This is for those of us that maybe haven’t been paying attention.
The most important concept that turns Things into an Internet of Things is communication. And there are lots of ways to communicate, the favorites of which are wireless. We’ve looked at short-range wireless like WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. And we’ve looked at Read More → "M2M in Orbit"
Sometime back, we took a look at Econais’s WiFi modules. We mentioned their ProbMe capability, which simplifies connecting these devices to the WiFi network.
This function has apparently gotten some traction, and they’ve made some improvements that they announced in early August. So I wanted to dig in a bit more to understand specifically how this thing works – and get clarification on what seemed (and possibly still seem) like possible complications.
First, why do this at all? This … Read More → "ProbMe Simplifies Thing WiFi Connection"
I was keyed into the concept of the “proximal network” by the AllJoyn network, conceived by Qualcomm and managed by the AllSeen Alliance. I started poking around to learn more about proximal networks and to see which other ones might exist.
What I found was that there are two different senses of proximal network, although they share a conceptual basis.
Once concept is what you might call a mesh network for cellular. That concept notes that, if you make a cell call or send a text to a person 20 feet away from you ( … Read More → "Proximal Networks"
A new report has said that the emerging standards for the Internet of Things (see IoT Standards: Is the Time Right to Calm the Chaos? http://techfocusmedia.net/archives/articles/20140908-iot/) are failing miserably in not considering security.
The concern of the authors of the report, from Beecham Research, is that while a number of bodies are looking at CyberSecurity generally, the architects developing devices and systems are generally ignoring the issue and this could have dire consequences. The CIA triad refers to an information security model made … Read More → "Is the IoT Secure?"
A while back, we took a look at a couple of new resonant wireless charging approaches, including PowerByProxi. Their charging pad consists of multiple coils, allowing them to energize only the coils underneath a device being charged, and allowing multiple devices to charge independently and aiding efficiency.
To help drive adoption, they’ve released an evaluation kit consisting of a transmitter and two receiver modules. It will allow testing of device charging up to the rate of 7.5 W.
Read More → "PowerByProxi Eval Kits"
This was originally going to be simply an update on something we discussed before. But it may be slightly more than that.
You may recall that, when it comes to local wireless for the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s largely a battle between WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee (not counting proprietary networks). And that WiFi and Bluetooth have an edge, being in phones.
But Zigbee, despite its … Read More → "Enabling CSR… or… Microchip?"
While multicore took a while to take root in the embedded world, it’s now relatively commonplace. But the most accessible style of multicore is homogeneous: all cores the same. Combine that with a shared memory configuration, and this becomes easy because you can use a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) solution out of the box from your favorite OS. It treats the multiple processors as a group as if they were a single processor. It can do so because the processors are all the same and they all have the same view of memory.
But that’ … Read More → "Mentor Does Heterogeneous Multicore I"
Cadence recently announced new extraction tools, claiming both greater speed (5x) and best-in-class accuracy for full-chip extraction. And what is it that lets them speed up without sacrificing results?
The answer is the same thing that has benefited so many EDA tools over the last few years: parallelism. Both within a box (multi-threading) and using multiple boxes (distributed computing). The tools can scale up to hundreds of CPUs, although they’re remaining mum on the details of how they did this…
They have two new tools: a new Read More → "Faster Extraction from Cadence"
3D has been tossed about quite a bit over the last few years. We can ignore the 3D TV craze that came and went like an evanescent avatar. But the two IC manifestations have been 3D transistors (i.e., FinFETs) and 3D package integration – stacking chips.
The latter is a more-than-Moore technology that allows multiple chips, each built on processes best suited to it, with the ability to leverage high-volume off-the-shelf dice like memories instead of designing them from scratch.
But what if you want to scale like circuits vertically? That’s to … Read More → "A New 3D"
Today we looked at the role of Freescale’s new FXLN83xxQ accelerometer for analyzing vibrations. But one feature of the accelerometer had me cocking an eyebrow: analog outputs.
We’ve covered a lot about sensors here before, and in the huge majority of the cases, a sensor consists of a MEMS (or other) sensing element, an ASIC to clean up and digitize the signal, and then … Read More → "Old-School Analog Outputs"
