1995 was the year that a co-worker walked into my cubicle and said, “Hey, you have to see this new web browser and Internet thing.” I promptly installed Mosaic, later renamed Netscape, and began surfing the web with all of those interesting hyperlinks bringing me to new articles. Marc Andreessen was the mastermind … Read More





Who Does Voice Recognition in the Samsung Gear S2?
If you have bought a Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch for Christmas, you certainly didn’t open it to do a teardown. Chipworks did it and have shared the results: Qualcomm is the big winner here with five different chips: Snapdragon 400 as the main CPU of the system, the RF transceiver, the audio codec, the power and the baseband processor… Read More
Internet of Things 2015 Year End Review: IoT Business Ecosystem
Goldman Sachs defines the Internet of Things (IoT) as the third wave of internet revolution: By connecting billions of devices to the internet, the IoT can open up a host of new business opportunities and challenges. According to McKinsey, the IoT has the potential to create up to $6 trillion economic value annually by 2025. According… Read More
Semiconductors Future Hinges on a Single Pillar
A unique phenomenon has started manifesting itself under the slew of mergers and acquisitions this year in the semiconductor landscape. This phenomenon is bound to intensify in the near future and would positions itself as a key factor for the future of the semiconductor industry. The winners and losers in the game would be determined… Read More
2015’s Unfinished Automotive Business
The farther we come, the farther we have to go. While progress in advancing personal transportation was made in 2015, the year closes with glaring elements of unfinished business threatening to impede further progress toward mitigating highway fatalities and reducing emissions and congestion. These areas of unfinished business… Read More
The “Era of the Photon” is here!
The 50 year anniversary of the publication of Moore’s Law was recently celebrated, highlighting the tremendous advances in the Microelectronics Eraof the period in human history known as the Information Age. However, the technical and economic challenges currently faced by the microelectronics industry are bringing into… Read More
MediaTek X20 Benchmark Leaks: A Prelude to 2016 Mobile Chipset Wars?
MediaTek is making waves, again. The company’s flagship mobile system-on-chip (SoC)—Helio X20—is up against rivals like Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung, according to leaked Geekbench scores, and is leading in some of the performance benchmarks.… Read More
How Not To Be Incoherent
The advantage of working with cache memory is the great boost in performance you can get from working with a local high-speed copy of chunks of data from main memory. The downside is that you are messing with a copy; if another processor happens to be working in a similar area, there is a danger you can get out of sync when reading and writing… Read More
mbed OS abstraction battles IoT hyperfragmentation
In the days of bit banging and single-threaded loops, programming a microcontroller meant grabbing a C compiler (or even before that, an assembler) and some libraries and writing bare metal code. High performance networking and multi-tasking was usually the purview of heavier real-time operating systems (RTOS) or, if an MMU… Read More
PUF the Magic (IoT) Dragon
Most people are familiar with Biometrics, the measurement of unique physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, and facial features, for the purpose of verifying human identity with a high level of certainty. The iris and even a person’s electrocardiogram (ECG) can be used as a secure biometric identifier.… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot