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January 13, 2015

2015 International CES: wearables and smart home

2015 International CES: wearables and smart home
by Bill Jewell on 01-13-2015 at 7:00 pm
Categories: IoT, Mobile

2015 International CES was held last week in Las Vegas. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) which puts on the show said over 170,000 people attended. The show featured more than 3,600 exhibitors covering over 2.2 million square feet of exhibit space.

In advance of the show, CEA released highlights of its forecast for the 2015 U.S. consumer electronics market, measured as shipments to U.S. dealers. The overall market is expected to grow 3% from 2014. One of the fastest growing markets is wearables at 133%. Wearables includes smartwatches and health & fitness trackers. Smartphones are expected to grow 5% and account for 23% of the overall consumer electronics market. Tablets, which have been a hot growth item since Apple reinvigorated the market with the iPad in 2010, are projected to decline 1%. Overall televisions and displays are forecast to decline 2%, but 4K or Ultra High Definition (UHD) TV revenues should double from 2014.

[TABLE] border=”1″
|-
| colspan=”4″ style=”width: 671px; text-align: center” | U.S. Consumer Electronics Market, $ Billion
|-
| colspan=”4″ style=”width: 671px; text-align: center” | Source: Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)
|-
| colspan=”4″ style=”width: 671px” |
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px” |
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 2014
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 2015
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | Change
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px” | Total
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 217
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 223
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 3%
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px” | Wearables
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 2.2
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 5.1
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 133%
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px” | Smartphones
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 48.9
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 51.3
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 5%
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px” | Tablets
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 25.2
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 24.9
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | -1%
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px” | TVs & Displays
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 18.7
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 18.3
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | -2%
|-
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 4K UHDTV
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 2.4
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 5.0
| style=”width: 167px; height: 21px; text-align: center” | 106%
|-

UHDTVs have become a mainstream product fairly quickly. In our 2013 International CES report, Semiconductor Intelligence stated: “The biggest visual impact was from 4K (or Ultra HD) TVs. With price tags of $20,000 and up and little content in 4K, 4K TVs will not have measurable impact on consumer electronics for a few years.” Now Bestbuy.com has major brand 55 inch UHDTVs for as low as $1000. CEA’s forecast of a $5 billion UHDTV market consists of 4 million units at an average dealer price of $1250.

The hot product categories at 2015 International CES were digital health & fitness and connected home. The 2014 CES featured 366 exhibitors under the category of digital health and fitness. For 2015 the category was split into three (fitness & sports, health & biotech and wearables) and featured a total of 1,781 exhibitors, almost five times the number in 2014. The 2014 connected home category featured 982 exhibitors. In 2015 the number more than doubled to a total of 2,066 exhibitors in three new categories (smart home/appliances, safety & security, and energy management). The total of 3,847 exhibitors in these two categories is about equal to the total number of exhibitors at 2015 CES. Obviously many companies are classifying products in these categories as well as in the traditional CES categories. There is also likely overlap in the subcategories.

Digital health & fitness and connected home are each part of the “internet of things” or IoT. IoT has been much hyped in the last few years as a major growth area for electronics and semiconductors. Many definitions exist, but the internet of things can be simply defined as any device which communicates over the internet and is not a computer, tablet or smartphone. These devices often communicate with the internet automatically without the need for human intervention.

At 2015 CES, A&D Medical released the results of a survey of 2,024 U.S. adults conducted by Harris Poll. The survey showed 56% want to monitor their health with connected devices. The most desired vital signs the participants wanted monitored were blood pressure, weight, chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, sleep, physical activity and diet. Only 5% wanted to monitor their sexual activity. However that low number did not stop OhMiBod from introducing a product in the category of wearable sex technology. We won’t go into detail here, but the specifics are in OhMiBod’s press release.

The 2015 CES Innovation Awards featured several products under the categories of wearables; fitness, sports & biotech; and smart home.

The Polar V800 (below) is a multisport GPS watch for activity tracking and fitness training with a list price of $520. It not only looks complex, the manual is 102 pages.

The Withings Activité in contrast is a simple and elegant looking analog watch which doubles as an activity tracker and retails for $450.

The Cloud Based Advanced Smart Robo VacMop from Moneual learns from prior cleaning history data saved on the Cloud. This device could be also be classified under “things we didn’t know anyone needed” and “fun things to scare your cat.”

