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Paranoia, Porsche, Paul Newman & Self-Driving Cars

Paranoia, Porsche, Paul Newman & Self-Driving Cars
by Roger C. Lanctot on 05-11-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

I was watching a documentary on the racing life of Paul Newman yesterday and I couldn’t get over the disconnect between Paul Newman’s near-obsession with auto racing and the general public’s understanding of the man. Most of us know Newman for salad dressing and iconic movie roles, but it appears, based on the testimony of friends and family members, that racing was his real passion.

He wasn’t much good at it when he got started. But like his acting he worked hard at it and ultimately became a winning driver and team owner. In interviews in the documentary he is pretty much at a loss to explain his passion other than to say that unlike the Academy Awards you don’t vote for the winner of the race, either you cross the finish line first or you don’t.

But it’s Newman’s passion for driving which fascinates me. For me, driving is an obligation, maybe a privilege, and occasionally fun. Driving can be empowering and it can be dangerous. I clearly lack Newman’s passion for this activity.

I was thinking of this because I had just visited Porsche in Stuttgart last week. I had a nice chat with the executive I was visiting and as I turned to leave I asked who at Porsche was working on self-driving car technology – the current industry rage. My host looked at me incredulously. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. Porsche. That’s right. No self-driving cars.”

A Web search turned up February 2016 reports of Porsche CEO Oliver Blume’s comments that Porsche would never create a self-driving car.

http://tinyurl.com/hbm6rrf – “Porsche CEO: Don’t Expect to See a Self-Driving Porsche Any Time Soon” – RoadandTrack.com

Blume’s position seems a little severe given the fact that nearly every other car company on the planet is working on this technology. Even governments are getting into the act setting rules and, in some cases, providing funding.

Where Porsche leaves off in objecting to self-driving cars, the paranoid step in. Website EricPetersAutos.com paints a gloomy picture of sheeple financially shackled to remote controlled drone cars under the command of car makers or the government or both.

http://tinyurl.com/zdyro73 – “Why the Hard Sell for the Self-Driving Car?”

Setting hysteria and driving tradition aside it’s important to understand the spectrum of self-driving and what it means to every day driving. The industry’s and government’s effort to master automated driving is having the collateral outcome of accelerating progress toward reducing car crashes and saving millions of lives.

Mania further reflects the fact that outside of Paul Newman and millions of other driving enthusiasts driving and owning cars is a headache. The effort to master automated driving may ultimately raise questions regarding vehicle ownership (thereby undermining the assumptions behind the paranoid screed linked to above) but it will also open up new employment opportunities and may help to reduce congestion, emissions and, most definitely, collisions.

As we assess the self-driving car opportunity it is best to recall that we may only want or need self-driving in particular circumstances – while on the highway, when in the midst of a medical emergency, when we are tired or disabled, or when we are in rush hour traffic. Some of these capabilities already exist and some do not. But 1.25M annual highway fatalities is intolerable and every car company and even governments have a responsibility to explore any technology capable of mitigating that toll.

It is best not to view self-driving cars in absolutist terms. We know there are governmental organizations that have tried or expressed interest in remote control of cars and Google’s proposed removal of the steering wheel and pedals is troubling to enthusiasts. If some consumers would rather be driven than drive, then the market should decide. Just remember, it will be impossible to look as cool as Paul Newman if you are in a self-driving car.

Roger C. Lanctot is Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk

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We All Need To Get Serious About Protecting Company Data With Hardened, Multi-Factor Authentication

We All Need To Get Serious About Protecting Company Data With Hardened, Multi-Factor Authentication
by Patrick Moorhead on 05-11-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Security

The world is becoming a less and less secure place due to the plethora of hacks that have happened over the course of the past few years. Companies like Sony, T-Mobile, Anthem, Target and their customers have been victims of countless cyber-attacks that resulted in many people’s information being compromised.

These breaches have become almost somewhat normal in terms of day to day news, but companies really need to start to protecting themselves better against these threats and one of the best ways to do. One of the most effective ways of preventing stolen login information from being used against a company is through the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA). We have written a more detailedpaper here if you want a deeper dive.

Hundreds of millions of users have seen their account data compromised as a result of major breaches in the past few years and the speed and size of breaches is only increasing. Companies are being compromised due to a multitude of reasons, however many of these attacks occur remotely after a 3rd party has their credentials compromised and their credentials are used to access a company’s systems in order to gain access to their entire network. In the case of a company like Target, the company’s board of directors asked for their CIO and CEO to resign as a consequence of their reaction to the biggest breach in the company’s history.

With more millennials entering the workforce, which we wrote about here, there are more computers and other endpoints like tablets and smartphones traveling around with their users. As a result, the risk to companies having their networks be compromised due to an external threat thanks to stolen credentials is greater than it has ever been before. Thankfully, there are new operating systems like Windows 10 that are inherently designed with security in mind and focus heavily on maintaining a trusted and secure computing environment for both users and enterprises. One of the biggest features of Microsoft Windows 10 that enables it to be so secure is its ability to natively support multi-factor authentication and to transmit it securely.

