Robots – we have all been waiting for them since we were young. We watched Star Wars, or in the case of the slightly longer-lived of us, we watched Forbidden Planet or Lost in Space. We knew that our future robot friends would be able to move around and interact with their environment. What we did not foresee long ago was that instead of… Read More




‘Que Legal,’ Uber é Legal
Uber went live in Florianopolis on September 30, a week before my wife and I arrived for some down time. But rumors suggested that the service was shuttered almost as soon as it started with a couple of drivers detained and their vehicles impounded. The word was spreading that the service was considered illegal.
As fate would have … Read More
AI and the black box problem
Deep learning based on neural nets and many other types of machine learning have amazed us with their ability to mimic or exceed human abilities in recognizing features in images, speech and text. That leads us to imagine revolutions in how we interact with the electronic and physical worlds in home automation, autonomous driving,… Read More
Targeting Cat-NB1 instructions delivers power savings
If one wireless IoT technology fit every possible use case, we would have one specification. Many tradeoffs – battery life, mobility, indoor coverage, licensed versus unlicensed spectrum, and more – have made for many potential solutions. A heated discussion right now is over the future of LPWAN technologies, with LoRA, SIGFOX,… Read More
Climbing the dimensions (part 2)
In the first part of this article we tried to present a way to capture the essence of the tesseract. We did that by “climbing” the dimensions from the point (no dimensions), through the segment (1-D), square (2-D), cube (3-D) and finally tesseract (4-D).
In the following figures we present other attempts at visualizing… Read More
CEO Interview: Geoff Tate of Flex Logix
This is the second in series of interviews we will do with executives inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Geoff Tate was the founding CEO of Rambus and is now CEO and co-founder of Flex Logix (embedded FPGA). This one should be of great interest due to the recent $16.7B acquisition of Altera by Intel. We all now know the importance… Read More
DOJ takes victory Lap in KLAC / LRCX deal post mortem (3 of 3)
The KLA deal died due to fox guarding the hen house.
Fox can’t guard Hen House…
In an industry where there are relatively few widget makers and only one, very dominant, widget inspector, the thought of one of the widget makers buying the most crucial widget inspector obviously would be anti-competitive. Not only would… Read More
The KLAM deal has died now how will KLAC and LRCX recover? (2 of 3)
As we had been suggesting the merger deal between KLAC and LRCX has failed. It obviously ran into too many complications, costs or other issues to continue. Unlike the Applied TEL deal which went on for a staggering 18 months before calling it quits in this case 12 months was enough to figure out it wasn’t getting done.
In our … Read More
KLAC & LRCX – Fall Out from the deal Falling Apart (1 of 3)
The odds of deal completion has fallen to low levels. Whats the fallout on the companies and stocks? Is there life after a failed merger?
“A quagmire wrapped up inside an enigma” – LRCX & KLAC’s merger is the talk of the town, both in the semiconductor equipment industry as well as DOJ watchers in Washington… Read More
One line of macOS code could cap a 20-year pivot
When Steve Jobs made it clear at the 1997 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference he was taking back his company, he tossed the now famous line in his opening monologue: “Focusing is about saying no.” Approaching 20 years later, that decision still reverberates.… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?