Articles – Page 203

January 22, 2014

Tired of hearing about the Internet of Things (IoT)? Good, because you’re about to get doused with a big stream of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) goodness.

Echelon has been making industrial-grade networking chips for 25 years; longer than some engineers have been alive. The company’s LONworks chips pretty much defined device networking for a generation of developers, and LONworks chips appear in more than 100 million devices, including traffic lights, railroad boxcars, and innumerable HVAC units, according to Echelon. But as useful and reliable as LONworks is, the technology is so… Eighties.

Catapulting itself … Read More → "Industrial Internet of Things for IdIoTs"

What Color is Your Abstraction?

FPGA Design Starts with You

by Kevin Morris

January 21, 2014

In the early days of FPGAs, we did our work with schematics. FPGAs were small, and you could stitch together a little gate-level schematic pretty easily. Then, it was just a matter of running the FPGA tool flow, and a few seconds later you had a bitstream ready to program your cute little programmable logic device. It was all pretty easy, and – with schematics being the universal language of EE, there wasn’t a lot of special skill required.

About fifteen years ago, FPGAs outgrew gate-level schematic entry. We moved on to hardware … Read More → "What Color is Your Abstraction?"

RTL Signoff

A New Step, Championed by Atrenta

by Bryon Moyer

January 20, 2014

The concept, “High risk, high reward” doesn’t hold with semiconductors. Heck, we have an entire industry built on the notion of risk reduction: EDA. EDA tools are enormously expensive to develop and are therefore expensive to acquire by the user.

There’s only one reason someone would spend that much money on tools: because it’s going to prevent even more gargantuan losses if something goes wrong with the chip.

OK, granted, much of what EDA is about is productivity – just try cutting a few billion transistors out of rubylith and see what that … Read More → "RTL Signoff"

An Internet Processor

Just What Does That Mean?

by Bryon Moyer

January 15, 2014

Qualcomm Atheros recently announced a new platform for the home (and, in the future, for business). It’s partly predicated on the fact that we’re consuming lots of bits over the interwebs. But that just merits a faster packet processor, and this is more than that: This is an “internet processor.” Exactly what is an internet processor? I was frankly wondering whether it was the classic marketing case of “define a new category so that you’re the only one in it,” but upon further musing, I … Read More → "An Internet Processor"

Absolute Zero Privacy

Pandora Walks Into a Bar...

by Kevin Morris

January 14, 2014

John was up earlier than usual. The body monitor he wore on his wrist had awakened him during the perfect phase of his sleep cycle and told him that his heart rate and respiration were slightly elevated. It was almost certain – even though he exhibited no symptoms – that he was coming down with the flu. John’s smart phone also gave him the news, telling him additionally that he should not go into the office today in order to avoid infecting others. He was further informed that he had likely been exposed to the flu two days … Read More → "Absolute Zero Privacy"

Phone/Body Decoupling

Distinguishing You from Your Phone

by Bryon Moyer

January 13, 2014

The Holidays can be a challenging time in the US. Particularly for people that don’t like shopping, this is not a favorite time of year. Count a big portion of the male population in that group of hapless souls that gird up their courage and wade into the miasma that is the local mall.

So here you sit, in your car in the mall parking lot, watching the steady stream of people going in empty-handed, coming out loaded with booty. That’s your competition. If they buy more than you do, you lose. And if you … Read More → "Phone/Body Decoupling"

That’s a Stretch

Taking Circuits Beyond Flexible

by Bryon Moyer

January 9, 2014

We’re careening down a road towards pervasive electronics. Heck, at this rate, we’re going to end up so far away from our primal roots that we’ll be completely helpless during a power outage. But insinuating those circuits everywhere doesn’t work so well with these clunky printed circuit boards that we’ve relied on for so many years.

No, these things will need to fit everywhere – wearable is obvious, but wearable is just the start. We’ll also be fashioning circuits into shapes that fit the items and the styles we like rather than … Read More → "That’s a Stretch"

Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?

Combo Windows + Android Systems Have Lackluster Appeal

by Jim Turley

January 8, 2014

This week, people flocking to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will be treated to their first look at a new kind of PC that dual-boots Windows 8 and Android. Imagine, a machine that runs Windows one minute and Android the next.

Sounds like the worst of both worlds, if you ask me. A triumph of marketing over engineering. The coppery taste of desperation has replaced product innovation.

Nobody’s saying anything official yet, so there’s a bit of speculation baked into all this, but the concept is pretty straightforward. Take a Windows 8 computer (please), and … Read More → "Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?"

Proliferating Programmability in 2014

Forecasting the FPGA Future

by Kevin Morris

January 7, 2014

The ball has dropped, the bubbly sipped, and the resolutions resolved. 2013 has ended, and before us we have a new year, a new universe of opportunity, and a crazy cauldron of activity in our beloved world of programmable logic. It’s time to throw down, gaze into the crystal ball, read the tea leaves, interpret the Tarot, and extrapolate the trend lines. Here, then, is our unflinching forecast for FPGAs in the months and years to come.

Before we fire up our forecast fest, we should nail down what we mean by “FPGA.” … Read More → "Proliferating Programmability in 2014"

Glass Interposers

Is Thin In?

by Bryon Moyer

January 6, 2014

There’s been lots of discussion of the silicon interposer as a way to ease us into the world of 3D-packaged ICs. The silicon interposer is the main enabler for what’s typically referred to as 2.5D packaging; it acts like a high-quality micro-PCB that can be built using the silicon manufacturing infrastructure that’s already in place.

But silicon has some downsides. It’s an expensive interposer (even though we’ve seen that, paradoxically, some extra expense can lower overall costs), and it … Read More → "Glass Interposers"