At the beginning October 2018, Bloomberg dropped a bomb by publishing "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate America's Top Companies". The story claims that between 2014-2015, Supermicro server motherboards had a small IC inserted onto the PCB, possibly connected to the baseboard management controller (BMC). The chip allowed attackers to …
Continue reading "Musings on Supply Chain Vulnerability in Light of “The Big Hack”"
5 November 2018 by Phillip Johnston • Last updated 27 September 2019 Welcome to the November 2018 edition of the Embedded Artistry Newsletter! This is a monthly newsletter of curated and original content to help you build superior embedded systems. This newsletter supplements the website and covers topics not mentioned there. This month we’ll cover: The Big Hack story and its ensuing dramaA request for modern Embedded Linux resourcesEmbedded articles from around the webWebsite updates The Big Hack At the beginning of this month, Bloomberg dropped a bomb by publishing “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to …
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The world is full of issue tracking systems. GitHub, JIRA, Zendesk, and Bugzila are just a few of the numerous tools out there. These tools are extremely important pieces of our development processes and do a remarkable job at helping us stay organized. So why would you need yet another issue tracking method? When working …
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Today, I depart from the "reading" portion of the Monday Morning Reading series. If you are not familiar with electronics manufacturing, the city of Shenzhen in southern China is the hub of all things manufacturing. Many parts vendors and CMs have offices and factories in Shenzhen. This documentary produced by Wired provides a nice look …
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In the previous article I introduced some basic manufacturing reporting concepts. This article expands on the basics with additional reporting concepts you will come across while building embedded systems. Table of Contents: Throughput Yield Units-per-hour (UPH) Cycle Time Work in Progress (WIP) In Repair Test in Progress Fail on Line Loopers Further Reading Throughput Yield While overall yield …
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At its simplest, yield is an easy concept: your yield is P/(P+F), or put into plain English: (total # of passing units) / (total # of units input) This concept gets complicated much further to provide more insight into the health of our manufacturing line. We will review the following concepts in relation to our manufacturing …
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If your company has a MAC address block, you need to keep track of address allocations so you don't use the same address for multiple devices. We developed a simple Excel template to keep track of MAC address allocations. This tracker can handle both single address and bulk allocations. It also shows the current number …
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After a recent prototype build, we received our systems - but the CM shipped the devices without our batteries! This can be a show-stopper when your product is a battery-powered device. We learned that we needed to submit our battery design for UN38.3 certification to ensure design safety. Without that certification, we could not ship …
Continue reading "Certification Requirements for Shipping Lithium Batteries"