One of the best ways that an enterprise can take advantage of multi-factor authentication is to deploy a system with hardenedmulti-factor authentication. One example of this is Intel’s new Authenticate platform, which I wrote a lot about here at Intel’s 6th Generation Core vPro Processors announcement. This platform takes advantage of biometric technologies like fingerprint sensors and ensures that they are hardened against attacks and that their usage is heavily protected against external threats. This platform in combination with Windows 10 and the right network security policies should help almost any enterprise to more safely protect itself against external attacks and unauthorized network access using compromised credentials. PCs that are still running single-factor authentication are now a vulnerability as they now become an easier point of attack for attackers.


Tom Garrison, VP and GM of Business Client s presenting at Intel vPro event earlier this year

While no client platform can guarantee identity security, this is the best one I have seen so far. The stakes have never been higher as it’s not just the company and customers who are impacted but employees of the hacked company. Senior management is now getting fired as company boards are now realizing that their companies decided not to adequately protect their businesses. Just check out what happened at Target. CEO and CIO out.

If you’d like to read more about the current enterprise security threats and how hardened, multi-factor authentication helps make PCs part of the security solution, please click here to read our paper.

More from Moor Insights and Strategy

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Analysis of Cypress Semiconductor acquisition of Broadcom wireless IoT assets

Analysis of Cypress Semiconductor acquisition of Broadcom wireless IoT assets
by Dale Ford on 05-10-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, IoT, Mobile
2 Comments

Cypress Semiconductor announced that it will acquire Broadcom’s wireless Internet of Things (IoT) business in a $550 million deal. The deal was announced on Thursday, April 28, at the same time it announced that T.J. Rodgers will step down as CEO. The deal transfers Broadcom’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Zigbee product lines, their associated intellectual property, WICED (Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices) branding and developer network. In a press release announcing the deal, Rodgers stated, “Cypress is a significant player in the IoT today because of our ultra-low-power PSoC programmable system-on-chip technology, but we’ve only been able to pair it with generic radios so far. Now we have the highly regarded Broadcom IoT business—state-of-the-art Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee RF technologies—that will transform us into a force in IoT and provide us with new market opportunities as well.”

Cypress plans to move further into the consumer IoT market as well as build on its portfolio in its core business of embedded technology, including automotive and industrial applications. Broadcom will retain its smartphone, set-top box and wireless access businesses. The deal is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2016.

Broadcom Ltd. was formed after Avago’s acquisition of Broadcom in February 2016. As part of management’s presentation to investors in May 2015, the combined company was billed as being “levered to numerous secular growth trends,” among them the connected home and Internet of Things (IoT) markets. However, Broadcom has stepped away from this market opportunity now with the sale of its wireless IoT business.

While this move may seem counter to the initial acquisition investor presentation mentioned above, there has been historical precedent for Broadcom Ltd. management to sell pieces of businesses that it acquires as part of or after the close of such deals. Not long after Avago completed the purchase of LSI in May of 2014, it sold the LSI flash associated business to Seagate for $450 million in cash and the LSI Axxia networking business to Intel for $650 million.

Such post-acquisition sales could take place due to a litany of factors including improving overall corporate profitability or exiting non-core businesses. Broadcom stated that revenue from the wireless IoT unit was about $189 million in the 12 months prior to the sale, with approximately 430 employees resulting in less than $440,000 per employee. This is much lower than the over $830,000 of revenue per employee for Avago as a whole according to its revenue of $6.8 billion and approximately 8,200 employees listed in its last 10-K filed in December 2015.

From another perspective, the asset sale may be a smart move for Broadcom. Broadcom’s entire corporate culture is built around serving top-10 OEMs in very large markets such as set-top boxes and smartphones. Broadcom’s goal is to become the number-one or number-two share leader in large markets. If it doesn’t have a clear path for achieving this goal, Broadcom re-evaluates its participation in that market, often either making acquisitions to double-down on its bet or divesting to exit the market.

This strategy has resulted in an organization that is very focused on the needs of specifically identified large OEMs while avoiding the distraction of mass-market customers that are likely to drive relatively low volumes. Illustrating this point is the fact that a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is required to see the datasheets for many of Broadcom’s highest-volume products. In fact, Broadcom has never released a full datasheet for the BCM283x that serves as the processor for the Raspberry Pi, despite its enormous popularity in the maker community as a single board computer.

The sale of IoT wireless assets to Cypress may be a tacit acknowledgement on the part of Broadcom that its lack of mass market support infrastructure has become an obstacle to achieving success in the IoT market and that several years of effort trying to address that failing have come to naught. Broadcom’s line of WICED development tools was meant to solve mass-market support issues, but WICED has not proven to be enough. It really comes down to an issue of corporate culture. This divesture clearly signals that Broadcom Ltd. will concentrate its efforts on selling front-end module (FEM) integrated circuits (ICs) and Wi-Fi combo chips to its key mobile customers.