Also from Moneual is the Smart Beauty Mirror, an integrated grooming gadget with a mirror that “provides personalized fashion and beauty care information through face analysis, skin monitoring, trending fashions, web contents and more.” Now every woman can have the magic mirror the evil queen had in Sleeping Beauty.

Netatmo’s WELCOME is a smart home camera with facial recognition. “It learns to recognize your household members and updates you on who is home when you are not, with concise notifications on your smartphone or your smartwatch.” Good way to keep your home safe and spy on who is with your kids when you are not home.

It is difficult to predict which of these products will be successful. However the “internet of things” is more than just hype – it is a fast growing area of consumer electronics.

January 13, 2015June 14, 2019

HiFi Sounds Better than Ever

HiFi Sounds Better than Ever
by Eric Esteve on 01-13-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Cadence, IP

If you think that the sound atmosphere created by Dolby or Surround–sound audio is the best you can achieve today by using complexes algorithms on DSP, like I thought before knowing about “Object-Based Audio”, you must read these lines! In fact Surround-sound Audio is limited by the number of speakers installed in a room, or a car, and the number of available channels. With Object-Based Audio, the sounds can be moved around the listening space regardless of the number of speakers. Just take a look at the picture, the numerous grey dots represent the perceived sound sources. Such a technique is already magic if the listening space is a room. Imagine your perception of the sounds when Object-Based Audio will be installed in an automobile, a listening space where adding speakers is quickly limited by some obvious factors…

Object-Based Audio sounds magic, but I will unveil the trick. The trick’s name is HiFi 4, the latest DSP core from Tensilica/Cadence. As you need high performance for such emerging audio, this HiFi 4 DSP support four 32×32-bit MAC per cycle with 72-bit accumulators then a single HiFi 4 DSP IP core can replace multiple DSPs, for example in high-end DTV and STB applications. With Object-Based Audio, control and signal processing loads have significantly increased, and HiFi 4 has been specifically tailored to make sure that a single DSP IP will support these extra loads, including an optional vector floating point unit.

It was not by chance if Cadence has grown DSP IP revenue from $6M in 2012 to more than $48M in 2013, allowing the IP vendor to be ranked #1 in this segment by Garner. Cadence claims counting more than 65 licensees to date, for the HiFi Audio DSP IP only, not integrating Tensilica Dataplane product. You can find HiFi Audio DSP IP integrated into Mobile Phones, Consumer Electronics, PC and Tablets, STB, Blu-ray Disc, AVRs and Automotive Entertainment. If you take a look at the various logos printed below, you can see that HiFi DSP is popular with Tier 1 semiconductor companies like Intel, Samsung, ST, NXP, Renesas, Fujitsu or Dialog and also with many system companies like Huawei, Wolfson or LG, to name a few.

The first and large application field for DSP has been the baseband for mobile phone since 2000, allowing the chip makers to familiarize with the DSP IP core concept and integration (before 2000, the semiconductor companies targeting wireless market tend to use their own DSP, think about Motorola or Texas Instruments). But a DSP can be used to support much more than convolutional coding or Viterbi algorithms! Audio has been a long time (almost) captive market for Motorola, thanks to their 24-bit DSP standard products. This explains why the first HiFi and HiFi 2 introduced by Tensilica at the beginning of the 2000’s were integrating 24-bit Dual MAC: potential customers using Motorola DSP would accept to move to a DSP IP solution, but only if they could stay with the familiar 24-bit DSP architecture, and reuse the S/W base.

At the end of the 2000’s, Tensilica has introduced the first 32-bit architecture (still with a 24-bit dual MAC), allowing a better pre and post processing, but the next product was based on a dual 32-bit architecture. Audio applications were developing fast and the most the performance improved, the more attractive could be the audio solutions. You can easily draw a parallel with Video, HiFi 3 was launched at the same time than 2K video, and we could say that HiFi 4 represents a performance jump equivalent to the move from 2K Video to 4K. The difference is that the HiFi 4 DSP can support a revolutionary audio concept, Object-Based Audio, and the DSP ecosystem includes more than 140 software packages compatible across all the Hi Fi cores.

If we want to synthesize Cadence/Tensilica HiFi DSP IP family offer, we could say that the HiFi 3 target markets are Mobile, Home Entertainment and Automotive, when HiFi 4 is more dedicated to Home Entertainment and Automotive high end applications, like Object-Based Audio. In fact for Mobile applications the balance between power and performance would push to use HiFi 3. Just like implementing 4K video resolution on a smartphone does not really make sense (except maybe as a pure marketing argument!). Interesting to notice, the HiFi Mini is specially tailored to support Voice Trigger & Recognition, sensor fusion, Always-on functions… sounds like this is the right DSP IP product to support IoT, exhibiting the lowest power of the WiFi family.

