When we were first introduced to earbuds, in-ear speakers connected through thin wires to your phone (and earlier portable music devices), they seemed pretty convenient for private entertainment at work, while walking, exercising, doing almost anything. Until we started to realize those long dangly wires weren’t ideal. They’d… Read More
I wrote a while back about some of the more exotic architectures for machine learning (ML), especially for neural net (NN) training in the data center but also in some edge applications. In less hairy applications, we’re used to seeing CPU-based NNs at the low end, GPUs most commonly (and most widely known) in data centers as the workhorse… Read More
One of the companies I met at ARM TechCon was Dover Microsystems who offer a product in embedded security. You might ask why we need yet another security solution. Surely we’re overloaded with security options from ARM and many others in the forms of TEEs, secure boots, secure enclaves and so on? Why do we need more? Because defending… Read More
Security and machine learning (ML) are among the hottest areas in tech, especially for the IoT. The need for higher security is, or should be, blindingly obvious at this point. We struggle to fend off daily attacks even in our mainstream compute and networking environment. How defenseless will we be when we have billions of devices… Read More
There’s a familiar saying that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Taking that one step further, the more improvement you want, the more accurately you have to measure. This become pretty important when you’re building huge designs in advanced technologies. Margins are a lot tighter all round and use-cases are massively… Read More
At a superficial level, emulation in the hardware design world is just a way to run a simulation faster. The design to be tested runs on the emulator, connected to whatever test mechanisms you desire, and the whole setup can run many orders of magnitude faster than it could if the design was running inside a software simulator. And … Read More
In the world of communications, the industry fairly quickly got a handle on a naming convention for cellular technology generations that us non-communication geeks could understand – 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G, (though some of us could never quite understand the difference between 4G and LTE, at least as those terms are widely and no … Read More
I think we’re all familiar with the cloud/edge debate on where intelligence should sit. In the beginning the edge devices were going to be dumb nodes with just enough smarts to ship all their data to the cloud where the real magic would happen – recognizing objects, trends, need for repair, etc. Then we realized that wasn’t the best… Read More
I don’t know if it was just me but I left TechCon 2017 feeling, well, uninspired. Not that they didn’t put on a good show with lots of announcements, but it felt workman-like. From anyone else it would have been a great show, but this is TechCon. I expect to leave with my mind blown in some manner and it wasn’t. I wondered if the SoftBank … Read More
Many of us dream about the wonderful widget we could build that would revolutionize our homes, parking, health, gaming, factories or whatever domain gets our creative juices surging, but how many of us take it the next step? Even when you’re ready to live on your savings, prototypes can be expensive and royalties add to the pain. … Read More