Companies such as Texas Instruments and Atmel have mass market support in their DNA, having made it a cornerstone of their corporate strategy over the course of a decade or longer. They have developed their websites, development tools, distribution and applications infrastructure to support tens of thousands of customers. They have encouraged and participated in user forums devoted to the use of their products. They have wholeheartedly embraced the maker community with tools, software, samples and abundant documentation. They even continue to support maker-friendly packages, such as through-hole dual in-line (DIP) packages which are no longer popular in high-volume production, but are still highly valued for prototyping and low-volume production. This is the kind of ecosystem that must exist around semiconductors that are marketed for the IoT market in order to be successful and it takes many years to develop.

Bottom line for Broadcom Ltd.: It is just following its usual playbook in this divestiture—failing fast to avoid throwing good money after bad. However, in doing so, Broadcom is potentially closing the door to one of the biggest emerging opportunities in the semiconductor industry, the IoT market.

The figures below place the revenues associated with this deal in perspective for Broadcom Ltd. IHS Technology’s published 2015 market share revenues for the products associated with this portion of Broadcom Ltd.’s business is $194 million, or 1.3 percent of its revenues in 2015. (Broadcom Ltd. stated trailing 12 month revenues as $189 million as of the end of April 2016.) Slightly more significant, these product revenues represent 4.3 percent of Broadcom Ltd.’s wireless application-specific IC revenues in 2015. Cypress Semiconductor earned only $3 million in wireless application-specific IC revenues in 2015. Almost all of Cypress Semiconductor’s revenue in wireless applications to this point has come from general purpose or programmable products, not application-specific products. With this acquisition, Cypress Semiconductor will take Broadcom Ltd.’s place as the second-largest supplier of WLAN and Bluetooth ICs for automotive, consumer and other applications as shown in Figure 3.


Figure 1: Broadcom Ltd. Wireless Application-Specific IC Revenue – 2015


Figure 2: Broadcom Ltd. Connectivity IC (WLAN/Bluetooth) Revenue – 2015


Figure 3: Market Share Automotive, Consumer, Other WLAN/Bluetooth ICs – 2015

From the Cypress Semiconductor perspective, it is planning to market Broadcom’s IoT WICED brand products in consumer, industrial and automotive sectors. These three sectors all have a large number of customers with small sales revenues per transaction. Cypress has well established sales channels into these markets where it has been selling to its existing base of 30,000 customers through distributors and its sales force.

Cypress Semiconductor’s top three customers from 2015 were all leading global semiconductor distributors—Fujitsu Electronics, Avnet and Arrow Electronics. By contrast, over the past few years, Broadcom’s top customers have been global OEMs including its top two customers, Samsung Electronics and Apple. Cypress will be expected to achieve significant synergies from cross-selling its market-leading programmable system-on-chip (PSoC) product with Broadcom’s legacy product through its existing sales channels.

The ability to supply solutions in low-power efficient controllers, memory and connectivity solutions is crucial to a successful strategy in an era of IoT strategies for most semiconductor suppliers. In addressing this strategy, the synergy of component product lines through the acquisition of Broadcom connectivity solutions is very strong. Before this acquisition, Cypress already had a strong offering of deeply embedded products offering robust flexibility.

Cypress is one of the few suppliers of processors outside of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) suppliers that allow for user-configurable hardware through its PSoC microcontroller (MCU) product series. Through its acquisition of Spansion in 2015, Cypress significantly increased its application-specific MCU portfolio as well, especially in automotive, the largest market for MCUs and arguably one of the markets primed for connectivity solutions. The combination of the original Cypress PSoC series of configurable MCUs with Spansion’s highly customized MCU portfolio serves customers at both ends of the spectrum for design strategies. The Spansion acquisition placed Cypress as the eighth-largest MCU supplier globally.

However, what has been lagging from a comprehensive IoT strategy for Cypress has been connectivity solutions that serve customers that want preconfigured solutions that are industry standard with well-recognized IP broadly applicable across multiple connectivity design demands. With the acquisition of Broadcom, Cypress will be able to address the needs of a much broader customer base with a wider range of both configurable and preconfigured solutions targeting IoT strategies.

Bottom line for Cypress Semiconductor: It is building on its strengths in serving mass market customers and strengthening its competitive position in the IoT market. This investment in future growth is strongly aligned with consensus expectations of high-growth opportunities in the future IoT market.

IHS Technology provides data and analysis in the area of wireless semiconductors and IoT devices and connectivity. For greater detail on the competitive dynamics of the wireless semiconductor market, you can go to the Wireless Semiconductor Intelligence Service here. Research can also be found in the IoT Devices & Connectivity Intelligence Service here.
Contributors to this analysis are:

  • Lee Ratliff, Principal Analyst
  • Tom Hackenberg, Principal Analyst
  • Christian Kim, Senior Analyst
  • Brad Shaffer, Senior Analyst
  • Dale Ford, Vice President & Chief Analyst
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Why NXP is Moving to FD-SOI (Part II)

Why NXP is Moving to FD-SOI (Part II)
by Ron Martino on 05-10-2016 at 2:00 pm
Categories: Arm, Automotive, EDA, FD-SOI, IP

At NXP, we’re very excited about the prospects for our new i.MX 7 and 8 series of applications processors, which we’re manufacturing on 28nm FD-SOI. As noted in part I of this article series, the new i.MX 7 series, which leverages the 32-bit ARM v7-A core, is targeting the general embedded, e-reader, medical, wearable and IoT markets, where power efficiency is paramount. The i.MX 8 series leverages the 64-bit ARM v8-A series, targeting automotive applications, especially driver information systems, and well as high-performance general embedded and advanced graphics applications.