By Eric Esteve from IPNEST

January 13, 2015

A Group of Happy Employees that Excels in Everything They Do!

A Group of Happy Employees that Excels in Everything They Do!
by Pawan Fangaria on 01-13-2015 at 9:00 am
Categories: EDA

I visited AtrentaNoida in August 2013 during the inauguration of its newly expanded facility. At that time, I had written about the beautiful environment Atrenta has, with its presence at many sites across the world in my blog – “Innovation + Thoughtful Management = Productive Expansion”. Innovation cannot happen without happy employees gelling with each other, bringing out the best in active teamwork with the support of management, to promote learning from failures rather than scrapping the project altogether. Innovation doesn’t come without risks and failures, management understands that. At the same time, the work place must be fun with a healthy work-life balance, along with an open, cooperative and trustful culture. I had many chances to visit Atrenta Noida during these years, and I could personally see that kind of environment there.

There is no wonder, I am seeing this video today, made by the enthusiastic people at Atrenta talking about their happy times in the company, how they spend the days and weeks, what they do, how they feel proud ofworking with top chip design companies, and their EDA tools being used in designing top electronic products. They also discuss how they publish technical papers and patents and so on.

Not being sure where to start, as a natural instinct, I choose to start with fun moments; play, games, fitness enthusiasts. It reminds me of my basic graduation professor at my college; he used to say that those who excel in the field will excel in class as well. Atrenta has a world class facility connecting Noida with rest of Atrenta’s sites in the world. It has all kinds of infrastructure including data centres for 24/7 operation.

Here people are gearing up to look at the bigger picture presented by their leaders. On the left side, Sanjiv Mathuris presenting some new architecture, algorithms or methods for one of their products; on the right side, Siddharth Guhais preparing to present some information on SpyGlass Power. I can just guess about the products on which they would be presenting since I have talked to them and blogged about their products in the past!

Then there is a brainstorming session going on one side of the room while there is a serious discussion on the other. At Atrenta, it’s a good practice to have small team sizes for particular projects / sub-projects that provide optimum productivity. During work time, people have best presence of their minds.

There is also a wall of patents. This reminds me about my discussion with Ajoy K. Bose, President and CEO of Atrenta; he said most of their patented ideas are realised in their products. What could be more productive then this? This is profitable to business, brings cheers among employees, encourages team morale, and provides a confident outlook for the organization. The team is enthused to publish and present technical papers at various conferences.

Here there is a relaxing moment, out of serious work, for people to chat and lighten up. Then there is a person seriously glued to his laptop and code to resolve a potential issue, urgently for a customer. At Atrenta, 75% of the 350+ work force is in R&D and still they are able to satisfy 250+ customers across the world. That is because of very flexible work environment that boosts productivity as well as work satisfaction among employees.

The Atrenta culture promotes social activities with a lot of enthusiasm; year over year, people celebrate important occasions. Above, people are celebrating last Thanks-Giving day where senior managers are serving food to employees. People pay thanks to their peers, managers, staff, and colleagues and even in their neighbourhood. As part of their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiative, they regularly organize blood donation camps and various other activities.

Here is the whole Atrenta Noida Team standing together under one umbrella. I’m sure many people are standing on the second and third floors of this Speciality Tower joining in the team spirit.

Atrenta is a true global organization with equal participation from all of its sites (R&D, Field and Sales) in USA, Europe, India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan. There is great level of collaboration between the sites to access best talent and support customers across the world in most cost effective manner.

Twelve Years of Sonics at Toshiba

Twelve Years of Sonics at Toshiba
by Paul McLellan on 01-13-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: IP, Sonics

Sonics announced today that Toshiba has completed the SoC design using Sonics’ on-chip network IP for its new TZ2100 group of application processors. The TZ2100 group of applications processors are the newest addition to Toshiba’s ApP Lite (Application Processor Lite) TZ2000 series. With this group of ApP Lite devices, sound and image communications can be securely processed at high speeds, making them well-suited for applications such as smart appliances, industrial CPUs, panel-control systems, and machine-to-machine [M2M] communication modules. The IoT will see more and more devices connected to the Internet and to each other. Increasingly, functions to effectively process and safely transfer a wide variety of data, from simple text to data-heavy audio and visual sources, are required for IoT. ApP Lite microprocessors are ideal for such processing.

