Electronics retailer Best Buy is known for catering to mainstream America, not niche audiophiles. So I was surprised to see the company offering an HDMI cable for $1650.99. Granted it’s 8 meters long, but still… It’s a freaking digital cable, folks!
Then I read the reviews. They’re as golden as the connector plating. Go check … Read More → "Some People Get It"
You may recall that, some months ago, we wrote about SIGFOX. As a quick review, SIGFOX is installing a completely new cellular system optimized for low-data-rate IoT sensors rather than for voice and Youtube. As a French company, they started the build-out in their European neighborhood, but they are supposedly starting their North American build-out now.
Of course, for this to be successful, you have to have devices that can talk to the network. And if the designers of those devices have to … Read More → "Atmel Gives SIGFOX a Transmitter"
The phenomenon that is Raspberry Pi has moved up a gear. On Monday (2nd February) the next generation of the credit card computer was announced. It has a new Broadcom BCM2836 application processor, based on the ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core CPU which they rate at 900MHz. Memory has doubled to 1GB. This is claimed to make the new Raspberry Pi 2 better than six times more powerful than the first generation Raspberry Pi Model B+.
There is full compatibility of both hardware and software with the previous model, and it has the same price of around $35. The … Read More → "Raspberry Pi: The next generation"
Zigbee rolled out their latest revision late last year: 3.0. I sat with Zigbee Alliance CEO Tobin Richardson right as he had arrived back in country from Europe. Alas, I didn’t manage to find a way to turn any jet lag to my advantage. (Gotta work on that…) He summed up the main contribution that this new revision brings: unification of all the profiles. The intent … Read More → "Zigbee 3.0 Released"
Chess is tough, right? It’s a complicated game. Just explaining the rules can take hours, or hundreds of pages, and that’s before you get into subtle strategies. Mastering chess can be the work of a lifetime.
So how did a French kid write a fully featured chess program in just 487 bytes of code? Not 487 MB. Not even 487 KB. It’s four hundred and eighty-seven bytes of code. And it plays chess. This kid is good.
In case you’ … Read More → "World’s Smallest Chess Program"
There have been a couple of developments in the wireless power world over the last couple months, both involving the new Rezence standard. You may recall that this is the new high-frequency resonant approach, as contrasted with the established lower-frequency Qi approach. We’ve reviewed the differences and proliferating standards before.
While Rezence beat out Qi in terms of establishing a resonant (as opposed to inductive, which is … Read More → "Rezence Wireless Charging Takes Steps"
I don’t know about you, but when I hear “Spansion,” I hear memory. But there’s more going on there these days than FLASH. I talked with them last November when they were exhibiting at the IDTechEx show, which is partly about energy harvesting.
In particular, they acquired Fujitsu Microelectronics a year or so prior to broaden their product line. What they got were microcontrollers, with lots of digital and analog connectivity, and analog – primarily power management ICs (PMICs).
With this, they’re gunning for the internet of … Read More → "More than Memory"
This one is for those of you that are interested in language. Our industry tends to take a lot of liberties with language (largely, I think, because we’re engineering majors, not English majors, and we fired all the literate production people years ago when we learned how to use Word.)
So, for instance, we routinely eliminate the spaces and hyphens between numbers and units (did you know … Read More → "Drawings as Cartoons?"
With semiconductors, we have this expectation that, at some future time, we’ll be able to integrate everything onto a single chip. Analog, digital, MEMS… you name it.
And, theoretically, we will be able to. In fact, we probably can now. Do we? Nope. And it’s even less likely as we keep moving forward.
Why? Because the most advanced wafers are freakin’ expensive. If there’s a bunch of your stuff that will work at 28 or 180 nm, you’re going to do that because it’s so much cheaper than, say, 14 nm. And if … Read More → "Monolithic Plastic… Or Not"
A couple of months ago, I wrote about ISO 26262 and the changes that this was forcing on the chip development process. (Spaghetti versus ISO 26262 https://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20141125-iso26262).
Many of the chips used in vehicles use ARM processor cores, particularly the Cortex-R5, and today ARM has announced that it is making available a safety document set that provide developers with the information needed to demonstrate that their products are suitable for use in systems that meet the highest level (ASIL-D) of safety.
… Read More → "ARM embraces 26262 Auto safety standard update"
