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November 29, 2015

My Life at Fairchild Semiconductor – 1979

My Life at Fairchild Semiconductor – 1979
by Mark Rioux on 11-29-2015 at 8:00 pm
Categories: Foundries

This week it was announced that Fairchild Semiconductor was sold to On Semiconductor for $2.4B. The end of an era. As I look back at my career of 36 years with the only company that I have worked for since graduating college, I can’t help but feel a bit sad but extremely grateful for the wonderful experience that Fairchild has provided to me. It has been a wild ride but I wouldn’t trade it for any other career on the face of the Earth.

Please allow me to reminisce….

The day was Monday, June 4, 1979. I had just graduated from the University of Maine at Orono with a BSEE degree. I was 22 years old, a young, wide-eyed kid raised from a large family (5 brothers and one sister and two great parents) in Lewiston, Maine. It was my first day of work at Fairchild Camera and Instrument located at 333 Western Avenue in South Portland, the exact same location that I will be retiring from on March 4, 2016 at 8:05am. This factory is the oldest semiconductor fabrication site in existence, starting operations in 1962.

I was one of many new engineers to report for work that week. The business climate was strong and the semiconductor market was growing rapidly. My first stop was HR, where I was given basic orientation on the work requirements and company benefits. A guy by the name of Peter Wiberg was the HR Manager and my boss was Mike Pawlik who was the Engineering Supervisor in charge of the Diffusion Fabrication area. Mike was an excellent supervisor and engineering talent. Shortly into my new job, He spent a week with me working on second shift, providing personalized one-on-one training. It was probably the most significant week of my entire career. I learned a tremendous amount about fabrication processing, parametric testing (measuring transistor beta, BVcbo and LVceo, etc.) and people. At that time, approximately 2000 people worked at the factory of roughly 100,000 sq. ft and I was proud and excited to be among the workforce. Today, the workforce has been reduced to less than 300.

I was hired to be a sustaining Process Engineer in charge of the Diffusion area for the 3″ Class 100 Fab. My starting salary was $16,800/yr. At that time, the fab had a start level of approximately 13,000 wafers per week and we ran TTL, Low Power and Standard Schottky logic products that had minimum feature sizes in the range of 4um – 7um. Our new technology was FAST logic, which was semi-recessed locos oxide isolated that offered tremendous speed power performance benefits relative our junction isolated technologies.

The Diffusion area used Thermco furnaces which had all copper plumbing (not stainless steel) with leak-prone swagelok fittings. Gas flows in the diffusion tubes were regulated using manual flowmeters as mass flow controllers were not developed as yet. This was the era before ion implantation so all semiconductor dopants were sourced through diffusion predeposition processes. antimony trioxide (Sb2O3) and arsine gas (AsH3) was used for bipolar collectors, boron nitride (BN) and boron trichloride (BCL3) to form base junctions and phosphorus oxychloride (POCL3) used to form emitter regions. Diborane (B2H6) was used for junction isolation. Each of these predeposition processes were quite unique in how they introduced dopant to the silicon surface. Although these dopants were quite hazardous and potentially deadly to work with, we did not have all the safety interlocking systems that are commonplace today but we did educate the workforce on the material properties of the dopants and the need to follow strict procedures.

Silicon wafers were loaded onto long quartz ladders using stainless steel tweezers (imagine the contamination induced) and the loaded ladders were then slid onto a carrier (quartz lined stainless steel) that would enable the operators to carry the ladder from a loading station to the diffusion tube. The wafers were then slid into the the furnace manually using a long quartz push rod. Once loaded, the operator capped the tube using a quartz end cap that had a hole to direct exhaust gases to the vestibule exhaust of the furnace.

Equipment and processes were significantly more manual than the advanced equipment of today. Of course wafer and die yields were very low by today’s standards. The average bank of diffusion furnaces cost far less than $100K.

We did have cleanroom garments that consisted of lab coats and booties and hairnets.

The office area of that time was quite different than today. The floors were all tile and we had cubicles that housed 6 to 8 desks. It was common for people to smoke cigarettes at their desk and ashtrays were commonplace. We had no PCs as they hadn’t been invented yet. There were no cell phones, no beepers, no emails. When we wanted to contact someone, we called their name on the intercom and asked them to call our number. When we wanted to write a report, we wrote the report and gave it to the secretary to type up and distribute. When a correction had to be made, they used white-out and typed over the mistake. When the fab had to communicate to the assembly sites overseas, they used teletype (TWX) machines to send written information. Phone service was typically not used as it was prohibitively expensive.

I could go on but you get the idea. The industry has seen much change since 1979 and I feel extremely fortunate for the great opportunity and career that Fairchild has provided me.

…more to come.

