In his recent blog on EETimes, Kurt Shuler of Arteris took a whimsical look at the hype surrounding the IoT, questioning the overall absence of practicality and a seemingly misplaced focus on use cases at the expense of a coherent architecture. I don’t think it is all that bleak, but when it comes to architecture, Kurt is right, and… Read More
Author: Don Dingee
What, SD doesn’t have enough pins?
I was in a Twitter conversation over the weekend with some very smart people, and one of the discussion points was how slow and painful the formal standardization process can be. One suggestion was that IoT companies should “just do it”, creating specification-by-implementation. … Read More
4G shalt thou not count, neither count thou 2G
Five years from now, what will be the leading mobile connectivity standard? If you said 4G, please report to the brainwashing remediation center nearest you immediately. 3G is not only here to stay for the long haul, it’s growing – and will quickly become the preferred choice for M2M deployments.… Read More
How Qualcomm crushed the mobile roadmap
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 announcement this week may seem like just another mondo-core SoC on a way-cool TSMC 20nm advanced process. Looking past the technology shows an understated genius in creating a roadmap – and why yours and most everyone else’s probably sucks.… Read More
Sketch Router and auto-assist PCB layout
Archaic tech metaphors abound, stuck in the psyche of users everywhere. We still “dial” numbers, long after the benefit of a short pull area code disappeared. (Humans could dial 1, 2, or 3 a lot faster on a rotary phone, and there were fewer dialpulses for central office switches to decode – thus big cities with more phone traffic like… Read More
Bluetooth Smart radio IP, backed by ARM
For most devices, the on ramp to the Internet of Things means wireless, connecting a microcontroller or SoC via some kind of radio. It seems every merchant semiconductor company and embedded software firm has jumped on board the IoT wagon. There is a litany of chips, modules, operating systems, and protocol stacks already, and … Read More
Care and trimming of MEMS sensors
My first job in electronic design circa 1981 was making analog autopilots and control devices for RPVs – the early form of what today we call UAVs. A couple of really delicate boxes with gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers, and several boards full of LM148 quad op-amps surrounded by a lot of resistors and capacitors made… Read More
Book review: “shift left” with virtual prototypes
Shipping a product with complete software support at official release is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Inevitably, there is less than enough hardware to go around, and what little there is has to fill the needs of hardware designers, test and certification engineers, software development teams, systems integration teams,… Read More
Rise of the cloudphone?
We’re all quite twitterpated with the smartphone. Admittedly, it has taken much of the world by storm, and dominates EDA discussion because of the complex SoCs inside. Feature phones have repeatedly been declared dead, or at least disinteresting, but the numbers tell a different story.
While Europe and the US enjoy much higher… Read More
Sewn open: Arduino and soft electronics
As several other recent threads on SemiWiki have pointed out, the term “wearables” is a bit amorphous right now. The most recognizable wearable endeavors so far are the smartwatch and fitness band, but these are far from the only categories of interest.
There is another area of wearable wonder beginning to get attention: clothing,… Read More
Will 50% of New High Performance Computing (HPC) Chip Designs be Multi-Die in 2025?