So you want to get into the wireless gadget business, eh? And you want to go with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)? You’re in good company – lots of folks are doing it. But how exactly are you going to go about it?
If you’re a big company with dedicated RF resources and lots of cash targeting high-volume applications (say, … Read More → "Vertically Integrated BLE Module"
About a year ago, when we were in the wake of numerous wireless power announcements, we discussed a technology called “Cota” from a company called Ossia. The idea was of using very high frequency charging – 2.4 GHz – at low power to keep a constant trickle charge going at distances up to around 30 feet (10 meters) or so. Effectively, … Read More → "Wireless Phone Charging Without the Extra Antennas"
Zigbee has a long history and is presumably familiar to our readers (at least at some level). It’s got the 802.15.4 physical layer, its own middle network/transport layers, and then profiles (in the Cluster Library) at the top application layer.
Those profiles define specific behaviors for a wide variety of devices; they define what I’ve referred to as “business object” semantics. Their value is in interoperability: you can share a Read More → "Zigbee/Thread Collaboration"
ARM reckons that the computational power in your car is set to increase by 100X in the next ten years, mainly through the growth of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). These systems use sensors of many kinds to gather information about the environment, process it, and present it to the driver. While at one level all that ADAS is doing is what a reasonably alert driver does- notices speed limit signs, the position of other vehicles etc, at the next level it gets more exciting. In poor light conditions ADAS can use visual light and RADAR sensors to see … Read More → "Driving ADAS"
We’ve looked at the DDS protocol before, but in a recent extended LinkedIn discussion</ … Read More → "Message Protocols: Data-Centric vs. Data-Centric"
One-third of a billion dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to. AMD acquired SeaMicro in 2012 for $334 million, hoping to jump into the hot (at the time) market for “microservers,” machines that use a lot of small microprocessors instead of just a few big ones. Now, AMD has killed off the entire product line and reassigned the staff.
SeaMicro wasn’t one of the many ARM-based server startups. Instead, it used small x86 processors to make its microservers, an obvious selling point for AMD. Nevertheless, AMD is moving forward with its ARM-based server chips, including … Read More → "AMD Pulls the Plug on SeaMicro"
Today we talk IoT enablement. Two sources with different goals.
The first one is a platform called iChipNet from ConnectOne (we’ve seen their modules before). And it’s brought to you by a concern for interoperability, which they see as a big barrier to IoT adoption.
When we think “interop,” often we think about hardware compatibility – sensors from different sources working with hubs and brokers and what not, humming away like a well-tuned orchestra. But … Read More → "Getting Onto the IoT"
For the reason’s posted under “Intel Plus Altera
What Would it Mean?” … Intel simply doesn’t need Altera, or Xilinx IP.
Everything that is important they will need to engineer themselves anyway, and that isn’t very much. A co-processor FPGA fabric is a very very different beast than today’s Altera and Xilinx FPGA’s.
Done right, and Intel will redefine computing … and implemented from XEON’s to Atom SOC offerings, so that Xilinx and Altera will spend the next decade playing catchup. Game over.
And with it, new important … Read More → "For the reason’s posted under “I"
So you run across an announcement from Imec that they’ve presented a circuit at ISSCC that involves tuning to match changing antenna impedances in cell phones. And if you’ve been hanging out in the same places I have, you might have the following reaction: “Hey, this is what some MEMS guys are doing as well! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Turns out it’s not quite that simple. I’d feel like it was just another day of me discovering yet another knowledge gap, but I wasn’t the only one conflating two concepts. Conversations with Cavendish … Read More → "Optimizing at the Cellphone Antenna"
Multiple financial news sources are reporting today that talks between Intel and Altera have ended. According to multiple sources, Altera declined Intel’s offer and the two companies have ended negotiations.
For the rest of the FPGA industry, this may be a bit of a disappointment. Other FPGA vendors we’ve talked with were optimistic that an Intel takeover of Altera would be good for the other FPGA players – altering and narrowing Altera’s focus, creating uncertainty among Altera’s existing customers, and disrupting the company’s existing development projects. Now, apparently, they’ll have to continue … Read More → "Intel Altera Deal Off?"