2016 Samsung IoT Smart Home Strategy Perspectives from Patents

2016 Samsung IoT Smart Home Strategy Perspectives from Patents
by Alex G. Lee on 11-29-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: IoT

Samsung launched the first fully integrated smart home system Samsung SmartThings for providing the home automation and safety services to make people’s daily lives easier, more comfortable and safe. Followings show the insights regarding Samsung strategy perspectives for providing other value added services to make Samsung as the smart home market leader in 2016.

Personal Cloud
In general, cloud computing resources are managed by a separate resource provider, such as a large data center, and include computing processor, memory, storage, development platforms, and application programs. Even if users can use the cloud service through the Internet anytime or anywhere without specialized technical knowledge, personal cloud solution is advantageous in some IoT (Internet of Things) applications (e.g., in case that the space for storing personalized content is required).
US20140195805 illustrates the personal cloud system for sharing content in the IoT smart home application. Since the cloud service shares the cloud server, the privacy issue can occur. For example, since many IoT devices can be used in the smart home, there may exist for sharing contents between family members. Therefore, a need exists for sharing contents between the IoT devices keeping each family member’s privacy by using the personal cloud device installed in the smart home.

Home Energy Management
Recently published Samsung patent applications indicate that Samsung is developing the smart home energy management solution. For example, US20150330652 illustrated the temperature control method and device of a heating/ventilation/air-conditioning (HVAC) system for efficiently saving energy. The method includes determining occupancy or non-occupancy of a user in a space subject to temperature control. When the user’s non-occupancy is determined, the temperature control device determines whether to start the temperature control based on probability distribution of a non-occupancy period that is predetermined. When it is determined to start the temperature control, the temperature control device determines the user’s target temperature based on previously collected data, calculates a setback temperature based on the target temperature, and performs temperature control according to the calculated setback temperature.

Considering the strong patent portfolio backed market leadership by Google (Nest Lab) and Honeywell in the home energy management, Samsung may exploit the strategic acquisition option. A good acquisition candidate will be a home energy management startup that holds the strong patent portfolio (for a good acquisition candidate, please see my article titled “Internet of Things (IoT) M&A Target Candidates Insights from Patents”).

Personalized Service
US20150330805 illustrates the system for providing location-based personalized information by using user location history information. User location history information can be stored in the smart home IoT devices (e.g., smart TV), the wearable devices, or other computing devices within an area where the user may directly control the device. User location history information can also be stored in a personal cloud server, service provider server, or public cloud server.

US20150327023 illustrates the avatar device to detect a movement of a user and provide the smart home service according to the movement of the user. The avatar device is wearable by a user, stores user information, and has communication functionality. An example of the avatar device is a smart watch associated with a smart phone. The user can wear the avatar device in a particular space and use a service device for the user service according to a signal from the smart phone.

Coming to a Workstation Near You: Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Standard

Coming to a Workstation Near You: Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Standard
by Ellie Burns on 11-29-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: Accellera, EDA, Semiconductor Services, Siemens EDA

Portable Stimulus has become such a popular standards topic of late that I thought it would be good to take a break this month from my low power series to bring you, my valued readers, more information about it from one of my colleagues, Dennis Brophy, who is working to help drive development of this standard within Accellera. I’ll be back in December to continue my low power series.

Ellie, thank you for the opportunity to share details on the standardization of Portable Stimulus — an emerging standard that is set to offer a quantum boost in verification efficiency and expand the reach of vertical reuse in the design process. I along with many others in the industry are engaged in the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group to make sure this happens in a way that is most beneficial to all of our customers.

First I should share a little history about how this came about and why we wanted to collaborate with others to drive development of this standard. Around DVCon 2014, Mentor Graphics approached Accellera with a proposal for a new standard building upon some unique verification technology. We wanted this technology to benefit from the next level of openness, standardization, and, most importantly, interoperability to promote expanded use by the design and verification community. To start the process, Accellera initiated a Proposed Standards Working Groupthat allowed everyone who wished to participate to come together to determine if it made sense to form a formal working group, which would create the standard.

At Mentor Graphics we were prepared to commit our technology to seed the standard’s development as we have seen customers gain a ten-fold increase in coverage closure by using it to exhaustively cover a device’s state space more rapidly. So we knew this would be highly beneficial. However, in real-world design verification, users often need to share their verification descriptions with others whom they may have business relationships. After all, most modern SoCs are comprised of blocks from numerous sources or companies that are not all guaranteed to be users of our technology. This posed an interoperability problem that a standard could help address.

The Accellera team recognized that the ability to express specific intent and behaviors should also be reusable across different target platforms; such as emulation, simulation, FPGA prototyping, post-silicon, and more. It was also not lost on Accellera, or those practicing functional verification today, that several different languages and techniques are used to generate verification stimulus, depending on whether one is working at the block-level, subsystem, SoC, or the system-level. It is also well understood that embedded software plays a key role to drive stimulus in SoC and system-level environments; yet current languages offer little, if anything, to adequately support this.

