Articles – Page 202

February 11, 2014

High-level synthesis has always been the “personal jet pack” of electronic design automation. We all know that someday, “in the future,” we won’t need all these cars and roads and stuff. We’ll each have our own personal jet pack to take us quickly and directly wherever we want to go. And, when we get there, we’ll do all of our electronic designs in abstract, powerful, high-level languages and synthesize them with high-level synthesis (HLS) technology. Hunger and war will be things of the past, disease will no longer exist, and billion gate semiconductor designs … Read More → "Elevating Their Game"

Sensors Get Platforms

Reference Kits Abstract the Details

by Bryon Moyer

February 10, 2014

New technology follows an arc. If it’s something really new and different, then it typically starts with an inspiration or an insight into how to do something really hard. The focus of all effort is then on doing whatever hard thing makes the New Technology possible.

Users of the New Technology tend to be early adopters – folks that can take a novel data sheet, figure out what it all means, and design whatever is necessary to integrate the New Thing into a system.

For sensors, you might imagine the original ur-sensors (many, many years … Read More → "Sensors Get Platforms"

Pocari Sweat

How Much Better Does “Better” Have To Be?

by Jim Turley

February 5, 2014

Let’s say you’re shopping for a new car. (Congratulations.) You head down to your town’s Auto Row and start browsing all the dealerships. There’s the Ford dealer; next door is the Toyota dealer. Across the street you see the BMW dealer, the Chevy dealer, the Kia/Hyundai dealer, and so on. They all make fine cars, and you spend some time at each place, kicking the tires and slamming the doors.

Then, down at the very end of the street, you notice something different. There, under the overpass, is a man living in … Read More → "Pocari Sweat"

Teaching Programming

The Case For

by Kevin Morris

February 4, 2014

There is some debate these days about teaching our kids to “code” and integrating software development into the mandatory curriculum along with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Many in our industry feel that this trend is misguided – including our own Dick Selwood, who recently wrote a piece making the case that programming is the wrong thing to be teaching. The arguments range from pointing to some of the very visible recent failures of software-based systems to worrying that programming is a passing fad that … Read More → "Teaching Programming"

A Tale of Two Graphenes

Promise and Disappointment

by Bryon Moyer

February 3, 2014

It’s pretty good times and, well, not as great times as we might have liked for one of the wonder materials of our time: graphene. To get a flavor of the schizophrenic nature of what’s going on here, you needed only to go to two different conferences last fall: the Graphene Live portion of IDTechEx’s convention on the West Coast and the IEDM show on the East Coast.

First of all, let’s be clear: these are very different conferences. IDTechEx is an amalgam of various smaller shows, including the graphene one. It’s … Read More → "A Tale of Two Graphenes"

Teaching Coding

Fast Track to Success or Failure to Get the Point

by Dick Selwood

January 30, 2014

Many years ago, I was attending a series of classes on computing. It was intended to introduce librarians, of which I was one, to the brave new world of “library automation.” The first lecture was a description of the 80-column punch card and how holes in it represented characters. (For those of you lucky enough not to remember the era, we used to write code on coding sheets and then pass the sheets to a punch room where operators turned the sheets into card decks that were read by the computer. The program executed, and the results were printed … Read More → "Teaching Coding"

XP ATM IoT FUD

New Technologies Raise New Fears

by Jim Turley

January 29, 2014

Two news items made the rounds last week. Both involved hacking, and both are (probably) bogus. I think the news says more about us as users of technology than it does about the technology itself.

First, bloggers were wringing their hands over the planned wind-down of Windows XP. After 13 years, it’s time for XP to ride off into the sunset, and so Microsoft warned users that it would stop developing new fixes and new patches for XP. No big deal, right?

Within hours of each other, nearly a dozen different blogs were keening about … Read More → "XP ATM IoT FUD"

Racing for Computer Nerds

Bitcoin Mining for Fun and Profit

by Kevin Morris

January 28, 2014

Every ten minutes, the green flag drops. Billions of dollars worth of exotic hardware strain the very limits of physics and engineering wherewithal. Elegant efficiency squares off against brute force barbarism in a contest of skill, cunning, and nerve. Enormous quantities of coulombs course through countless traces, giving off enough waste heat to warm a city. This is balls-to-the-wall, heavy-iron, high-stakes racing at its best.

Strapped into the competitive cockpits are the unlikeliest adrenaline junkies – computer and software engineers. This sport isn’t soaked in sweat and combustibles. There is no burning rubber … Read More → "Racing for Computer Nerds"

Which Wireless Will Win?

The Internet of Things is the Driver

by Bryon Moyer

January 27, 2014

Imagine if our phones and gadgets all had wires for communication. Yeah… almost kills their usefulness. Now imagine a future sensor-saturated world, with all of them communicating by wire. Yup… we’d pretty much be crawling through a cat’s-cradle tangle to get anywhere.

We think of wireless as convenient, and it is. Why, with wireless mouse and keyboard, the rat’s nest behind my desk has shrunk. And then came a wireless printer connection. And, somewhere along the way, wireless USB was supposed to happen, although those wires still seem to predominate. But sometime in the … Read More → "Which Wireless Will Win?"

Wireless Power

There’s a New Way to Do It. Or Is It New?

by Bryon Moyer

January 23, 2014

It all started one night when an MIT denizen’s slumber was awakened by an insistent sound. No, it wasn’t the smoke detector; evidently those aren’t the only devices with batteries designed to go dead at 3 AM in any time zone.

No, this was his cell phone complaining that the battery was running low, and there was but one way to shut it up: get up and plug it in. Which provided some laying-awake time for ruminating on phone charging and the transfer of energy over distance. Which led to a Eureka moment. And, ultimately, … Read More → "Wireless Power"