Just like that, ARM TechCon is over for another year! Last week was an exciting week for everyone within the ARM ecosystem and it was a very busy week! I wanted to round off the event with one last blog post, so here are some of my highlights from the third and final day of ARM TechCon. If you missed my previous blog posts, you can check out my highlights from day one here: Building better systems at ARM TechCon – day 1 and my highlights from day two here:  Building better systems at ARM TechCon – day 2.

Hacking cars and crashing Jeeps

The third day kicked off with a fascinating keynote from Charlie Miller (Senior Security Engineer, Uber Advanced Technologies Center). Who is well known for his remote car jacking work in the automotive field. Charlie took us on a journey where he shared his various experiences of cracking car systems, starting in September 2012. His frustration of the lack of technical details surrounding earlier attacks, led him and his friend (Chris Valasek) to start their own work.

Charlie and Chris’ journey in this space had many different steps;

• September 2012 – granted funding from Cyber Fast Track which allowed the purchase of two vehicles (Prius and Ford Escape)
• August 2013 – successfully plugged into both cars and sent messages to control steering
• July 2015 – remotely hacked moving Jeep,which lead to the recall of 1.4 million cars
• August 2016 – managed to remotely attack the car and control its steering, no matter how fast the car was going

Charlie then walked us through the different methods you can use to hack cars which included; Bluetooth, cellular modems, CDs, web browsers and even insurance dongles. Before leaving us with an important message; cars have always been insecure, but it never mattered until now. His biggest call-to-action was for the audience to understand the difference between car hacks. Many news articles use the term “car hacking” but more often than not, these hacks are unlikely to cause life or death situations. The hacks we need to worry about are those that have the ability to tamper with CAN bus messages.

Unlock the potential of Cortex-A systems with ARM's next generation System IP

Following on from his exciting talk at the Linley Processor Conference, jdefilippi (Senior Product Manager, ARM) took to the stage to tell attendees about the new ARM® CoreLink™ CMN-600 and ARM CoreLink DMC-620 coherent backplane IP. He showed us how the  ARM AMBA® specification and CoreLink Interconnect IP has improved over time, building to the latest products in our portfoilio. Jeff highlighted how these new products allow designers to build more powerful systems, delivering six times more compute and five times more throughput. The new products allow designers to tailor solutions and systems from edge to cloud.

Learn more about the new products here: Build more powerful SoCs from Edge to Cloud

Accelerate your IoT design

ARM’s philburr (CPU Product Marketing Manager) joined Kevin Yee from Cadence Design Systems to discuss how ARM’s Design Start program, the Cadence® Hosted Design Solution (HDS), the CoreLink SSE-100 IoT subsystem and mbed OS can help you to accelerate IoT designs.

ARM and Cadence have spent a lot of time validating IP designs and subsystems, which has improved compatibility and TTM, while reducing risk and cost. Cadence demonstrated the results of this work within their HDS environment, which allows designers to be productive in any location, with flexible systems and 24/7 support. Their demo showed developers working onsite at ARM TechCon in California, working on servers hosted in Munich, with no delay or lag.

Assemble systems in days!

mariocooper (Product Manager, ARM) was onsite to show how ARM tooling and models (including CoreLink Creator, ARM Socrates™ Design Environment, ARM Fast Models and ARM Fixed Virtual Platforms) can speed up developer time, meaning that you can assemble systems in days! The second part of his talk showed how Reference Data is used at ARM and how it enables partners to reduce design risk and development costs.

Finding solutions to performance challenges

jdefilippi's second talk of the day was a collaboration with Cadence, where we modelled performance use cases with traffic profilers. Everyone agrees that it is beneficial to find performance issues early in the process and the talk showed how workload use cases can make this easier. The team introduced Traffic Profiles over ARM AMBA interfaces, which enable the creation of these workload use cases. During the talk, ARM and Cadence shared an example of ARMv8-A mobile subsystem, which uses Traffic Profiles implemented on top of the Cadence Simulation VIP.

Thanks to everyone who joined us at ARM TechCon this year, we hope to see you all again next year!