The Portable Stimulus Working Group (PSWG) was approved as an official working group at the end of 2014 and has been in full operation all of 2015. First, the group gathered requirements and called for contributions. In response, several companies offered technology that fulfilled many of the requirements. In this process, one fundamental technology Mentor Graphics contributed was our graph-based test specification, as offered in our inFact™ solution. Even better than a contribution from us alone, Cadence Design Systems and Breker also contributed, setting the stage for a standard that can be practiced by several suppliers for the benefit of all consumers.

The involvement of multiple solution suppliers and the success of solutions already in the market that are advancing design verification efficiency are two big reasons Portable Stimulus presentations have led to packed conference events – such as the last two DVCon India conferences. At DVCon India 2014, Portable Stimulus was the talk of the event. And at DVCon India 2015, the early-morning, birds-of-a-feather, pre-conference meeting saw a full room – and a commitment by those attending to brave the traffic and extra-early morning departures to reach the venue.

As many share my opinion that graph-based verification methods will usher in the next level of verification efficiency and that Accellera’s Portable Stimulus standard will help this happen, some may wonder what the basis for this opinion is. As mentioned earlier, at Mentor Graphics we have direct proof of this efficiency from our practice today. And the industry knows that a graph-based specification format is not new to verification. It is based on the standard Backus-Naur Form (BNF), pioneered by IBM, and has been used by many companies to automate compiler testing.

An example of an instruction set graph (top level)

The task at hand now is to ensure that the use of the Portable Stimulus notation emerging from Accellera can address the group’s requirements such that it will improve vertical reuse and support the design verification environments, methodologies, and languages in use today. Accellera working groups are membership-based development activities. You will find some public information at the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group website, but the vast majority of detailed technical information and deliberation on contributions requires membership.

Given the fast pace of requirements gathering and review of technology contributions, my guess is there will be more public information for non-members in 2016, so they can also learn more about this important emerging standard.

In advance of public information from Accellera, we already have lots of material for you at mentor.com and the Verification Academy.

A couple of good resources are a paper on how a portable stimulus specification can be applied to make instruction-stream generation simpler, A New Stimulus Model for CPU Instruction Sets,on the Mentor Graphics Functional Verification web site.

And the video, New School Stimulus Generation Techniques, puts a spotlight on Mentor’s Questa inFact graph-based portable stimulus tool.

November 28, 2015

How to Gain Low-Power at High-Performance

How to Gain Low-Power at High-Performance
by Pawan Fangaria on 11-28-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Arm, EDA, Events

In a world of smart devices, high performance is required in order to address several specific needs such as intelligent and immediate data processing for IoT applications, instant response from mobile devices, highly interactive user interfaces, and so on. Most of these devices are battery operated and hence require lower power consumption. Designers are challenged with lowering power consumption in devices without impacting their performance.

There are several techniques, already evolved and still evolving to reduce SoC power consumption by various means such as technology trade-off, hardware design, software design, and using automated tools to measure, analyze and optimize power. However, to get the best out of all these methods a designer or software developer needs to know what to do when and where during the SoC development.

I am pleased to see a detailed presentation in ARM TechConon low-power MCU (Microcontroller) design by Dung Dang, an expert in ultra-low-power architecture and application software design from Texas Instruments. Dung provided actual tips which can be used while developing low-power hardware and software designs.

The MCU vendors typically choose an optimal process node which can provide lowest energy consumption out of leakage and active currents at the best possible operating frequency for the device. Then there is voltage threshold, V[SUB]th[/SUB] for transistors which plays a very important role in trade-off between performance and power. Advanced MCUs use a combination of transistors with different threshold voltages; standard SV[SUB]th[/SUB] for active peripherals and high HV[SUB]th[/SUB] (that exhibits lowest performance and power) for standby logic.

To reduce the overall active power, the power rail can be split into multiple voltage levels. The rail at higher voltage, Vcc can feed the circuit that requires high voltage such as I/O and analog. The lower voltage, Vcore rail can feed core CPU and digital logic.

There is a choice of voltage regulators to generate Vcore. The Low-dropout linear regulator (LDO) is simple to design, cost effective with smaller footprint, and robust; the generated rail is relatively noise-free. The DC/DC converter has ~60% power saving compared to LDO and has higher efficiency (75 – 90%) for moderate to high loads. However, the DC/DC converter has higher noise.

There are also some other design improvements which can be done in the SoCs to reduce power consumption.

The active duty-cycle can be minimized for faster CPU speed, and standby power can be reduced through several techniques such as lower leakage process technology, cell optimization, power gating of idle circuit, turning off idle memory banks, and so on. Low-power UART, I2C, Timer, etc. can be used for low-power peripheral system. The peripherals can be divided into power domains and high-power, high-frequency domains can be gated off during standby. Also, separate power domains can be designed for HV[SUB]th[/SUB] and SV[SUB]th[/SUB]; HV[SUB]th[/SUB] can be used for low-speed peripherals and SV[SUB]th[/SUB] for high-speed peripherals. Only HV[SUB]th[/SUB] gates can be enabled during standby.