Choosing an FD-SOI solution gave our designers some specific tools that helped them to more easily and robustly deliver the features our customers are looking for. Here in part 2, we’ll look a little more deeply into the markets each of these chip families is targeting, and the role FD-SOI plays in helping us meet our specs.


i.MX 7 Series: IoT, wearables and so much more

Announced last June, the first members of our new 7 series — the i.MX 7Solo and i.MX 7Dual product families — will be hitting the market shortly. We’ve been shipping samples since last year, and the response has been tremendous. (You can read about the i.MX 7 IoT ecosystem we’re helping create for our customers here and support for wearable markets here.)

Our i.MX 7 customers are building products for power- and cost-sensitive markets. That of course includes a vast array of innovative IoT solutions and wearables, but also solutions for other parts of the embedded market like handheld point-of-sale (POS) and medical devices, smart home controls and industrial products. The i.MX 7 series also continues NXP’s industry leading support for the e-reader market via integration of an advanced, fourth-generation EPD controller.

For all these markets, excellent performance is very important, but both dynamic and static power figures are really key. When you’re creating a system with power efficient processing and low-power deep sleep modes, you enable a new tier of performance-on-demand, battery-operated devices that are lighter and cheaper, and in a virtuous cycle require smaller batteries.

The next members of the NXP i.MX 7 series combine ultra-low power (dynamically leveraging the reverse back biasing you can do with FD-SOI) and performance-on-demand architecture (boosted when needed with FD-SOI’s forward back-biasing). It’s the industry’s first general purpose microprocessor family to incorporate both the ARM[SUP]®[/SUP] Cortex[SUP]®[/SUP]-A7 and the ARM Cortex-M4 cores (customers can choose between single or dual A7 cores). These technologies, together with our new companion PF3000 power management IC, unleash the potential for dramatically innovative, secure and power efficient end-products for wearable computing and IoT applications.

The initial offering of i.MX 7 was designed (on 28nm bulk) with Cortex-A7 cores operating up to 1 GHz, while the Cortex-M4 core operates at up to 200 MHz. The Cortex-A7 and Cortex-M4 achieve processor core efficiency levels of 100 microWatts (μW) /MHz and 70 μW /MHz respectively.

A Low Power State Retention (LPSR), battery-saving mode can be improved by FD-SOI and consumes only 250 μW, representing a 3x improvement over our previous generation (on 40nm bulk). That’s almost 50% better than our competitors. Plus it minimizes wake up times without requiring Linux reboot, while supporting DDR self-refresh mode, GPIO wakeup, and memory state retention.


The next members of the i.MX 7 series, with FD-SOI dynamic back-biasing, enable different blocks to be reverse or forward back-biased on the fly to attain always-optimal power savings or performance. Additional power optimization features are enabled to achieve leadership power efficiency. We’ve optimized FD-SOI dynamic back-biasing to enable performance-on-demand architecture through which the i.MX 7 series meets the bursty, high-performance needs (this is when forward back-biasing kicks in) of running Linux, graphical user interfaces, high-security technologies like Elliptic Curve Cryptography, as well as wireless stacks or other high-bandwidth data transfers with one or multiple Cortex-A7 cores.

When high levels of processing are not needed, low-power modes kick in with reverse back biasing of the critical subsystems, and the ongoing, real-time work is carried on by the smaller, lower powered Cortex-M4.

All things considered, it’s perhaps no surprise that we expect i.MX 7 series solutions for cost-sensitive markets to be a key driver of our long-term i.MX portfolio expansion.

i.MX 8: Revolutionizing automotive, interactive multimedia/display apps
Our new i.MX 8 series portfolio, based on 28nm FD-SOI process technology, targets highly-advanced driver information systems and other multi-media intensive embedded applications. It incorporates those same key attributes as the i.MX 7, but extends them into realms the industry has never experienced. We believe the i.MX 8 series is poised to revolutionize interactivity in multimedia and display applications across all kinds of industries.

i.MX 8 incorporates innovations in the processor — complex graphics, vision, virtualization and safety to help revolutionize interactivity for a wide range of uses in many, many markets. The capabilities of this family is broad, but one of the places it’s going to be the biggest game-changer is in what is becoming the e-cockpit of your car.

For almost two decades, SOI has shone in the embedded processing world. In addition, NXP counts every major automotive maker in the world amongst its customers for our devices. Entering the new e-cockpit frontier, 28nm FD-SOI is the logical choice in making the i.MX 8 series meet and exceed the stringent requirements of top automotive OEMs for years to come.

