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Are We Ready for 2Q 21C?

by Max Maxfield
September 30, 2025

It just struck me that we are rapidly approaching the end of 2025. In turn, this means we’re poised to plunge headfirst into 2Q 21C, which is a notation I’ve just invented to indicate “The second quarter of the 21st century.” Feel free to share this nugget of knowledge and tidbit of trivia with your family and friends (you’re welcome).

As I’ve mentioned before, I graduated from high school in 1975. Now, 50 years later, those days make fleeting appearances in the rearview mirror of my life—close enough to touch in … Read More → "Are We Ready for 2Q 21C?"

New Auto Test Capability for the Analog Portions of SoCs

by Max Maxfield
September 25, 2025

Ever since I began my career in electronics, analog has been the underdog compared to digital in the realm of automation. In the case of tools and techniques like fault simulation, test coverage, and automatic test pattern generation, the digital world has enjoyed robust support for decades. Meanwhile, analog has typically been relegated to handcrafted efforts and ad-hoc methods. Well, that imbalance just shifted in a dramatic fashion.

Analog and digital designers and verification engineers talk different languages and are invited to different parties. This column is unusual in that it should interest … Read More → "New Auto Test Capability for the Analog Portions of SoCs"

SiTime Has Unleashed its Titan MEMS Resonators (Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid)

by Max Maxfield
September 23, 2025

Apropos of nothing at all, I just read a definition of “engineer” that struck a chord. I understand that this was one of five options submitted to EE Times by their readers many moons ago. The definition in question reads as follows: “An engineer is someone who takes the creativity of an artist, the knowledge of a scientist, the imagination of a writer, and the stamina of an athlete and turns science fiction into reality.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

But we digress… I was just chatting with Piyush Sevalia, … Read More → "SiTime Has Unleashed its Titan MEMS Resonators (Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid)"

FPGAs Find Their Voice: Achronix and the Economics of Speech Recognition

by Kevin Morris
September 22, 2025

Speech recognition has become one of the most pervasive AI applications. It’s in our phones, our cars, our call centers—everywhere we need a fast, natural human–machine interface. Training the models that make this work is a cloud-scale GPU problem, but running those models in production—day in and day out—is all about inference. That’s where the economics start to matter.

Inference for speech recognition is both throughput-driven and latency-sensitive. You need to process a flood of audio streams in real time, with each response delivered … Read More → "FPGAs Find Their Voice: Achronix and the Economics of Speech Recognition"

Smarter Human Machine Interfaces at the Edge

by Max Maxfield
September 18, 2025

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that breathless commentators, marketing messengers, press release pundits, headline and hype merchants, and technology evangelists are constantly bombarding us with claims and commentaries telling us how lucky we are to be surrounded by technologies that would have been beyond our wildest dreams just a few short years ago.

If we aren’t careful, we might be beguiled into thinking that we are living in a golden age of technology. But is this really the case, or are we collectively trying to convince … Read More → "Smarter Human Machine Interfaces at the Edge"

FPGA-Based Prototyping Like You Wouldn’t Believe

by Max Maxfield
September 16, 2025

I’ve said this before, and I’ll doubtless say it again—after I’d graduated from Sheffield Polytechnic with my degree in Control Engineering, my first position was as a member of a team designing CPUs for mainframe computers.

As an aside (this one came sooner than any of us were expecting), Sheffield Polytechnic is now known as Sheffield Hallam University. Meanwhile, “Control Engineering” courses now go under various guises, including “Mechatronics and Control Engineering,” “Systems and Control Engineering,” “Automation and Control Engineering,” and others.

This was in 1980. … Read More → "FPGA-Based Prototyping Like You Wouldn’t Believe"

Migrating SWaP-C-Constrained Aerospace & Defense Apps to VNX+

by Max Maxfield
September 11, 2025

As usual, my poor old noggin is spinning like a top. I’ve just learned more than I ever wanted to know about the problems with the existing PC/104 and VITA 74 (VNX) standards, along with the advantages promised by the recent introduction of the VITA 90 (VNX+) offering.

Before we plunge into the fray with gusto and abandon (and aplomb, of course), let’s take a step back to make sure we’re all tap-dancing to the same skirl of the bagpipes. The term “SWaP-C” refers to an engineering evaluation framework primarily used to … Read More → "Migrating SWaP-C-Constrained Aerospace & Defense Apps to VNX+"

Meet the ManT1S: Computing, Comms, and Power Over Single Pair Ethernet

by Max Maxfield
September 9, 2025

I’m always impressed by engineers who possess the ability to identify a market need and then create a tailored solution that elegantly addresses the situation. I’m not that sort of engineer (it’s a wise man who knows his own limitations).

In my case, I have the almost uncanny ability to misidentify a market need (to identify a non-need if you will) and to then create an overengineered solution to address my nonexistent problem. Although I don’t like to boast, I think it’s fair to say that overengineering things … Read More → "Meet the ManT1S: Computing, Comms, and Power Over Single Pair Ethernet"

Hardware-Agnostic Sensitivity-Aware Fully-Automated AI Model Optimization is a Game-Changer

by Max Maxfield
September 4, 2025

Well, hello there! You just caught me cogitating and ruminating over the fact that so many things that seem conceptually simple when you are first exposed to them turn out to have hidden depths of complexity when you consider them more closely.

Take Newtonian gravity, for example. In his Law of Universal Gravitation (1687), Isaac Newton proposed that every mass attracts every other mass with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

This appears to be easy-peasy … Read More → "Hardware-Agnostic Sensitivity-Aware Fully-Automated AI Model Optimization is a Game-Changer"

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