To minimize active power one can employ special frequency mode in MCUs and use low-current output power sources. Hardware accelerators can be employed for compute intensive functions such as Advance Encryption System (AES) or CRC, FPU, and DSP engines. Use of DMA can also reduce power consumption.

While there are ample opportunities to reduce power in hardware, there are many techniques that can be applied at the code level in software to reduce power. Highly optimized software can be developed on ARMCortex[SUP]®[/SUP]-M series of processors that can have smaller binaries to fit in smaller devices, consume lesser power and run faster.

It’s important to review the ARM processor architecture to know what is available to leverage on to reduce power consumption. For example, floating point operations should be avoided if FPU is not available on the MCU; unaligned data access should be avoided. On the other hand, the architecture should be utilized to the maximum extent, e.g. use as large variables as the native architecture permits.

For efficient embedded software, special care should be taken in the code, for example using bitmask instead of bit-field; using DMA for repetitive transfer instead of ‘for loop’ or ‘memcpy ()’; terminating unused I/Os; using compiler to build tight loops fitting in MCU cache or buffer.

There are efficient ‘C’ coding techniques on ARM processors available from ARM and elsewhere; a detailed guideline can be found HERE.

Also, there are vendors providing optimized libraries for specific MCUs. These libraries are pre-built with all kinds of optimizations taken into account with specific compiler settings. Some MCUs have built-in ROM libraries that are faster and consume lesser energy compared to Flash or even cache memories. Depending on the amount of task and ROI involved one can decide which way to proceed.

The developers can also use various tools to measure, analyze, and debug various parameters in order to optimize power. Texas Instruments provides ULP Advisor, a code analysis tool that can help developers spotting code inefficiencies. EnergyTrace++[SUP]TM[/SUP] is an efficient energy measurement and debugging system for microcontrollers that can track current, CPU and peripheral states, and identify power black holes.

The MCU developers have a great opportunity to leverage process technology, hardware and software design, and tools to develop low-power and high-performance MCUs, a critical need for today’s electronic systems.

Pawan Kumar Fangaria
Founder & President at www.fangarias.com

November 28, 2015

Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off

Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off
by Bernard Murphy on 11-28-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: IoT

In the wave of enthusiasm surrounding the IoT, medical applications are often held up as an obvious and compelling area where applications cannot fail to succeed. I beg to differ. I think there are two important reasons why almost no such applications will succeed, at least not in the way we seem to be approaching them today.

The first is based on the very wide gap between the IoT community and the medical community, compounded by a very tall barrier of regulation which any practical solution must clear. There is a “Field of Dreams” feel about this – if we (the innovators) build it, they (the doctors) will come. But that’s backwards from how innovation happens in pretty much any field. You start with a serious domain-specific problem and tentative domain-specific solutions, in this case developed and refined in a research/teaching hospital. Then you work with a partner well versed in all the regulatory hurdles (perhaps GE), to build a solution. Hardware and software come in somewhere along that path, but they don’t drive development.

There are certainly popular novelty applications with a health veneer (fitness bands for example) which are not held to these standards. But neither are they likely to be very successful outside a niche community. The information they provide is interesting, but not especially actionable, which will make it difficult to sustain interest even among early adopters and almost impossible to expand to broader markets.

The second reason is even more important. The IoT raison d’être is to generate Terabytes of data which we will distill to extract wisdom. But Eric Klein at Lemnos Labs has commented that generating and distilling is not enough. We will not have useful solutions until we also create or influence change. In the field of health management, I completely agree. Take obesity as a test problem. This is an epidemic in the West and a real solution would be immensely valuable, but surely we don’t lack for data. We have books, magazines, TV shows, apps and a $60B weight-loss market focused on this single problem – with no apparent success. The problem is not a lack of data; it is a lack of motivation. In this example, motivation must be immediate and must be designed intimately around human psychology. It should reinforce good behaviors and (within reason) provide negative feedback on bad behaviors. Again, you cannot even conceive of a useful solution until you fully understand the problem and what it will take to correct (not just describe) the problem.

While I understand the desire to push the IoT forward as fast as we can, at least in the medical domain we need to step back and focus first on problems, not solutions. I wrote a blog some time ago where I proposed a wearable solution targeting obesity which seems to violate the cardinal requirement of an IoT device – it does not connect to the Internet. Whether or not this particular solution would be successful, it illustrates that perhaps real problems are not always well aligned with how we define IoT paradigms today and force-fitting the problem to the solution is unlikely to secure a path forward. You can read the blog HERE.