The i.MX 8 series leverages ARM’s V8-A 64-bit architecture in a 10+ core complex that includes blocks of Cortex-A72s and Cortex-A53s. 
All the FD-SOI advantages discussed above for the i.MX 7 are also being brought to bear here (the power envelope for automotive designers being extremely strict). But in the hot and electrically noisy automotive environment, FD-SOI also plays an important role in ensuring robust operation.


The way we see it, your car’s multimedia centric e-cockpit will revolve around the i.MX 8, a single chip that drives all displays from infotainment to heads-up-displays (HUD) to instrument clusters. It’s optimized for the intelligent transfer of data and information management from multiple subsystems within the IC – as opposed to only delivering raw performance through one or two processing blocks.
For drivers and passengers alike, we’re looking at a very different world: one that includes the spread of advanced heads-up displays, intuitive gesture control, natural speech recognition, augmented reality, enhanced convenience and device connectivity. (I wrote a blog exploring the possibilities last fall – you can read it here.)

And of course, it will be secure from hackers, and fail-safe for critical systems.

From our customers’ standpoint, they can design a single hardware platform and scale it across multiple market segments with the unique approach to pin and software compatibility within the i.MX product families.

The i.MX family has been leveraged in over 35 million vehicles since it was first launched in vehicles in 2010. So with all these new features, and low-power and robust performance, we see a very bright future for FD-SOI and the i.MX 8 in automotive. It’s going to be a great ride.

By Ronald M. Martino, Vice President, i.MX Applications Processor and Advanced Technology Adoption, NXP Semiconductors

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TSMC and Solido on Variation-Aware Design of Memory and Standard Cell at Advanced Process Nodes

TSMC and Solido on Variation-Aware Design of Memory and Standard Cell at Advanced Process Nodes
by Daniel Nenni on 05-10-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA, FinFET, Solido

Being that TSMC and Solido are founding members of SemiWiki, you should be able find out everything you ever wanted to know on their respective landing pages. If not, just ask a question in the SemiWiki forum and I can assure you it will be answered in great detail. And here are some other interesting 2015 factoids from Solido:
Continue reading “TSMC and Solido on Variation-Aware Design of Memory and Standard Cell at Advanced Process Nodes”

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Deep Learning and Security

Deep Learning and Security
by Bernard Murphy on 05-10-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Security

Deep learning based on neural nets is most commonly thought of as a very promising approach to scene recognition, text recognition and similar areas. Now there is increasing interest in applying this technology to security objectives. There were a number of papers on this topic in a 2015 BlackHat conference and there are several ventures either investing in or built around this method.

Deep Instinct, one such venture, was founded in 2014 to build security methods on deep learning, and to coin another cool company name around the word “deep”. (I’m hoping someday to see a venture called Deep Doodoo – the founders won’t be stuck for a description of their problem when they get into trouble).

The philosophy behind Deep Instinct and deep learning in general as applied to security is to build automatic adaptability into threat detection and prevention. The dominant approach to detection today requires human involvement at some level, which is why zero day attacks are such a problem – you can’t defend against an attack-type you are seeing for the first time. This presents a general problem for defenses because it’s not difficult to modify a virus in a relatively minor way, or even to make viruses self-modifying to confuse standard methods of detection.

But a neural network initially trained on threat examples can potentially continue to self-train (as Deep Mind’s AlphaGo does for Go games). That could mean that Deep Instinct could significantly improve defenses. Variants of known viruses could be detected and blocked without human intervention and only truly new attacks could hope to succeed.

Deep Instinct has already partnered with FireLayers on security for cloud platforms, which could add further weight to cloud suppliers’ claims that they are actually more secure than in-house systems. All of which is good, but I feel it may be premature to declare victory quite yet. I still see a number of potential issues, though I’m very willing to admit that I may not have a sufficiently deep (there it is again) understanding of the application.

First, training is presumably central but can (post-training) self-learning updates be shared, or does each installation become an island after training, learning on its own but with no ability to share learning? Perhaps there is a way to share but I’m not quite sure how you merge training weights from multiple neural networks. Might some locally-appropriate defenses be lost in that merge or is each merge guaranteed to preserve all subset detections?

A plus to the neural network technique is that it is not easy to hack in the conventional manner – you can’t search for weaknesses in antiviral code for example. But a minus is that neural networks, especially self-training networks, can be hacked by driving them with biased data. Neural net conclusions after all are probabilistic. If I drive data at a neural net which biases to some class of threat examples, I can reduce sensitivity to a different class. Biasing is not an abstract possibility. Microsoft had to withdraw their Tay chatbot recently after it had been gamed into expressing racist and other offensive views.

Finally, one reviewer of the BlackHat papers was somewhat skeptical – not necessarily of the general direction but of lack of depth in published research, also challenges in getting to a sufficiently representative corpus of virus examples for training. Perhaps Deep Instinct has answers to these questions.

You can learn more about Deep Instinct HERE. The BlackHat review is HERE.

