Lighting Up The Cloud

Lighting Up The Cloud
by Bernard Murphy on 12-30-2015 at 7:00 am

In our rush to imagine a world populated with IoT devices, tech advances at the top end of this ecosystem (the cloud) don’t seem to get much airtime. But this isn’t because they are limited to modest refinements. As one example, there is active technology development in connectivity around fiber-based communications within the… Read More


Auto Introspection

Auto Introspection
by Bernard Murphy on 12-20-2015 at 4:00 pm

It is an indictment of our irrationality that our cars are now more health-conscious than we are. Increasingly safety-conscious readings of the ISO26262 standard now encourage that safety-critical electronics (anti-lock braking control for example) automatically self-test, not just at power-on but repeatedly as the car… Read More


What’s Driving Real Medical Tech

What’s Driving Real Medical Tech
by Bernard Murphy on 12-17-2015 at 12:00 pm

I just watched a webinar on non-invasive bio-imaging as a way to detect and track disease, which gave me a sense of the way tech progresses in the medical field and makes for a positive counterpoint to my views on medical IoT, at least as envisioned in much of our industry. The webinar, on new approaches to in-vivo imaging was hosted … Read More


Palladium Moves Power (and Temperature) Modeling to the System Level

Palladium Moves Power (and Temperature) Modeling to the System Level
by Bernard Murphy on 12-13-2015 at 12:00 pm

I had a debate with Steve Carlson of Cadence earlier in the year at the EDPS conference on whether there were really any truly effective solutions for doing power estimation in emulation. I thought there weren’t and he said I was wrong. After attending the Cadence front-end summit last week, I have to admit he has a point.

First, who… Read More


Powering the IoT – Wishful Thinking versus Reality

Powering the IoT – Wishful Thinking versus Reality
by Bernard Murphy on 12-11-2015 at 12:00 pm

There’s a lot of discussion these days on IoT applications, architectures, communication, security and more, all very good stuff, but little debate on how these devices will be powered. If you can plug them in, this maybe isn’t an issue (though we may need to think about increased demand on our overstrained power generation infrastructure).… Read More


Cadence Enters the RTL Power Estimation Game

Cadence Enters the RTL Power Estimation Game
by Bernard Murphy on 12-09-2015 at 12:00 pm

At the Cadence front-end summit last week, Jay Roy presented the Cadence Joules solution for RTL (and gate-level) power estimation. Jay is ex-Apache, so knows his way around RTL power estimation which should make Joules a product to watch. Joules connects very natively to Palladium for power characterization for realistic software… Read More


Optimizing power for wearables

Optimizing power for wearables
by Bernard Murphy on 12-06-2015 at 4:00 pm

I was at the Cadence front-end summit this week; good conference with lots of interesting information. I’ll start with a panel on optimizing power for wearables. Panelists were Anthony Hill from TI, Fred Jen from Qualcomm, Leah Clark from Broadcom and Jay Roy from Cadence. Panels are generally most entertaining when the panelists… Read More


Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off

Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off
by Bernard Murphy on 11-28-2015 at 7:00 am

In the wave of enthusiasm surrounding the IoT, medical applications are often held up as an obvious and compelling area where applications cannot fail to succeed. I beg to differ. I think there are two important reasons why almost no such applications will succeed, at least not in the way we seem to be approaching them today.

The first… Read More


Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls
by Bernard Murphy on 11-25-2015 at 12:00 pm

We boomers thought we would continue to innovate and live forever. We put men on the moon, we created rock and roll, we invented practical computers and personal computers, we did it all. And we lived the high life, especially in tech – big houses, fancy cars, great vacations. Then unexpectedly we got old (nobody warned us), and now… Read More


Networks, Emulation and the Cloud

Networks, Emulation and the Cloud
by Bernard Murphy on 11-23-2015 at 12:00 pm

To fans of Godel, Escher and Bach (the Eternal Golden Braid), there is an appealing self-referential elegance to the idea of verifying a network switch in a cloud-like resource somewhere on the corporate network. That elegance quickly evaporates however when you consider the practical realities of verifying such device in ICE… Read More