IoT M&A Target Candidates Insights from Patents

IoT M&A Target Candidates Insights from Patents
by Alex G. Lee on 11-27-2015 at 4:00 pm
Categories: IoT

Smart Home Energy Management
Ecofactor provides automated energy savings, comfort and control through energy efficiency, demand response and HVAC performance monitoring services. Ecofactor holds 26 issued US patents including one design patent regarding thermostat. In assessment of the commercial importance (e.g., potential commercial implementation or licensing potential), Ecofactor patents ranked second following Samsung Electronics among top 10 innovators in the smart home patent landscape research.

Allure Energy is a smart home energy management company based in Austin, Texas. Allure Energy develops leading-edge smart energy management solutions for many IoT applications. Allure Energy holds 22 issued US patents. Significant number of forward citations shows the high quality of the family patents. Especially, many patents of most key industry players including Google (Nest Lab), GE and Honeywell in the smart energy management heavily cited Allure Energy patents.

Smart Home Automation
Neura provides the intelligence IoT platform and human-centered smart home application solutions. Neura patent application US20150019714 illustrates the adaptable autonomous smart home system. The adaptable autonomous smart home system can recognize the contextual or semantic profiling of a person or place or devices (physical environment) based on sensed data by the IoT devices. The adaptable autonomous smart home system determines particular interpretation instructions (define particular IoT device control rules) that are associated with the particular physical environment and dynamically updates the control rules for changing physical environment.

Pie Digital provides cloud-based services for smart home applications. Pie Digital patent application US20140201340 illustrates the smart home system that can dramatically simplify and automate the configuration, maintenance and integration of the IoT devices in the home and office.

Smart Home Personal Care
Jibo provides the world’s first social robot for the home. Jibo patent application US20140277735 illustrates the friendly, helpful and intelligent home robot that can adapt to reside continually in the environment of a person and to interact with a user. Jibo can provide emotional engagement with the user. Jibo can sense and respond and learn as the user engage with Jibo.

Affectiva is an emotion sensing technology company that grew out of MIT’s Media Lab. Affectiva patent application US20140200463 illustrates a practical possibility of implementation of emotion-aware smart home IoT applications by determining well-being status from an analysis of facial information and physiological information of an individual.

Connected Cars
INRIX analyzes traffic and movement data from 100’s of data sources including the most robust crowd-sourced network of 175 million vehicles and devices. INRIX patent application US20150035666 illustrates the system for monitoring the user driving behavior in various driving contexts, and presenting driving suggestions of alternative driving behaviors. The presentation of the alternative driving behaviors to the user can facilitate changes in user driving behavior that improve the safety, efficiency, and/or comfort of the driving experience.

Zubie was formed in 2012 as a joint venture between Best Buy and Open Air Equity Partners. Since began with a focus on connected car applications for consumers in the US, and has expanded globally into services for insurers, small businesses, large fleets and auto dealers.

US20140167983 illustrates an integration of the smart home and connected car system. Smart home system includes home smart appliance networks, home smart energy systems, smart lighting system and others. The smart home system can include sensors or components that are physically located at different places throughout the home and are in communication with a central “command center” that consolidates information from each of the sensor/components whether a particular entry door, window, or garage door is opened, or whether a motion sensor has sensed any motion, or whether a particular light or set of lights is off/on or a current temperature of the house

Connected Healthcare
Bobo Analytics is a smart healthcare technology and data analytics company for performance optimization. Bobo Analytics patent application US20140073486 illustrates the physiological measurement systems for continuous health and fitness monitoring. A lightweight wearable system is provided to collect various physiological data continuously from a wearer without the need for a chest strap. The system also enables monitoring of the physiological parameters in addition to heart rate including body temperature, heart rate variability, motion, sleep, stress, fitness level, recovery level, effect of a workout routine on health, caloric expenditure. The system enables automatic interpretation of the physiological parameters to assess the cardiovascular intensity experienced by a user.

Hello builds hardware and software to help people live better through understanding themselves and the world around them. Founded in 2012 and based in San Francisco, California. Hello is a team of designers, engineers, and operations staff. US20140249760 illustrates the system including wearable or portable monitoring device that can detect user’s activities, behaviors, habit information, and health. The monitoring system determines user’s melanin level.

IoT Security
Zscaler is a global cloud-based information security company. Zscaler patent application US20140208426 illustrates the system for dynamic cloud-based malware behavior analysis. The cloud-based behavioral analysis system includes nodes that communicatively coupled to the users. The nodes perform inline monitoring and malware detection and preclusion.

