs). These threats remain undetected to penetrate deeply into the network.

Next, there are attack kits, which allow the novice, unskilled attackers to enter the market with sophisticated tools. The increase in kit activity is notably marked by Zeus.

Key fact and figures on India
First, the bot mania continues! India had an average of 788 bots per day, and 62,623 distinct bot-infected computers in 2009. However, Symantec observed an average of 10,440 active bots per day in the APJ region -- an 11 percent decline from 2008. The reason being -- many command and control centers were seized. Dhupar advised that we need to protect all end points, including mobile phones/smartphones, etc.

Still on bots, Mumbai accounts for 50 percent of total bots in India, up from 37 percent in 2008, followed by Delhi at 13 percent (7 percent, 2008), Hyderabad at 7 percent (4 percent, 2008), and Bangalore 6 percent (same in 2008). Some other cities in this list include Cochin, Chennai, Pune, Bhubaneshwar, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.

Next, malicious code trend types. India ranked no. 1 in APJ and 2nd globally (after the US), for malicious code! Wow!! What are we doing? We are toppers in this area! There has been an increase in worms and propagation through remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, primarily due to Conficker. Also, trojans made up 56 percent of the volume of the top 50 malicious code samples reported in 2009, thankfully, a decrease from 68 percent in 2008.

Still on malicious code trends, India had the highest number of potential worm infections in the APJ during 2009, unchanged from 2008. This, in a country which takes pride in its IT strength is really strange! Aren't the IT guys, especially, protecting themselves enough?

As for the propagation vectors among the malicious code trends, in 2009, Symantec identified over 240 million distinct new malicious programs -- a 100 percent rise over 2008! In 2009, propagation through file sharing executables accounted for 72 percent of malicious codes that propagate -- up from 66 percent in 2008. Also, there is a lack of information centric policy driven end point, data loss prevention and messaging security.

Coming to the phishing trends, brands are being phished by sectors. As per the APJ rank percentage 2009, the financial sector tops at 79 percent, followed by ISP at 8 percent, retail at 4 percent, and several others, such as insurance, Internet connectivity, telecom, consumer hardware, etc., at 2 percent each, respectively.

Of the phishing URLs identified in India during 2009, a whopping 91 percent targeted the financial sector. Oh, 1 percent of the world's phishing hosts and 7 percent of the regional phishing were in India. India continues to lead in these areas too!! Why? Some more India facts on phishing, One, cyber criminals are increasingly localizing phishing attacks. Two, recent examples include phishing attacks on the Indian tax department.

Now to spams! Spam accounted for 88 percent of all email messages observed by Symantec during 2009. No surprises again -- India was the third-highest spam originating country in the world and first in APJ!

Am sure you love forwarding emails to friends and colleagues. We all do it, don't we? How many of us realize that this is spamming? Even if we do, that still doesn't stop us from forwarding fun emails, and definitely, emails that have content dealing with religion, or even sex, jokes, latest buzz, scandals, cricket, IPL (Indian Premier League), politicians, and so on and so forth! See, how we all contribute 'lovingly' to this huge number!

Protect yourself!
Enterprises and end users, do try and protect yourselves better against Internet threats. Follow your company IT policies as strictly as possible! And, keep your Internet security program updated at all times -- especially, the home users.

Am sure, you love checking emails on your smartphones, or even updating your Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts, since it is all so convenient. No harm in doing that, but just ensure your smartphone is not open to hackers. Do remember, you are also opening up another end point for possible security breach or attack!

I do tell some of my friends -- do log out completely of the web sites you visit, especially, your personal email programs. Never save your username and password on the Internet -- simply because it is easy to log into a website/an email program. Oh, the next time you forward a 'fun' email, do think of how much Internet bandwidth is being wasted in that activity, besides you spamming your friends!

Finally, hello my dear fellow Indians -- what are we all doing? Why are we all so keen to be well known for "Internet notoriety"? Isn't there something better for us to do?