What is perhaps even more significant is that Toshiba have been using Sonics NoC technology for 12 years and have completed over 30 designs. Cumulatively they have shipped over 200 million SoCs in which Sonics’ NoCs serve as the communication fabric. These cover a wide range of different target markets: gaming, digital TV, mobile, and automotive applications, and now the TZ2000 series, application processors. As you would expect, over those dozen years the designs have got increasingly complex in terms of both the number of IP blocks integrated and the performance, both increasing clock speed and using increasingly advanced process nodes.

Katsuya Konisha, who is GM of the Logic LSI Design Department emphasizes that Toshiba will be continuing to use Sonics NoCs going forward:Sonics’ on-chip network products play a critical role in the integration of our complex SoC designs. They help us achieve the time-to-market and performance requirements for these projects. We are very pleased to reach this important milestone in our relationship and plan to continue using Sonics’ IP in our ASSPs and ASICs.

Sonics also announced that that Nexell has licensed SonicsGN and adopted the SonicsStudio Director development environment for creation of a customer-specific application processor design targeted to the digital consumer and communication systems market segments. Nexell, founded in 2009, is a Korean-based developer of SoCs, semiconductor IP, and application processors. The company plans to target its new application processor design, which includes the SonicsGN NoC, for manufacturing in Samsung’s 28nm low-power Gate First High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) foundry process technology. Nexell will use SonicsStudio Director as its SoC integration environment to drive design and verification within the Samsung EDA tool and manufacturing flows.

UPDATE: the webinar has been moved to Wednesday February 4th.

Also, I will be moderating a new webinar Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements from IoT to Servers. The webinar will be at 10am Pacific on Wednesday February 4th. The webinar itself will be presented by Drew Wingard, the CTO of Sonics.

For more information on the webinar, including registration, go here. On that page you can also view the last Sonics webinar that I moderated, NoC 101. This is an introduction to network-on-chip technology for designers who are unfamiliar with the concept.

January 12, 2015June 14, 2019

Semiconductor Design: Chips to Systems!

Semiconductor Design: Chips to Systems!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-12-2015 at 8:00 pm
Categories: EDA, Events, Siemens EDA

This is the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] year of DesignCon and I’m really looking forward to it. While I haven’t attended all 20 I certainly have attended the majority of them. Now it is like a college reunion for me seeing all sorts of friends and former coworkers. One of them is even a keynote but more on that later. This year there are 14 conference tracks covering semiconductor design through to the system level with more than 100 sessions, panels, and tutorials. Take a look HERE for the conference overview.

My good friends at Mentor Graphics are a platinum sponsor this year with Technical Workshops on:

DDR Interface and SerDes Channel Design for High Performance FPGA – based PCBs
Electromagnetic Simulation for Electronic Systems
Designing Manufacturable Stackups – A Comprehensive Approach to Stackup and SI Modeling
A Holistic Approach to IC, Package and Board co-optimization
DDR4 Board Design and Signal Integrity Verification Challenges
Accurate statistical analysis of SERDES links considering correlated input patterns, data-dependent edge transitions, and transmit jitter

Mentor Graphics® is the worldwide market leader in PCB systems design and analysis technologies. Mentor Graphics will be showcasing its advanced HyperLynx and Nimbic technologies for electrical sign-off, including a complete analysis environment for DDRx designs, multi-gbps channel analysis, full-wave 3D electromagnetic modeling, and power distribution design. Visit booth #935 to learn more about Mentor’s technologies and best practices for virtual prototyping or by attending Mentor Graphics technical presentations.

You can also visit their booth and spend some quality time with experts in the field of signal and power integrity analysis, IC/package/board co-optimization, and automatic stack-up design.