More articles by Bernard…

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Sonics opens new strategy for SoC energy processing

Sonics opens new strategy for SoC energy processing
by Don Dingee on 05-09-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: IP, Mobile, Sonics

Back in February when we shared the Sonics philosophy on the ICE-Grain Power Architecture for hardware-based SoC power management, I speculated we’d know more by DAC 2016. Sonics is hitting the road with a new live seminar coming to Silicon Valley this month and Austin during DAC – and the news is big. Continue reading “Sonics opens new strategy for SoC energy processing”

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Samsung Could Have A Winner With The Gear 360 VR Camera

Samsung Could Have A Winner With The Gear 360 VR Camera
by Patrick Moorhead on 05-09-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Mobile, Samsung Foundry

For success, VR playback and content must be robust
The world of VR is split into two different areas, tethered PC VR and mobile VR. The reason why so many companies are going after mobile VR is because that’s where all of the volume is expected to be in VR. As a result, you have companies like Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics introducing products for mobile VR as well as companies like Apple and Google hiring lots of staff to build their own VR solutions.

However, even with all of the hardware in the universe, nobody will buy any of it if there isn’t enough compelling content. Without good content that gets consumers excited, there’s no future for VR. However, in order for VR content to be successful there also needs to be a reasonably big install base to support the development of that content. This is where mobile VR has the best chance because it has the biggest opportunity to grow quickly enough into a seriously addressable market. Heck, even Google’s own Google Cardboard has now shipped over 5 million cardboards globally and that is literally a piece of cardboard you put your phone in.

Enter Samsung Gear 360 VR camera
The Gear 360 VR is Samsung’s own solution to the VR content problem, it is a 360-degree VR camera that you can control wirelessly. It has two wide angle cameras that are computationally stitched together and then remove key-stoning in order to give a natural 360 appearance. It has a removable battery and microSD storage. It also has the ability to stream directly to the Gear VR headset or the Galaxy S7 for control purposes. Samsung has created this camera as an integrated solution that allows for both the creation and consumption of VR content on their phones with the Gear VR headset.

Hands-on with the Gear 360 VR
In order to use it you have to open the Samsung Galaxy S7 application, choose to take a photo or video and then preview it on the phone. This preview is streamed directly over Wi-Fi and all you have to do is hit record and it will record locally onto the camera. It also allows you to import it wirelessly through the application onto the phone.


High quality preview (Photo credit: Patrick Moorhead)

It stitches the video together in what seems like real-time and creates a pretty seamless solution for a mobile experience. Alternatively, if you aren’t desperately in need of having content immediately on the go, you can always move the content over to the PC via SD card and edit it there. What makes this camera great is that you can watch the content on your Gear VR, your phone or even your PC, the choice is yours. It wasn’t necessarily the highest quality video I’ve seen before, but the novelty of it distracted me from concerns or thoughts of quality.


Transferring video from camera to phone (Photo credit: Patrick Moorhead)

Potential Gear VR 360 use cases
Having this camera in normal daily situations could actually prove pretty useful for a lot of applications, which is probably what Samsung Electronics is banking on. It could be used for weddings, birthday parties, graduations, actual births, you can now record the entire reaction of everyone in the room rather than having to focus on just one person. It can also be used for educational purposes like hands on activities where seeing the surroundings is extremely valuable like geography and nature. It could also be used by real estate agents to show what a property looks like to remote buyers or simply for previewing purposes. It can also be useful in sporting events and outdoor activities where there is always more going on than meets the eye at first glance.


(Photo credit: Patrick Moorhead)

I am sure there will be plenty of peripherals and wearable applications for these 360-degree VR cameras and the great thing about tech is that someone will eventually invent something really cool for this class of camera.

Gear VR still hasn’t fixed VR “sick”
Even though this camera is really fun and easy to use, consuming its content could still prove problematic for some. The Gear VR still has a chance of making you sick. This is due to the fact that they haven’t added strobing to the HMD or the phone to compensate for lag. As a result, there are still some situations where a user could find themselves getting sick if the content is too intense.

HMD maker IonVR has done a lot of work on their headset to reduce sickness and increase the satisfaction of the experience.

Wrapping up
VR is the hot new thing and everyone is jumping aboard, some companies have already jumped on-board and others are just getting on. Samsung Electronics has already been committed to VR with their Gear VR, but they are furthering their commitment to VR by creating a 360 VR camera, the Gear 360 VR. This is because even though we have VR headsets, there still isn’t enough content out there to make it a compelling experience for many. The Samsung Electronics Gear 360 VR camera could help solve that content problem by helping users to easily create 360-degree VR content and consume it and share it.

There are other 360-degree VR cameras out there already and others in development, but Samsung’s commitment shows that they are committed to helping move VR forward. This includes pricing it according to what the market is willing to absorb, which means it needs to be $199 or less in order to drive serious volume. My personal experience was that it was better than I expected, but there are still some issues on the mobile HMD side for Samsung Electronics that could still cause nausea. I haven’t used the Gear 360 VR for any extended periods of time, but the short amount of time that I did get at MWC 2016 was a mostly positive experience.

