Articles – Page 161

May 18, 2016

I’m told that the motivation for the iconic 1979 Saturday Night Live skit was a loosening of the US censor restrictions on broadcast television. For the first time, the word “hell” could be uttered on American TV. The story is that the Saturday Night Live writers wanted to celebrate the event by including the word “hell” as many times as possible in one skit.

Steve Martin stood staring off into the distance repeating: “What the hell is that thing?” and a crowd gradually gathers, all asking the same question.

The World’s Best Multiplexer

Lattice CrossLink pASSP Fits Into the Odd Spaces in New Designs

by Jim Turley

May 17, 2016

“Better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.“ – Anonymous

In biology, it’s known as a niche – a narrowly defined set of circumstances wherein a certain specific plant or creature can thrive. Outside of its niche, the beast in question perishes. Within its niche, however, it is king.

Marketers have hijacked the term, of course, and they use it in a vaguely pejorative way to describe limited market opportunities and conditions. A small-potatoes company is known as a “niche player,” while a specialized … Read More → "The World’s Best Multiplexer"

Collaboration Between OPC UA and DDS

How Are These Protocols Different? How Are They Similar?

by Bryon Moyer

May 16, 2016

Some time back, we addressed the many standards and would-be standards and proprietary formats populating the IoT space. Because there are so many, it’s easy, when faced with two arbitrary protocols, to assume either that they compete or that they are orthogonal. But, as it turns out, they may do what appears, on the surface, to be the same thing, but with application-based differences that make them neither competitive nor orthogonal, but complementary.

I waded into this when the Open Platform Communications (OPC) Foundation … Read More → "Collaboration Between OPC UA and DDS"

A Fashion Exhibit for Makers

The Met’s “Manus X Machina” is All About Process

by Larra Morris

May 12, 2016

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just opened their new Spring/Summer fashion exhibit: “Manus X Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology,” focused on the distinction between the handmade (manus) and the machine made (machina) in the world of fashion and garment creation. This is a fashion show for makers. Beyond just the word “technology” in the exhibit subtitle, which for some people might hold promises of robot dresses or futuristic materials, this is an exhibit with an intense focus on how the featured garments were actually made: what materials were used, what processes were … Read More → "A Fashion Exhibit for Makers"

Atom, We Hardly Knew Ye

Intel Axes Smartphone Chips Amid Big Restructuring

by Jim Turley

May 11, 2016

“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” –US Senator Everett Dirkson (likely misattributed)

You can’t axe 12,000 jobs without losing a few products along the way. Intel is starting to prune some low-hanging branches off of the product tree.

The company is sending all of its smartphone and tablet processors into the wood chipper, even though some of those chips are already in production and others are so far down the pipeline that they’re just weeks away from their release date. No matter; Intel is … Read More → "Atom, We Hardly Knew Ye"

FPGAs for the Masses?

Freeing FPGA Implementation from the Hardware Designer's Grip

by Dick Selwood

May 10, 2016

Over the years, there have been many attempts to make FPGAs easier to use, and most of them now occupy the footnotes of FPGA history. So when I got a note from Stéphane Monboisset introducing me to a new FPGA design tool called QuickPlay from a company called PLDA, I was about to send a polite, “Thanks, but no thanks,” when I remembered where I had last met Stéphane. It was when Xilinx was launching Zynq, and he was very successfully handling the European aspects of the launch, including the press conversations. The fact that he had … Read More → "FPGAs for the Masses?"

Analog Spring

Synopsys and Cadence Update their Custom Tools

by Bryon Moyer

May 9, 2016

Ah, spring is here, and analog is in the air!

Um… yeah, that sounded better in my head than on paper. Guess it’s why Shakespeare never did any odes or sonnets to analog.

Be that as it may (and being that it’s May), this spring has seen analog announcements from two sources. Not sure if that’s a coincidence, but it does mean we’ve got some analog to discuss.

The two stories are pretty different, although that would be partly because the two companies have rather different positions in the … Read More → "Analog Spring"

PCB with a Faster Cadence

OrCad and Allegro Speed Up Board Design

by Kevin Morris

May 4, 2016

The PCB Design tool race is perhaps the most stable and long-lived competition in all of electronic design automation. Since at least the 1980s, commercial tools have fought to own the screen of board designers as they convert ideas to schematics to metal traces etched into a substrate. Through all of those decades, the basic process has always been the same. Craft a schematic drawing with components from a library, verify that the thing will probably do what you intended, and create a board layout that physically hooks the parts up the way you specified.

Read More → "PCB with a Faster Cadence"

An Entrepreneur’s Tale

Sometimes Going With Your Hunch is the Best Business Strategy

by Jim Turley

May 3, 2016

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.” – Ernest Hemingway

They say you should never meet your heroes. But I met one of mine, and it couldn’t have turned out better.

Meeting your heroes is supposed to lead to disappointment and regret. Your favorite sports star will turn out to be a foul-mouthed child abuser. A respected civic leader will be taking bribes from all sides. Your childhood movie star crush will be revealed as a rude, self-absorbed, talentless twit. Better to cling to … Read More → "An Entrepreneur’s Tale"

Is the Consumer IoT Happening?

A Review of Adoption Rates and Issues

by Bryon Moyer

May 2, 2016

Go to any of the dozens of conferences dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT), and you’re likely to hear it: “The consumer IoT isn’t gaining adoption at the rate initially hoped.”

That matches with my anecdotal experience – at least amongst my non-tech friends, for whom being the first on the block with some new gadget doesn’t constitute a value proposition. One friend was even annoyed that her boyfriend bought her a Nest: “I just want a stupid thermostat!” But, being anecdotal, my experience doesn’t really tell us anything about what’s going … Read More → "Is the Consumer IoT Happening?"