Here are the conference tracks that cover all aspects of chip, board, and system design:

[LIST=1]

Optimize Chip-Level Designs for Signal and Power Integrity

Overcome Analog and Mixed-Signal Modeling and Simulation Challenges

Wireless and Photonic Integration

System Co-Design: Chip/Package/Board: Modeling and Simulation

Characterize PCB Materials and Processing Characterization

Apply PCB Design Tools

Design Parallel and Memory Interfaces

Optimize High-Speed Serial Design

Detect and Mitigate Jitter, Crosstalk, and Noise

Leverage High-Speed Signal Processing for Equalization and Coding

Ensure Power Integrity in Power Distribution Networks

Achieve Electromagnetic Compatibility and Mitigate Interference

Apply Test and Measurement Methodology

Ensure Signal Integrity with RF/Microwave/EM Analysis Techniques

This year there are insightful keynotes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday by industry luminaries:

[LIST=1]

Thomas H. Lee Ph.D, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Karen Bartleson, Senior Director of Corporate Programs and Initiatives, Synopsys

Alex Lidow Ph.D, CEO, Co-Founder, Efficient Power Conversion Corporation

Karen is the friend I mentioned. She is very active with IEEE and is currently a candidate for IEEE president! Congratulations Karen! I will be at DesignCon all three days and it would be a pleasure to meet you!

Taking place annually in Silicon Valley, DesignCon was created by engineers for engineers and remains the largest gathering of chip, board and systems designers in the country. Combining technical paper sessions, tutorials, industry panels, product demos and exhibits, DesignCon brings engineers the latest theories, methodologies, techniques, applications and demonstrations on PCB design tools, power and signal integrity, jitter and crosstalk, high-speed serial design, test and measurement tools, parallel and memory interface design, ICs, semiconductor components and more.

January 11, 2015

Je Suis Charlie

Je Suis Charlie
by Eric Esteve on 01-11-2015 at 4:48 am
Categories: General

Last Monday was the first working day of 2015, dedicated to installing a new PC. Tuesday was also dedicated to an admin work, asking for a new passport, so Wednesday was supposed to be the first real working day for me. In fact, because the Radio is on when I am working, I heard about this crazy offense against the complete editorial board in working session at “Charlie Hebdo”, a French caricature fanzine, a few minutes after it happened. In less than 5 minutes, the entire cartoonist band, Cabu, Wolinski, Charb. Tinious and Honore, plus some of their occasional writers and friends and the policeman supposed to protect the fanzine’s director (and two other persons in the building) have been killed by two terrorists using Kalachnikov… It was Kalachnikov against pen, fundamentalism against humor.

Before going further and propose my humble contribution against middle age obscurantism, let me add that these two terrorists have eventually been neutralized, being killed on Friday, but that a third one had time to attack a casher grocery that same day, killing four hostages before being killed as well. These grocery customers have clearly been killed because they were Jewish, such an action recall us what’s happened in Berlin in the 1930’s. These “terrorist” are just barbarians.

To come back to the cartoonists’ massacre, these artists have been killed because they have used their pen to caricature Mahomet (in fact to critic the positioning of a very small part of Muslims, using the religion as a weapon, and dropping bombs instead of trying to convince). You may think that these journalists have been provocative… and that’s true! But the key point is that they are provocative with every religion, Catholics (see above), Jewish, Muslims and so on, they are also provocative with (all) the political forces, and definitely with any kind of hypocrisy, including the politically correct. To be fair, I must say that before this massacre, many French people did not like this type of humor, that we call “Humour Gaulois”. This “Humour Gaulois” is not characterized by subtlety or delicacy… but is it a reason for killing? Beside this clumsy humor, you can quickly find a way of thinking linked to Enlightenment, Voltaire et al., these same persons who have been the source of the French revolution in 1789 or the USA Independence in 1776. Voltaire was saying: “Even if I don’t like your ideas, I will fight as much as I can to allow you to express it”.

As far as I am concerned, on top of trying to kill freedom of expression (but they will not succeed!), these stupid terrorists have killed part of my youngness. If you take a look at the above picture, it was published in the early 1970’s by Cabu (RiP on Wednesday) in a fanzine dedicated to teenagers like me. I perceived these images as my first teenager emotion, a teenager able to select by him what he wanted to enjoy with (and not what the religion or the politics expect him to enjoy). Since Wednesday I am sad, for me and for my culture, and I am angry too, and I am not alone to be angry as probably more than one MILLION peoples will silently walk today in Paris. Including politics from Germany, England, Israel, Palestine, including people who did not really liked Charlie Hebdo, including Jewish, Catholics, Protestants or even Muslims. All of us will claim: “Je Suis Charlie”!

Note to a potential moderator: this is not a political or religious blog, just a request to keep freedom of expression as strong as possible. Moderating this blog, even by auto-censure, would be a way to reduce this freedom of expression.