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The Future of Wearable Tech

The Future of Wearable Tech
by Raj Kosaraju on 05-09-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: IoT, Mobile

Today, the wearable device market is a nascent, but growing one. There are about 160 unique wearable devices on the market, and IDTechEx predicts wearables will grow to a $70 billion market in the next ten years. The future of wearables, which includes activity trackers, smartwatches, smartglasses and embedded sensors in clothing, is quickly evolving and changing to reflect technological advances and new products available in the marketplace. Health-related wearables, particularly those for seniors and babies, and for monitoring sleep and health conditions, constituted a large segment of the new devices. The most popular devices will be smartwatches and fitness trackers.

Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 274.6 million wearable electronic devices will be sold worldwide in 2016, an increase of 18.4 percent from 232.0 million units in 2015 (see Table 1). Sales of wearable electronic devices will generate revenue of $28.7 billion in 2016. Of that, $11.5 billion will be from smartwatches.

“From 2015 through 2017, smartwatch adoption will have 48 percent growth largely due to Apple popularizing wearables as a lifestyle trend. Smartwatches have the greatest revenue potential among all wearables through 2019, reaching $17.5 billion,”

Table 1: Forecast for Wearable Devices Worldwide (Millions of Units)
[TABLE]
|-
| Device
| 2015
| 2016
| 2017
|-
| Smartwatch
| 30.32
| 50.40
| 66.71
|-
| Head-mounted display
| 0.14
| 1.43
| 6.31
|-
| Body-worn camera
| 0.05
| 0.17
| 1.05
|-
| Bluetooth headset
| 116.32
| 128.50
| 139.23
|-
| Wristband
| 30.15
| 34.97
| 44.10
|-
| Smart garment
| 0.06
| 1.01
| 5.30
|-
| Chest strap
| 12.88
| 13.02
| 7.99
|-
| Sports watch
| 21.02
| 23.98
| 26.92
|-
| Other fitness monitor
| 21.07
| 21.11
| 25.08
|-
| Total
| 232.01
| 274.59
| 322.69
|-

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

Here are some 10 new opportunities for Wearables Technology in the forthcoming years:

1) Big Opportunity: According to PwC, companies in the EMC industries have perhaps the largest opportunity for advancement and growth in the wearable technology market. Basically, where there’s a screen, there’s an opportunity – and if projections that sales of wearables could reach 130 million units in 2018 are correct, that opportunity is big.

2) Choose a Device by Human Touch: Consumers may need a human touch to help them choose a device and its associated apps. An “apps formulary” of apps vetted by medical teams (and available in a virtual apps pharmacy) could help consumers wade through the thousands of health apps and devices.

3) Social Media Benefit of Wearables: As social media becomes more fundamental to the way we receive information and interact with others, consumers want wearable technology to offer anytime/anywhere access to their favorite networks. This is especially true among millennials, who were three times as likely as the general population to list real-time social media updates as an important benefit of wearables.

4) Chronic diseases led to the growth of wearable technology :The increasing demands from consumers and medical application have also led to the growth of wearable technology in the Americas. Other factors promoting the growth of the market are increasing incidences of chronic diseases, diabetes patients, and ease of use. While fitness bands, smart watches and other wearables are already established in the market, many of them have under-delivered on expectations.


5) Wearable Technology can be used for Capturing Data:Wearable data can be used by insurers and employers to better manage health, wellness and healthcare costs, by pharmaceutical and life sciences companies to run more robust clinical trials, and by healthcare providers to capture data to support outcomes-based reimbursement. The market for wearable technology is on the rise owing to growing demand from younger demographics and the high computing power wearable devices provide in a relatively small and compact size. They have linked their fitness watches, heart monitors and other wearable health devices to an iPhone app that is sending valuable information thousands of miles away. But it will be critical to address the consumer concerns such as cost, privacy, and ease of use.

6) Increasing attention from health-conscious consumers: From smart wristwatches that record heart rates to intelligent bands that track physical activities; wearable technology in the form of fitness monitoring devices attract increasing attention from health-conscious consumers The two main purposes of wearable technology are to monitor various bodily markers and to keep the user connected to the digital world by syncing to parent electronic devices such as smartphones. Within the former, some wearable devices can also compute data gained from the markers they monitor and take actions such as drug delivery in response.

7) Emerging Value Propositions: Many leading companies have already launched smartwatches and wrist bands. It is expected that with major companies foraying into the market such as Apple and Samsung, the look and feel for wearables would increase immensely. Wristband providers are experimenting with how to compete with smartwatches and take market share from the market leader, Fitbit. Examples of emerging value propositions for wristbands beyond fitness include mobile payments, access, safety, wellness and health.

8) Fitness wearables: Include wristbands, smart garments, chest straps, sports watches and other fitness monitors continue to increase in popularity, driven in some part by U.S. wellness programs. In 2016, looking forward smartwatches will have stronger appeal with consumers as they typically have more multifunctional devices that can track exercise.

