“What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.” – Robert Browning
“We are in a somewhat uninteresting territory.” These are the words of Piyush Sevalia, Executive Vice President of Marketing for SiTime. You have to give the man points for honesty.
He’s not wrong. SiTime is in a tough business, and a lot of their challenges aren’t technical, but evangelical. … Read More → "SiTime Oscillator Beats on Rocks"
With the COVID-19 situation continuing to evolve, numerous companies in our industry have been telling their employees to work from home (WFH) lately to enable “social distancing” to slow the spread of the virus. Large numbers of engineers, marketers, and other technology professionals may find themselves hanging out on the sofa, trying to squeeze out a normal day’s work via VPN over a cacophony of kids, dogs, and soap operas. It may sound fun at first, but after a few days, a lot of folks may find themselves pining for the cubicles.
“I eat at the unlimited buffet of danger.” – R.J. Haywire
Security is de rigueur these days, and, like machine learning and cloud connectivity, it’s moving down into cheaper and cheaper devices. Now even low-end microcontrollers have embedded security features – and it’s still not enough.
Mention “security” to most engineers, though, and they’ll roll their eyes. It’s something the boss says they need to have, but nobody really … Read More → "How to Stop an Embedded Virus"
“My Zen garden’s more serene than yours.” — Dan Piraro, “Bizarro”
The most powerful force in the computer world is inertia. We stick with the software, tools, operating systems, and hardware architectures that we know, and it takes enormous effort to dislodge us from those foundations. Newton’s Third Law states, “a computer ecosystem in motion will remain in motion, pretty much forever.”
How else to explain the continued prevalence of QWERTY keyboards? Or Windows PCs running on x86 processors? Or of … Read More → "Ampere Altra Addresses ARM Aspirations"
I was recently introduced to the concept of Engineers Week (EWeek), which was founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) in 1951. This year, EWeek took place 16-22 February. Of particular interest to me was … Read More → "Introducing Girls to Engineering"
We’ve elaborated at length in these pages on the remarkable capabilities FPGAs bring to the world of embedded vision and vision analytics. With enormous numbers of new applications demanding embedded vision capabilities at the endpoint and edge, there’s a huge green field of opportunity out there, just waiting for FPGAs to take over. The ability of FPGAs to accelerate AI tasks on a miserly power budget, perform various video filtering and processing tasks, and adapt to handle basically any interface standard for the myriad sensors, displays, and other related hardware out there is unmatched … Read More → "Lattice mVision Stack"
“Physician, heal thyself” – Luke 4:23
My Thermos bottle keeps hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold. How does it know?
An electrical engineer would probably design a Thermos with a toggle switch (“HOT” and “COLD”), or a big temperature dial, or – if you work in Cupertino – an LCD display, touchpad, RTOS, and proprietary cable interface. Thankfully, real vacuum flasks take care … Read More → "Machine Learning at the Push of a Button"
I’m afraid that I don’t know as much about imaging sensors as I would like. I was just about to say that I don’t really come into contact with these little rascals much in my daily life, but then I realized that — in reality — I’m surrounded by the little scamps.
For example, in addition to its backwards pointing camera to aid in reversing, my car has a dual-camera assembly in the front providing binocular vision for use with lane departure detection and automatic braking in emergencies. … Read More → "Sensors, Space Probes, and Wi-Fi Cybersecurity, Oh My!"
“Persistence and endurance will make you omnipotent.” — Casey Neistat
Tiffany & Co. isn’t the biggest retailer in the world, but they seem to do okay. Same goes for Hermès, Rolls-Royce, Bertazzoni, or Princess Yachts. They’re all small boutiques that cater to a clientele with, shall we say, unique product requirements. Sure, they’re expensive. But they’re worth it.
You might even add Everspin to that list, not because they’re startlingly expensive (they’re not) but because they … Read More → "Magnetic RAM Finds Its Niche"