IoT Big Data Analytics
Bit Stew Systems provides the premier platform for handling complex data integration, data analysis, and predictive automation for connected devices on the Industrial Internet. In the electricity supply industry, a typical advanced metering infrastructure network comprises millions of smart meters, each containing multiple hardware and software elements, sending hundreds of millions of data points per day through a variety of communications networks to an array of back-office systems. Bit Stew Systems patent application US20150213035 illustrates the big data analytics system for organizing, searching and accessing data created by multiple disparate data sources within a utility supply system.

Cloud for IoT
EVRYTHNGprovides the IoT cloud platform that connects any consumer product to the Web and manages real-time data to drive applications. EVRYTHNG patent application US20140181256 illustrates the system that can compute the object identifier and contextual information based on pre-defined set of rules and map the object identifier and contextual information to an entry point associated with a specific computer application. The system provides access to the specific the application to the end-user through the cloud services.

IoT FinTech
PayRange provides the credit card solutions for machines. PayRange patent application US20150227928 illustrates the mobile-device-to-machine payment system for facilitating a cost-effective and easy-to-use cashless transaction for purchase of products or services by a user from a payment accepting unit such as vending, parking meters, luggage carts, transit ticketing, laundromats and amusement.

Mentor takes IoT devices to cloud and back

Mentor takes IoT devices to cloud and back
by Don Dingee on 11-27-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Arm, EDA, IoT, Siemens EDA

Walking into the Mentor Graphics booth at ARM TechCon, I was greeted by my friends Warren Kurisu and Shay Benchorin. It was good to see them both again. They were poised in front of a table with a Samsung tablet and a small Wi-Fi-ish box, next to a large Samsung printer. The demonstration was similar to a lobby check-in process, where I typed my name in a form on the tablet and the printer soon delivered a personalized welcome sheet.

It doesn’t sound all that cool until you realize what’s going on at the system level. Shay lamented that even his own management team didn’t quite understand what they were seeing. (Wally and Greg, if you’re reading this – take it from a IoT guy, this is exciting stuff.) After 4 years of incubation, Mentor is ready to take on a new business, combining their expertise in embedded software, board layout, and services, and leveraging key partnerships to do something about a big gap in IoT offerings.

I’ve mentioned the evolving IoT gateway requirements before, dealing with multi-protocol, long lifecycle platforms embracing provisioning and security features. The problem people keep running into with less flexible gateway designs (looking right at Intel “Moon Island” platforms) is customization, especially being able to add and certify wireless solutions. Most of the other approaches leave some expansion slot and ask the customer to have at it for anything past Wi-Fi.

Mentor’s first step is collaborating with Freescale to create a customizable gateway reference design for intelligent IoT gateways. The little Wi-Fi-ish box was actually a packaged quad-core i.MX6 design, complete with a thermal management solution where the enclosure contacts a heat spreader on the SoC when the board slides in. The board comes in a couple versions, with the usual gateway stuff down on the board: USB, HDMI, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4 radio.

Layered on the hardware platform is what Mentor calls a SysDK. It contains both the Nucleus RTOS and Mentor Embedded Linux side by side, with middleware and integration with Icon Labs Floodgate firewall technology. Mentor has also done some integration with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator to help with provisioning and security.

Those two pieces are what I’d expect from the Mentor embedded business. Since 2009 when Mentor purchased Embedded Alley for Linux to go along with their purchase of Accelerated Technology in 2002, Mentor has been building capability including adding CodeSourcery in 2010. There has always been a deep relationship with Freescale, who is more than happy to accept help in developing reference platforms around their processors with software support.

At previous events in recent years, that is about where the Mentor story stopped, at least for the public. There has always been a professional software services component, where Mentor teams can customize their software to a specific design. What Mentor is showing now – complete with datasheets for verticals such as Managed Lobby Services – is something very different for the company, more like what some M2M providers have been doing with cloud solutions, but with much deeper embedded expertise.

First is the hardware customization story. Mentor is offering the IoT gateway reference design in Gerber files, or in an Xpedition-ready package that customers can take and lay out themselves. I asked if there is a tie-in to enabling customers to do their own SoC design – not yet, today’s offering is Freescale based, but it isn’t hard to imagine the next steps being other merchant chips, then other customer-designed ARM chips.

Mentor can then layer embedded software over that, complete with ARM TrustZone-based security and over-the-air updating. Next, there is a cloud services platform, again completely secured and managed by Mentor developed jointly with Samsung.

Kurisu pointed out something very interesting – Mentor is actually now in the leasing business. Customers are asking Mentor to aid in project jumpstarting and small-scale pilots. These customers are reluctant to plow the investment necessary to establish their own private or hybrid cloud solutions, or to develop gateway hardware by themselves. (Don’t get me started on people trying to use public clouds for IoT deployment, for anything past presentation-layer stuff.)

