I first read about the Pebble smartwatch earlier this year and thought “I don’t need yet another electronic device, and certainly not one that’s attached to my body.” Then I felt bad. Am I a troglodyte? It’s true, I do still have an iPhone 4, which is a little embarrassing in Silicon Valley. I have also never worn a wrist watch of any kind,… Read More
Mobile Maturity Leads to Extremes
The smartphone is becoming a commodity, a lifecycle stage where the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker, and the products standardize and start to look alike. This dynamic is driving innovation in existing products to extremes and spawning a new class of wearable devices.
Today two major players are leading the mobile hardware… Read More
And the 2013 Mobile Winner is … Micron?
To the surprise of nearly all observers and due to no extraordinary technological advancement, there is one true mobile winner of the past year and that is Micron, whose stock has soared in 2013 from $5 to $21. I know, you’re probably saying, “Micron, you can’t be serious.” Let’s run through the … Read More
My iPhone 5s is having hot flashes!
It is bad enough my wife is “flashing” but now my phone is 100+ degrees too!?!?!? It seems that an application is getting stuck and the SoC is thrashing. Which application I do not know, you need to use the old process of elimination method to figure this one out. Doing a hard reboot (turning your phone off and on) is the quick fix, you can… Read More
Smartphones Are More Amazing That You Can Believe
I’ve written before about just how widespread mobile phones are: more people use mobile phones that a a toothbrush and more know how to use one than to use a pencil to write. This all happened very recently. I bet if you are asked when you got your first mobile phone you will guess too early. I had a car-phone in 1993 and a real mobile… Read More
Cloud-RAN: a New Way to Build a Basestation
One thing that I learned about at the Liney Microprocessor Conference last week was C-RAN which stands for Cloud Radio Access Networks. The technology is created by ASOCS who are working with China Mobile as the driving customer. And before you dismiss that as just being one network interested in the technology, China Mobile has… Read More
How Asia Works, phase 2/3
Success in manufacturing has two conditions: tariff barriers to shield the infant industries from external competition, and a rigorous focus on exports to ensure that manufacturing cannot just shelter behind the tariff barriers and reap monopoly profits inside the country. Each industry needs to have several companies enter,… Read More
Mobile-Ready EDA and Semi IP Web Sites
18 months ago I blogged about how the mobile revolution that we enjoy today is really enabled by EDA software and IP in the hands of SoC designers, yet very few EDA and Semi IP companies had mobile-ready web sites. In that past 18 months we’ve witnessed only a handful of companies migrate to mobile-friendly web sites, the most… Read More
Apple: "It’s The Sales Channel, Stupid!"
Apple’s decision to launch the iphone 5C as a “high priced” device as opposed to a $300 entry level mass market consumer play appears to be intertwined in a much more overriding strategic plan that is beginning to play out in the market. Many analysts who pushed for the low cost device saw the need as necessary to save the ecosystem but… Read More
Apple’s 64 Bit Plan to Finish Off Android
Many people are underestimating the speed and the magnitude of the transition that is about to take place with the tandem rollout of iOS 7 and the 64 bit A7 processor. While the former provides a nice visual upgrade to the entire ecosystem the latter will be used to collect accolades and drive application development that will result… Read More


PDF Solutions Charts a Course for the Future at Its User Conference and Analyst Day