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AIStorm Makes AI Sensors Cheap & Easy

Sometimes it’s the little things. Call it small and cute, cheap and cheerful, wee and wonderful, sometimes the inexpensive entry-level products can be the most interesting. So it is with this week’s company. 

Business guru Clayton Christensen used the example of Honda motorcycles to illustrate his now-famous thesis of “disruptive innovation.” Back in the 1970s, American motorcycles were big, heavy, fast, and expensive. Honda didn’t make anything close to that. Its Super Cub was tiny and underpowered, practically a toy. So, Honda decided to sell it through … Read More → "AIStorm Makes AI Sensors Cheap & Easy"

Spectacular Spintronics (Mechanical Electronics)

I’m currently so excited I can hardly speak (I can barely even manage a squeak) because today saw the launch of the Spintronics Kickstarter — an event for which I’ve been waiting in dread anticipation for weeks. As we will discuss, Spintronics is a new game suitable for ages 8 to 80+ in which players build mechanical equivalents of electrical and electronic circuits to solve puzzles.

When I was young and foolish — more foolish even than today — I thought that electrical and electronics were the only engineering domains worth talking about, … Read More → "Spectacular Spintronics (Mechanical Electronics)"

Ampere Ups the ARM Ante

They say there’s no such thing as “the cloud.” It’s just somebody else’s computer. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that their computer is the same as your computer. Today, most cloud datacenter servers are x86 machines just like your desktop PC except bigger and farther away. But that doesn’t have to be the case. 

Silicon Valley company Ampere Computing thinks that cloud datacenters really should … Read More → "Ampere Ups the ARM Ante"

Lattice Powers-up Industry 4.0

Lattice Semiconductor has hit their stride, smoothly executing the strategy they laid out a couple of years ago. In the wake of a failed acquisition, the company turned the page, re-focused, and set a course to make their FPGA technology accessible to a broad range of engineering teams designing high-value applications. It’s a solid strategy – bundling their devices with full-stack solutions including hardware, hardware and software IP, software design and customization tools, reference designs, and design services – everything a typical team would need to quickly get an FPGA-based solution up and running, even with no … Read More → "Lattice Powers-up Industry 4.0"

The Secret Power Behind SSDs

I keep waiting for hard disk drives to die off, but they just never do. Individual drives fail all the time, but the whole category of spinning platter storage has shown a remarkably resilient half-life. I guess Neil Young was right: Rust never sleeps. 

The main alternative is solid-state disks (SSDs), and they’ve been getting better and cheaper, threatening to usurp the disk drive’s throne, but we’re not there yet. SSDs are standard fare in laptops now, and they’re the preferred boot medium for high-end desktop … Read More → "The Secret Power Behind SSDs"

Voice Activation Gets More Efficient

Science fiction is all about “what if.” What if there were no gravity? What if apes developed an advanced civilization after our own? What if we’re living in a computer simulation? 

What if voice-activated gadgets used a lot less power? Would that change the way people use them, or make them more useful, or open up new applications? What if?

Tiny fabless chip company AmbiqRead More → "Voice Activation Gets More Efficient"

Achronix Goes Head-to-Head

For leading FPGA suppliers Xilinx and Intel (Altera), the secret to success has always been to beat the other. That’s how duopolies work. For everyone else wanting to wedge their way into the highly-competitive programmable logic market, common wisdom has always been to find a niche. 

The niche strategy is more of a survival trick. Numerous companies have made a decent living by zooming in on just one aspect of the FPGA market – military/aerospace applications, ultra-low power applications, small form factor, and so on. Companies chose their niche, … Read More → "Achronix Goes Head-to-Head"

New Paradigms for Implementing, Monitoring, and Debugging Embedded Systems

Are you familiar with the Tracealyzer and DevAlert tools from Percepio? How about the Luos distributed (not exactly an) operating system from Luos? I don’t know about you, but for me, the past few days have been jam-packed with my learning all sorts of exciting nuggets of knowledge and tidbits of trivia pertaining to the implementing, monitoring, and debugging of embedded systems using these little scamps.

I’m not too sure where to commence, so let’s all take a deep breath, start at the beginning, wend our way … Read More → "New Paradigms for Implementing, Monitoring, and Debugging Embedded Systems"

featured blogs
Jan 29, 2026
Most of the materials you read and see about gyroscopic precession explain WHAT happens, not WHY it happens....