Free IoT SOC Books at REUSE 2017

The second annual REUSE conference is next week bringing the fabless semiconductor ecosystem together for a day of food, fun, and some very interesting presentations. It’s at the Santa Clara Convention Center this year which is nice and it is FREE! More importantly, there will be 30+ vendors in the exhibit hall which opens at 9am for registration and breakfast. Exhibit hall conversations are the best for networking, absolutely.

You can find me at the Open Silicon booth signing free copies of our latest eBook “Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified” – A Book Focusing on the Emergence of Custom Silicon for IoT Devices. More than 500 people are expected to attend and we only have 100 books so get there early if you can, it would be a pleasure to meet you!

In case you have not downloaded the PDF version here is the book foreword by Taher Madraswala, President and CEO of Open-Silicon. It has been a pleasure to work with Taher and the Open Silicon people over the last two years on SemiWiki.com. Not including this one, we have written 30 blogs about Open Silicon that have earned close to one million views.

FOREWORD

Enablers of the Internet of Things (IoT) are improving the growth rate of the semiconductor industry in a significant way. Technology advancements in algorithms and processing units have made human-to-machine communication a reality. We are now entering an era where incorporating this capability in smart devices has the potential to simplify, enhance and even save lives. The IoT ecosystem is a symbiotic collaboration of hardware and software developers, building block (aka IP) providers, architects and visionaries who want to translate complex human functions (such as voice, vision, and thought) into simpler, machine-decipherable functions. At the core of this effort are the custom system-on-chip (SoC) solutions that enable designers across vertical markets to meet the performance, power, price, and time-to-market constraints of the quickly evolving IoT universe.

The semiconductor ecosystem has categorized the IoT space into three distinct segments: IoT cloud, IoT gateway, and IoT edge. This segmentation allows key players to devise strategies and offerings in areas of their expertise, which benefits customers with much-needed competition in each segment. Similar segmentation in the computation world helped create the “WinTel” (Microsoft + Intel) ecosystem, which ruled humanity for decades. Segmentation also helps address new and evolving standards, markets and customers in a rapid response manner. Custom silicon solutions have been deployed on the cloud side of the IoT for many years, specifically in networking, telecommunications, storage, and computing. However, until very recently, custom solutions were out of reach for IoT edge and IoT gateway segments due to cost or lengthy development schedules.

The IoT SoC platform approach has opened up many new use-cases for edge applications. Among them are sensor hubs for industrial applications, including outdoor, factory floor and in-room environmental control. IoT gateway applications are also experiencing rapid growth from the custom IoT SoC platform approach. For example, a well-designed IoT gateway SoC platform can address multiple smart city applications, such as waste management, transport, traffic, parking, lighting, and metering.

Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified 6 The custom IoT SoC platform approach can speed custom design, reduce risk and cost, and enable the critical differentiation that customers demand. Quality platform development requires extensive experience and knowledge. Platform creators must think like a system company as well as a startup. They need to consider end-use-cases in the vertical IoT markets while designing an easy-to-use platform. Such developers need to be responsible for the core block and its verification, which allows for the highly customized software drivers to be written and used as the core library.

The use of platforms not only opens the door to faster validation of new designs with very little risk but also allows the visionaries and architects to focus on their end goal, which is to bring product differentiation, more use-cases, more functionality and more ingenuity to the world of IoT.

“Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified”is the first comprehensive book to explicitly define and detail the various IoT architectures. It covers the multitude of security factors, the power budgets associated with different IoT applications, and many more technical considerations that dictate the success of a custom IoT SoC platform, including but not limited to implementation methodologies, as well as hardware and software tradeoffs. This book also provides a detailed case study of a highly successful approach to custom SoC design for an IoT gateway SoC using Spec2Chip turnkey solutions.

It is important to mention that the implications of the Spec2Chip offerings outlined here extend far beyond IoT cloud, IoT edge, and IoT gateway devices. OEMs in other emerging technologies, such as deep learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, gaming and autonomous driving cars are benefitting from this Spec2Chip platform approach. Customers in these markets are collaborating with turnkey ASIC providers so they can scale back on, or even eliminate, the risks and loopholes of a lengthy chip design flow, and focus specifically on the core hardware differentiation IP and end application software that they bring to their innovation.

This book deliberately includes a great deal of data and references to real products. We want you to fully understand and appreciate the scope of the IoT ecosystem and the Spec2Chip platform approach that is fueling its expansion. The goal is for you to take this experience and knowledge and apply it to your personal or organizational design flow. Our sincere hope is that your ideas, combined with the proven design methodologies outlined here, will result in a technological advancement that contributes to the IoT universe and those who live within it.

You can register for the conference HERE. I hope to see you there!

Also read: 35 Semiconductor IP Companies Hold 2nd Annual Conference