Where the Emerging Tech Jobs Are

Where the Emerging Tech Jobs Are
by Bernard Murphy on 01-18-2017 at 7:00 am

There’s an article published in InfoWorld on jobs trends in several emerging tech areas. The trends are based on analysis of job postings and job-seeker searches from the beginning of 2014, sourced by Indeed.com. I would have liked to dig deeper into Inded.com, to get more info on jobs in our industry but unfortunately it seems you… Read More


Getting Ready for Bluetooth-5 Verification

Getting Ready for Bluetooth-5 Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 01-13-2017 at 7:00 am

Bluetooth has been very successful for many years, but arguably trapped in a niche, at least for us consumers, as a short-range wireless alternative to a wire connection – to connect your phone to a car or speakers for example. (In fairness I should add that the 4.2 version has improved range and Bluetooth has already become quite … Read More


Tool Trends Highlight an Industry Trend for AMS designs

Tool Trends Highlight an Industry Trend for AMS designs
by Bernard Murphy on 01-11-2017 at 7:00 am

Archaeologists often use tools found in digs as a major indicator of trends in civilizations. The same could be said for trends in design, though we don’t have to reconstruct these design trends – we tend to see them ahead of us.

The trend in this case is the growing importance of sensors in designs and there’s no better example of that… Read More


NVIDIA on a Tear at CES

NVIDIA on a Tear at CES
by Bernard Murphy on 01-09-2017 at 7:00 am

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, gave the opening keynote at CES this year. That’s hardly surprising. From a company that operated on the fringes of mainstream awareness (those guys that do gamer graphics), they finished 2016 as the top-performing company in the S&P 500, returning revenue growth of 35% (forecast). That’s startup… Read More


Webinar: Hassle-Free Bluetooth 5 SoC Design

Webinar: Hassle-Free Bluetooth 5 SoC Design
by Bernard Murphy on 01-05-2017 at 7:00 am


Bluetooth has always been a popular communication protocol for short-range applications, but now anticipating BT5 it’s really moving into the big leagues as a significant option for IoT applications. The new standard combines ultra-low power with significantly higher range and higher performance. Ultra-low power is always… Read More


This Apple Fell a Little Further from the Tree

This Apple Fell a Little Further from the Tree
by Bernard Murphy on 01-04-2017 at 7:00 am

Some companies are famously, even obsessively secretive about internal development. We never get to see discussion of areas they are working on (other than through patent filings) – we only see the polished and released product/service. Amazon is one such company but Apple must rank for many of us as the pre-eminent company in … Read More


Crowd-Sourcing Morality for Autonomous Cars

Crowd-Sourcing Morality for Autonomous Cars
by Bernard Murphy on 01-03-2017 at 7:00 am

Questions are being raised on how autonomous vehicles should react in life-or-death situations. Most of these have been based on thought experiments, constructed from standard dilemmas in ethics such as what should happen if the driver of a car or an autonomous car is faced with either killing two pedestrians or killing the occupants… Read More


Who Left the Lights On?

Who Left the Lights On?
by Bernard Murphy on 01-03-2017 at 7:00 am

I attended a Mentor verification seminar earlier in the year at which Russ Klein presented a fascinating story about a real customer challenge in debugging a power problem in a design around an ARM cluster. Here’s the story in Russ’ own words. If you’re allergic to marketing stories, read it anyway. You might… Read More


AI vs AI

AI vs AI
by Bernard Murphy on 12-30-2016 at 7:00 am

You might think that one special advantage of AI systems is that they should be immune to attacks. After all, their methods are so complex and/or opaque that even we can’t understand how they work, so what hope would a hacker have in challenging these systems? But you would be mistaken. There’s nothing hackers like better than a challenge.… Read More


The Other Half of AI

The Other Half of AI
by Bernard Murphy on 12-27-2016 at 7:00 am

I touched earlier on challenges that can appear in AI systems which operate as black-boxes, particularly in deep learning systems. Problems are limited when applied to simple recognition tasks, e.g. recognizing a speed limit posted on a sign. In these cases, the recognition task is (from a human viewpoint) simply choosing from… Read More