This is new territory for Mentor, and a new partnership with the likes of Samsung for printing and digital signage components. It seems the marketplace is littered with IoT firms operating in one of the three tiers – lots of people at the edge, a few big firms in the infrastructure, and some smaller firms in the gap that is the multi-protocol gateway. We’re seeing new things like OpenFog pop up because there is this gap, and it has to do with end-to-end provisioning, processing, and security. Mentor is taking a big step here in doing something to solve the problem, with a reference platform approach plus a services offering.

You can read more on the Mentor Graphics IoT Cloud Services story.

IoT: Where are we Now and Why Most IoT Startups Fail

IoT: Where are we Now and Why Most IoT Startups Fail
by Majeed Ahmad on 11-27-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: Arm, IoT

“Mobile has won,” proclaimed Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Bloomberg TV in December 2013. Now, what’s next? If you were at the recent ARM TechCon held in Santa Clara, California on November 10-12, 2015, it’s unmistakably the Internet of Things (IoT).

That, however, comes with a number of strings attached. For a start, ARM CEO Simon Segars persuaded the developers that “let’s get IoT right” before governments get involved. He outlined interoperability, built on layers, and security as the two key challenges. “Security has to be baked into hardware because you can’t upload security on a light bulb.”

Next, Eric Klein of Lemnos Labs told the attendees that we are at the base camp now in terms of the IoT deployment. “It’s mostly based on the usage of simple sensors.” Lemnos Labs is a venture fund for hardware-centric IoT startups.

IoT stack immaturity yields new business opportunities

Lemnos’ Klein, from his vantage point, said that there is no single IoT. He outlined three emerging IoT ecosystems: consumer, industrial and enterprise. “They all need different business models, and they are growing independently of each other while they have strong intersection points,” Klein added.

He said that consumer IoT is now the wild west while industrial and enterprise are just getting started. Moreover, Klein added, IoT stacks are still immature, which translates into new opportunities for developers. Take, for instance, garbage trucks that hover around the city streets just to find out that a lot of garbage cans are still not filled up.

Now sensors incorporated into garbage cans could inform trucks if it’s full or not, and as a result, garbage trucks could optimize their routes through smart overhauling and save a lot of money. And there are so many other untapped opportunities like the one mentioned above.

So why IoT upstarts have been largely failing so far? First, there is a need to provide IoT entrepreneurs the toolchains they require. Second, it’s imperative to go end-to-end to tap full value of IoT. For example, a phone or a wearable device tells us that we walked 360 steps, but that’s not enough unless it tells us how to make this information useful.

Eric Klein: ‘Consumer, industrial and enterprise are three emerging IoT ecosystems’

The tools will be required for connectivity, data and security, respectively. Then, Klein asked developers which tools they are going after. For the connectivity part, he quoted smart home, in which devices don’t interact intelligently so far. For the data part, Klein said that IoT developers have to sort out which portion of data needs to be fused and which data fraction has to be uploaded.

Then he explained the massive role of security in the IoT realm. Klein concluded his talk by emphasizing the need for better network architecture. “You should know networking better than Verizon guys,” he told IoT developers. ARM chieftain Segars had pointed to something similar earlier in the event when he defined IoT as the amalgam of connectivity and innovation. In fact, Segars used the phrase “The Internet of Connected Things.”

Majeed Ahmad is the author of the book The Next Web of 50 Billion Device.

November 25, 2015

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls
by Bernard Murphy on 11-25-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: General

We boomers thought we would continue to innovate and live forever. We put men on the moon, we created rock and roll, we invented practical computers and personal computers, we did it all. And we lived the high life, especially in tech – big houses, fancy cars, great vacations. Then unexpectedly we got old (nobody warned us), and now newer generations are pushing us aside.

On which note, Business Insider recently published a piece on ageism in tech. The main thesis is that for boomers it’s difficult to hang onto a job and even more difficult to be respected. It’s a good piece and I agree with many of the conclusions, but there’s one thing that irks me. The easy take-away is that ageism is a problem; I believe that ageism is a symptom and a narrowly-targeted response will not address the underlying problem.

VCs fund young people in startups because young people, unburdened by experience, will try anything and will take big risks, which is what VCs need to see the possibility of big payoffs. Some people (mostly young people) argue that young people are also smarter, but I doubt it. If you place a lot of risky bets, a few pay off, but the vast majority fail; young people are just more willing to gamble what little they have. Young people will work for less as long as they have an equity stake and we all like to work with people our own age. Take these factors together and you have a bias in tech toward younger workers and away from older workers.

The real problem is that boomers still in the workforce have to keep working, with no clear retirement in sight. Back in the day, you worked until you were 55 then retired on a pension. The big tech companies like IBM, HP, and TI all had pension plans which would allow you to live comfortably if not lavishly. New tech never worked that way. You have 401k’s and equity (which mostly doesn’t return anywhere near your expectations), then add wage stagnation, a recession and a >50% divorce rate (a big hit to anyone’s retirement plans). The lifestyle we expect and our practical retirement options have become severely misaligned.

