Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference

As The Who sang on Who’s Next:Keep me movin’, groovin’, groovin’, yeah
Movin’, Yeah
Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile, …

On April 22nd and 23rd the place to be moving (or movin’) to will be the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. Because What’s Next is this year’s Linley Mobile Conference. The conference basically focuses on processors for mobile handsets with a sprinkling of IoT (mobile base-stations are covered in the Linley Datacenter Conference which you missed in February or the Linley Carrier Conference on June 10th).

This year the organizer is Mike Demler who I worked with at Cadence, then he took up the noble profession of blogging, but has been a senior analyst at Linley Group for a couple of years now. The program will include technical presentations and panel discussions addressing a broad range of topics. The precise agenda is still has not been finalized but I am assuming it will follow the usual format which consists of a few presentations on a particular topic, followed by a panel session with all the presenters.

One change from previous years is that you will not receive a printed copy of the proceedings when you check in at registration. They will be available for download during the conference however, assuming you brought a (mobile!) device.

Here are some of the presenters already committed:

• The keynote on the first day will be Linley Gwennap’s Mobile Market Overview. This is an overview of the market, technologies, equipment-design, and silicon trends for designers of mobile devices.
• Morten Christianson of Synopsys will talk about Designing mobile SoCs with USB Type-C connectors. Synopsys has recently produced a complete suite of IP for this connector. I can’t wait for it to be widespread since the plug can be inserted either way up (the original USB connector seems to be the only connector that takes 4 attempts to get it inserted despite only having two orientations).
• Synopsys again with Hezi Saar on Cost-Effective Implementation for High-Resolution Display Mobile Devices
• And you can’t keep them away, no wonder they are a premier sponsor: Synopsys’s Yankin Tanurhan on Embedding Vision in Mobile SoCs.
• On the same topic, Yair Segal of CEVA on Enabling Intelligent Vision Processing in EmbeddedSystems.
• And keeping with vision, Jeff Bier of the Embedded Vision Alliance on Computer Vision in Mobile Devices: Progress and Challenges.
• Cadence’s gets a turn with Chris Rowen of Tensilica fame on Always Alert: New Processors for Low-Energy Wireless Sensor Nodes.
• Tim Saxe of Quicklogic, will talk about Partitioning Between Software and Hardware is Key to Ultra-Low Power. More always-on I suspect.
• Steve Singer of Inside Secure on Embedding Robust Platform Security into Application Processors and IoT SoCs. Security is clearly truly “a thing” in mobile and especially IoT and destined to be a huge differentiator, I believe
• Charlie Janac, the CEO of Arteris, will talk about using FlexNoC Physical to accelerate timing closure.
• Staying with the NoC theme, Joe Rowlands of NetSpeed will present The Next Challenge in SoC Design: Customizable Cache Coherency.
• Roy Ju of Mediatek will talk about Heterogeneous Computing for Smart and Energy-Efficient Mobile Applications. I’m still waiting to see an energy-inefficient mobile application.
• Brian Jeff of ARM on all things ARM Cortex-A72. This is the new 64-bit core that they announced earlier this year, for the time being at least positioned for mobile.

Breakfast and lunch are provided both days (and the food is always excellent), and there is an evening reception the first (Wednesday) evening. With prizes.

The conference is free if you are a designer of mobile chips, mobile devices, or mobile software or a service provider, member of the press (me, yea!) or the financial community.

More details, including a link for registration, are here.