Thomas Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.

Google wants to spend $12.5 billion to acquire the part of Motorola that still makes cell phones, but it’s really Moto’s patents, not its hardware, that is the real attraction. How important are the patents? During the official announcement, Google CEO Larry Page used the words “defend” and protect” several times, but never once mentioned “innovation,” “enabling,” or invention.” In short, Moto’s portfolio of 17,000 patents (with another 7,000 pending) will be used to build a defensive moat around the company.

How broken is that? Patents that … Read More → "Google’s $12.5 Billion Moat Monster"

A few weeks ago we looked at a local “boutique” Bay Area manufacturing operation that was struggling to stay local and “sustainable.” Inherent in the effort is the assumption that local is better, resulting in a smaller human footprint (carbon or otherwise).

But is that always the case?

This week a European group issued a press release on work they’ve done to assemble an embedded systems tool flow. Called the INTERESTED project (I won’t … Read More → "Thinking a Bit Too Local"

Harris did a poll recently at the behest of a German company called TeamViewer that provides access to computer data from anywhere. The study asks questions about where people want to be able to access data they don’t have with them. I’m assuming they also did the study before developing the product, but this data is recent.

While TeamViewer provided some distilled statistics in their press release, they also put some raw data tables in there, which provide a couple other humorous insights.

The real take-away from this whole … Read More → "Where do you want to get to your data?"

For the last couple years, “envelope tracking” has caught on as a way to reduce power in phones, cellular base stations, and digital broadcast transmitters. The idea is that RF power amplifiers are most efficient when the signal amplitude runs near the drain voltage, operating in or near saturation or “compression.” When the signal isn’t running that high, then, with a constant power level on the amplifier, the remainder of that power is wasted as heat.

With envelope tracking (ET), the signal envelope is detected and fed to a power modulator … Read More → "Tracking the Envelope"

Feeling somehow less worthy in the shadow of the passing of Bob Pease… (with no offense intended towards Docea…)

I spent a few minutes with Docea at DAC a couple weeks ago. You may recall their Aceplorer product dealing with both power and thermal analysis. Two things caught my eye, one of which is a new feature, the other something they’re working on.

The new feature is scenario generation. This is particularly applicable to multi-mode designs, where different modes are exercised as different … Read More → "Scenarios – Certain and Less So"

Cadence just announced that it’s adding a web portal facility to its OrCAD Capture tool, and they’re enabling two different capabilities with this. The first is obvious: allowing easier access to relevant information from the OrCAD ecosystem.

But more interesting is the ability to buy apps. Now… presumably this is different from phone apps stores, where the strength – hundreds of thousands of apps – is also the weakness (why having to choose between 100 different random indistinguishable variants of the same function is a good thing is unclear to me).

… Read More → "Is There an App for That?"