OK, so maybe some of us didn’t plan very well, but there is a much more important point. This generation is or will soon be eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And there will be more of us drawing on those plans than there are younger people paying into the system. You may feel entitlement programs need to be scaled back to fix this, to which I say (a) good luck with that and (b) tell me how you feel when your turn comes. So both to keep people of my generation afloat and to keep social Security afloat, we need to keep older people in the workforce longer, paying into the system.

This can’t be underwritten by yet another entitlement program. Paying companies to hire older workers or imposing quotas would be economically pointless. Older workers need to add positively to the economy for this be effective. One of the most important ways they can do this is to build a broader base of skills which will help them remain relevant. To the extent government can or should help, they perhaps could do so by encouraging development of and easy access to career counseling and retraining programs. But I’m also a big believer that, individually, we need to take charge of our future.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn suggested that each of us needs to be an entrepreneur of our own career. We need to keep reinventing ourselves, we need to keep developing new skills, and we need to keep our network active and growing. In my career, I never wanted to be the very best I could possibly be at one thing. I changed my objective many times – starting in R&D, switching to strategic sales support, then sales, then services, then back to R&D and technical marketing, then strategic planning, blogging, training and more. When I look back, I wonder how I would have turned out if I had just focused on R&D. I got to be both a VP of engineering and a CTO, so I don’t think I missed out on titles. But more importantly I got a broad insight into most aspects of tech business and I developed a broad base of contacts in the industry. If I ever need to look for another job, I feel happier about the path I took than I might if I had remained purely an R&D expert.

I encourage thinking as far outside the box as you can. Writing articles is pretty far removed from software engineering and not something I had done in any meaningful way since high school. But it satisfies my creative needs and gives me a chance to look more broadly at the industry than I had been able to before. Am I as good a writer as I was a product developer? I very much doubt it but my writing skills are in higher demand than my product development skills and I’m always working on improving.

In short, perhaps that tolling bell need not be for thee, if you are willing to adapt what you do to what customers or businesses want to buy.

Here’s the Business Insider piece and the Reid Hoffman TED talk.

Six Ways Your Car Can Be Hacked!

Six Ways Your Car Can Be Hacked!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-25-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: Arm, Foundries, IP

The question is not IF but WHEN your car will be hacked. How about this: You connect your smartphone to your car and malware sets off the airbags. My car has front, side, and rear airbags so that would be a very painful and expensive experience for sure. According to my mechanic this is certainly possible and it would cost more than $10,000 to replace all of the airbags. And who would pay for this expense? Not the car manufacturer, not your car insurance, not your smartphone provider, etc… You would get stuck with that bill, absolutely.

Or maybe your car will be held hostage. According to the FBI, between April 2014 and June 2015, there were 992 “ransomeware” related complaints, with victims reporting losses totaling more than $18 million.

As I have mentioned before, security was the overwhelming theme at ARM TechCon and “Connected Car Security” was the first presentation on my agenda. According to Rob Valiton, SVP & GM Automotive, Secure Products Group and Memory Business Units @ Atmel Corporation, cars are exposed to many potential attacks through an increasing number of interfaces including:

[LIST=1]

Telematics ECU: E.g. OnStar, Uconnect, iDrive, …

WiFi Hotspot

Bluetooth

Passive Entry / Keyless Systems

Onboard Diagnostic Port

Traditional In-Vehicle Networks (e.g. CAN2.0, LIN)

Rob showed this video clip for extra effect:

Did you read about the Jeep Cherokee hack? Hackers wrote some code (zero-day exploit) that can give them wireless control via the internet through the Jeep’s entertainment system. So yes, hackers can control your car from anywhere in the world and make it do pretty much whatever they want. They also hacked a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius. Lucky for us these hackers were funded by DARPA so the car manufacturers were alerted prior to the publishing of these stories and software patches could be made. Next time we may not be so lucky. These gentlemen hackers now work for Uber’s Advanced Technology Center so this was probably more of a job interview than a regular hack.

One of the reasons why I switched to the iPhone is security. When we did a SemiWiki app we submitted it to both the Apple and Google sites. The Android app was approved immediately while the iOS app took several days (better QA?). Another reason is that Apple controls both the silicon and software so security is less daunting (I would hope). Unfortunately, I was told that hackers are now targeting iOS devices for the fame of it (job interviews), so NO ONE is safe! Especially my beautiful wife who has dozens of apps on her phone that she rarely uses but I digress…

There are also reports of car key fob hacks. Similar to what has been done with garage door openers, a hacker can use a $32 device to intercept and store keyless entry codes for modern cars and trucks as well as garage doors and alarm systems. The device is called RollJam and was presented at the last DefCon in Las Vegas. Here is a link to the full slide deck in case you are interested.

You can get a look at Atmel Automotive Solutions HERE.

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