9) Bringing New Technologies: As trust is a key concern with consumers in the wearables space, enterprises will need to be consistently transparent with what they do with data and how they use it. The technology is based on organic electronics and makes possible the manufacture of flexible displays and sensors. It has applications in a wide range of consumer products including wearables and mobile devices, and industries including automotive, biometrics and healthcare. This technology is not limited to wearable devices. It can be integrated into mobile devices, car interiors, digital signage and other applications that will benefit from creative designs, more functionality and unbreakable screens.

10) Embrace Wearable Technology: To effectively embrace wearable technology, businesses must put the user at the center of the activity, reshaping an entire enterprise and its capabilities system around the customer or user experience. Currently, wearable technology is mostly limited to the wrist, but thanks to flexible electronics it can be transferred to almost any other surface such as clothing, accessories and shoes. From devices and apps that help you track heart rate and food consumption details to gadgets that monitor your mood and even surrounding air, the “quantified self” is a reality for the everyday person.

In Closing,
To effectively embrace wearable technology, businesses must put the user at the center of the activity, reshaping an entire enterprise and its capabilities system around the customer or user experience. I saw a product which not only tells the time, but it has a connected GPS, Fitbit says it will monitor your heart rate and lets you oversee your phone’s music, calendar, texts and caller ID. Enables you from smart shoes that purport to advise you on your “foot strike zone” to a wearable that checks your pulse during workouts. Large-scale investigations using data collected from millions of wearable devices will provide valuable insights that could help cure or manage major diseases. These studies have been made possible because of the advanced gyroscopes, accelerometers, barometers and other sensors contained in modern wearable devices and smartphones.

As market analyst and research firm CSC Insight says sales of wearables will grow from 29 million in 2014 to 172 million in 2018, with a spike in 2015. Fitbit and Jawbone will continue to dominate the wearables market. They expect sales of fitness and activity devices to double in 2016 to 40 million units. The overall market for wearable technology is expected to reach USD 31.27 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 17.8% between 2015 and 2020. As with any digital strategy, adopting wearable technology requires taking the long view. It’s looking down a path on which IT is a driving force, directly impacting the technology industry. Wearable tech products are increasingly being designed with business applications in mind, with the promise of improving workplace productivity and the overall efficiency of organizations.

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Car Leasing, Car Sharing Don’t Mix

Car Leasing, Car Sharing Don’t Mix
by Roger C. Lanctot on 05-08-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

Not to be outdone by General Motors with its investment in Lyft, its acquisition of Cruise and its launch of Maven, BMW is in the process of relaunching and expanding the DriveNow car share service in the U.S. and may soon provide aftermarket hardware to enable Mini lessees to rent their cars, according to a Bloomberg report.

“BMW to Let Car Owners Rent Out Vehicles Like ‘Airbnb on Wheels”

Bloomberg says Mini plans soon “to make its new cars available with devices that enable owners to rent out their vehicles … the system includes features that accept payment and track the vehicle to make sure the renter doesn’t go for a one-way joyride.” Further details regarding the add-on system were not available, although the functional description is reminiscent of Berlin startup Carzapp’s device for car sharing applications.

The news arrives in connection with the Beijing Auto Show, though it’s not clear what geography will first see the new device. My heart sank, though, when I read the words of a senior Mini executive: “…there’ll be others who’ll love the idea of halving their leasing rate.”

There are some excellent value propositions in car sharing – especially if you own your car. There are some excellent value propositions in car leasing – especially if you like driving a new car every 2-3 years. But leasing and sharing do not go together.

Leasing is a very popular option for drivers of German luxury cars. According to U.S. car shopping service Cartelligent the Mini Hardtop is the fifth most frequently leased vehicle. It is exceeded in leasing popularity by the BMW 3 Series – third most frequently leased (70%), according to Cartelligent.

Leasing is on the rise in the U.S. according to figures shared last year by Experian. Some leasing analysts have noted that the typical 2-3-year leases are starting to extend to four and five years.

Leasing a car is one of those things that your friends and family members tell you to NEVER DO! I usually listen to that advice, but since I have a BMW in a long-term lease right now, I can tell you I did not listen and I am not happy and I watch my car’s mileage carefully. I do not want to get dinged for per-mile charges over and above my annual limit.

By the way, I am also notorious (to my wife and sons) for parking in remote areas of parking lots – not wanting to acquire any door dents or rim scrapes that might crop up during the inspection when I return the vehicle at the end of the lease. Can a lessee count on a car sharer to be so careful with the vehicle? I don’t think so.

Share it if you own it, not if you lease it, I say.

Adding an aftermarket device to a leased Mini or BMW is the equivalent of attaching an explosive device to the customer’s credit report. It is not a good idea. It is not a good business model. It is not a good marketing practice.

If the test of Mini car sharing goes well, Bloomberg reports, BMW will expand the offer to the parent brand. It’s all part of BMW’s larger plan to become a mobility company. It may take time for a determination to be reached regarding the program’s success, but I can say without equivocation: car leasing and car sharing do not mix. It’s only hip up until the point that someone bends a rim.

Roger C. Lanctot is Associate Director in the Global Automotive Practice at Strategy Analytics. More details about Strategy Analytics can be found here: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/automotive#.VuGdXfkrKUk