Eric Esteve

January 10, 2015

Intel’s Diversity Goals Explained!

Intel’s Diversity Goals Explained!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-10-2015 at 9:00 pm
Categories: Foundries, Intel Foundry

One of the more interesting announcements by Intel at CES was surprisingly not about technology, it was about a $300M Investing in Diversity and Inclusion initiative. According to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich “A fully diverse and inclusive workplace is fundamental to our ability to innovate and deliver business results.” After being overwhelmed with technology last week this was a welcome diversion so I did a little more digging into this somewhat controversial topic.

California is truly a melting pot of cultural diversity but when I started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s it was very white. The company I worked for (Data General) was based in Massachusetts but had a fab in Sunnyvale. In fact, DG was founded the same year as Intel. In my experience it really wasn’t until the emergence of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem that diversity came to Silicon Valley. Semiconductor design was no longer controlled by the big IDMs so anybody from any part of the world could start a fabless semiconductor company and they did. The fabless semiconductor ecosystem brought even more diversity with hundreds if not thousands of start-up companies coming and going (EDA software, semiconductor IP, design services, etcetera). And with that came incredible strength because Brian Krzanich is right, continued semiconductor innovation requires diversity, absolutely.

Given that evolution, the question I have is: Why does Intel have to invest $300M in diversification and inclusion? The answer is in the 2013 Intel Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Report (the EEOC enforces Federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination). According to Intel 57,000 out of 100,000+ employees are based in the U.S. with this illustrated diversity:

Intel management is even less diverse: White men and women hold 156 of 187 (84%) of the executive and senior management positions. Certainly most people in Silicon Valley know this and it is not an “Intel only” problem. I’m guessing it is a somewhat common problem with U.S. companies founded in the 1960s. I do however greatly appreciate that Brian Krzanich publicly acknowledged this challenge, especially in a worldwide forum such as CES.

You can see the Intel Global Diversity and Inclusion landing page HERE. Intel even has a Chief Diversity Officer (Rosalind Hundell) who is a 19 year Intel employee. According to her bio Rosalind was appointed Director of Diversity in 2004 and is now also Vice President of Human Resources:

“What an exciting time for our industry and our company. Candid discussions about the state of diversity build the foundation for real change in the technology sector. Recent media attention has given us a moment to pause and reflect on Intel’s own diversity journey.”

Considering that she has been at this since 2004 I’m wondering what the Intel diversity ratio was back when she started versus what it is today. I could not find the 2004 Intel Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Report. If someone else can, please post it in the comments section and I will include it. Or maybe someone from Intel can help with this? Transparency is your friend. I also sent Rosalind a LinkedIn invitation so let’s see where that goes.

January 10, 2015

Wanna Buy a Used Stepper? Only One Owner, Mint Condition…

Wanna Buy a Used Stepper? Only One Owner, Mint Condition…
by Paul McLellan on 01-10-2015 at 12:20 pm
Categories: ESD Alliance, Semiconductor Services

Back in the early 90s there used to be a billboard alongside 237 advertising second-hand fab equipment: steppers, ion implanters, diffusion ovens. It used to amuse me as an “only in silicon valley” thing; after all, even in silicon valley the number of individuals who were likely to be in a position to buy used fab equipment was pretty small and billboards are usually a form of mass advertising.

But there really is a secondary market for fab equipment. Today it is approximately $1.5B, representing about 5% of the total $31B fab equipment market. It is likely to become more important going forward. Of course 14nm and 10nm equipment gets all the publicity but the reality is that legacy fabs are becoming increasingly important. For example, TSMC has recently produced new lower-power variants of several of their older processes, presumably with a view to increasing loading in some of their older fabs. GlobalFoundries upgraded on of its legacy fabs from 200mm to 300mm. The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to provide further volume for legacy processes.

Investment in “legacy” fabs are important in manufacturing many semiconductor products and such fabs remain a sizeable portion of the industries manufacturing base:

150 mm and 200 mm fab capacity represent ~40% of the total installed fab capacity
Over 400 150 mm and 200 mm fabs are in production today, and only 10–20 are expected to close by 2018
200 mm fab capacity has been on the increase, led by foundry companies who are increasing capacity by approximately 7% by 2016
For 2014, foundries and IDMs increased spending for secondary 200mm equipment by 45% (foundries being roughly half of the spend)

SEMI have just produced a report on this subject, the SEMI Secondary Fab Equipment Report. They completed a study of the market to determine the market size and identify key trends and issues impacting this important industry segment. Foundries and IDMs were asked to provide information pertaining to their acquisition of used tools for 150mm, 200mm and 300mm. Direct spending input was obtained from 28 IDMs and foundries and estimates made for another 12 based on capex plans, quarterly reports and so on. The focus of the report is fab equipment (used assembly, test and packaging equipment was not included in the study).

This report is new, unique coverage for the industry. The report contains 26 pages and 29 figures and charts. The target audience is expected to be companies serving the secondary fab equipment supply chain, IDMs and foundries, and other industry analysts who need data to benchmark and analyze this market.

You can order the report (or download a sample) here.

Curie to Bring New Dimensions in Wearables!

Curie to Bring New Dimensions in Wearables!
by Pawan Fangaria on 01-10-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Events, Foundries, Intel Foundry, Mobile

In the past year, seeing the kinds of wearables doing what Smartphones can do, I wasn’t much excited about wearables; however after looking at what Intelhas demonstrated in CES 2015, a button sized SoC called Curie, I get to believe that it will be a game changer in wearables and would let Intel do what it couldn’t do with Smartphone chips even after spending billions of dollars to gain that market. This intelligent button can unleash many newer possibilities which we haven’t seen in wearables so far, I will talk about it a little later, let’s first look at what it is.

That’s the Curie, Brian Krzanich; CEO of Intel is showing holding it between his three fingers at CES. Wow! That’s a perfect size suitable for the IoT world where it can invisibly rule that world. It’s powered by Quark SE CPU, 80 kB SRAM, 384 kB flash memory, BTLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) radio, integrated battery charging PMIC and an integrated 6-axis combo sensor with an accelerometer and gyroscope that supports gesture recognition. Wow! with all that on a cute circular PCB, it’s the smallest! It has open source RTOS. Curie is said to be a platform that can be versatile for wearable makers to slip it into anything – ring, watch, fitness gizmos, eyewear, jewellery, apparel and virtually anything which can be easily put on your body. With low power and rechargeable battery, that’s ideal for wearable. It’s just out of Intel labs, to be available in the market by 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] half of this year, but was ready for Krzanich to play with it and show some gimmicks during his keynote in CES. It’s said to be coming with Intel IQ software kits that contain host of applications including apps, device drivers, algorithms, connectivity, biometrics, and cloud integration and so on.

Now let’s imagine how it can cling into many things for different purposes in our society. It reminds me about James Bond movies 😎 where he uses tiny tracking devices, micro eyes, spying devices…. Are we going to see real Bonds everywhere in today’s society, spying and securing the society? In developing countries, catching corruption in time and building healthy societies can be initiated. Interestingly, the devices built with Curie can bring up many possibilities for women safety and security as it can slip into jewellery, bracelet, pendant, and so on and can provide real-time help in case of any distress signs. Can such devices be stolen? Thieves beware!

Only concern to have is it really provides the needed performance and battery life, shouldn’t disappoint like Galileo. The brighter side is that Intel has partnered with several brand names in wearables – eyewear makers Luxotticaand Oakley; watch maker Fossil; designer wear company OpeningCeremony; acquired intelligent fitness device maker BASIS. In the fall of last year, Intel and OpeningCeremony unveiled MICA Bracelet; MICA is an abbreviation for My Intelligent Common Accessory.

It appears that Intel is head-on to win the game in wireless business through wearable market. That’s a great move! It prompts me to frame a phrase here – A leader should stop chasing, rather it should change the route.

Mentor Moves to Enter IoT Fray

Mentor Moves to Enter IoT Fray
by Tom Simon on 01-09-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, IoT, Siemens EDA

In December I signed up for an IoT “lunch and learn” hosted by Mentor Graphics. There were a number of surprising things about the session. The first and most obvious is that it was really a “breakfast-to-lunch and learn”. Starting at 9AM and going through the end of lunch, it was packed full of ‘learning.’ It was also packed full of attendees. Clearly people were interested to hear what Mentor was presenting on the topic of IoT. This is interesting because many people see Mentor as just an EDA company. But as the first presenter, Product Line Manager Andrew Caples, pointed out, Mentor has been involved in embedded software since 1986. And of course as an EDA company, they necessarily have vast experience with software.

Caples offered up some interesting concepts. Looking at total units produced, he divided up previous and current generations of computing. Mainframes had up to one million units produced; mini computers reached the 10 million mark. The number of units for Mobile is in the billions, and we can expect IoT to reach 10’s of billions. No matter how you define it, the internet of things covers a lot of use cases. On one end you have OpenADR, created by utility companies to manage and match electrical generation and demand on the power grid. On the other you have the quantified self (i.e. Fitbit) and things like knee joint monitoring devices.

According to Caples, 4 things are essential for the internet of things: connectivity, security, reliability and power management. In his talk he discussed each of these areas and how they can be addressed. The internet of things changes our previous computing models by adding a large number of external computing elements. External nodes are hard to update and have more difficult code traceability. The end nodes are more easily hacked. Caples’ assertion is that right now convenience is winning out over security.Bluetooth Smart often uses broadcast or “just works” pairing for the easiest connections. He pointed to Bluetooth Smart as having a weak 6 digit pin for key exchange. For Bluetooth Smart, Out Of Band (OOB) pairing is what should be used for the most secure connection, but it has the most complicated use model.

The way to secure end nodes starts at the lowest level of code. Then each level of code above that needs to be verified before runtime. This is called Root of Trust. Mentor’s widely used RTOS, Nucleus, supports Root of Trust with keys to create a hash to verify code prior to boot. Caples cited the example of Freescale’s i.MX processors that use a feature called High Assurance Boot (HAB) to verify boot code before it is executed.

ARM uses what it calls Trust Zone to ensure that only trusted code can access certain parts of the processor IP. This can help keep malicious code from accessing crypto blocks, certain devices and secure keys. One participant pointed out that Trust zone is all or nothing. So that means that a banking app that might need to use a crypto block would have full run of everything in the Trust Zone.

Caples also spoke about power management. No matter how many power optimization capabilities there are in the hardware, unless the software is built to use them there will be wasted power. Caples said that Nucleus has a rich set of features for managing hardware states to manage power. Developers can define system states for different operational modes. I was reminded of my Fitbit: it uses a low power mode to track my motion and then needs more system resources to sync to my smartphone. Operating points are used to control processor speed. Nucleus allows developers to set system states and operating points with a single API call.

The second talk was by Felix Baum, who oversees Mentor’s virtualization, Multi-OS and Multi-Core technologies. He dove deeper into the security aspects of the internet of things.

A growing technique for securing IoT and mobile platforms is partitioning tasks across processors. This way a secure wall can be built between critical functions and potentially malicious application code. Taking this a step further Mentor suggests using their Hypervisor to support virtual machines. Now a mix of operating systems can be used, and strong firewalls will exist between critical functions of the system and potentially vulnerable application code. This also works well for putting code that needs RTOS support on one machine and putting higher level OSs like Linux on another.

Baum outlined several scenarios where there is a mix of either homogeneous or heterogeneous cores. With current embedded CPUs it is feasible to run an RTOS in a virtual machine, or even in a bare metal environment (BME). Perhaps one processor is used solely to decrypt video and has specialized capabilities for this task. Another example is an elevator that does not need to use any resources until a BME core detects an occupant, at which time a Linux processor can be booted to interact with the user. In medical applications, tasks can be divided up for local and remote operations. Perhaps a medical device has a console at the bedside, but also occasionally needs to transmit data to a server for archival or subsequent analysis. These tasks can be coded for separate processors using the optimal OS and coding environment. Mentor’s Multicore Framework can facilitate this kind of development.

Data in the internet of things is vulnerable in several places. The most obvious is during transmission, but shared memory and IPC traffic are at risk, as well as data at rest. How many of us wipe our old phones before letting them out of our hands? Or do you prefer to smash them with a hammer? You have to think of the whole product lifecycle if you want to be comprehensive about security. Baum’s well taken point is that encryption does not equal security.

Mobile and embedded processors have evolved tremendously. The idea of multiple VMs running on multiple core CPUs in mobile devices would have seemed far-fetched a decade or two ago. ARM has even added type 2 virtualization to its A15 so that the Hypervisor itself can run as an application (guest) on a native OS. This means that even bare metal code or the guest operating systems are well contained within the underlying OS protections.

Mentor has a solid offering and lots of experience in the embedded space. It looks like Mentor has big plans for the internet of things and cloud computing. I’ll discuss the third presentation in another blog. The one teaser I can leave here is that it seems EDA companies are venturing far afield in looking for new business models. Look no further than Synsopsys’ acquisition of Coverity to get a sense of this.