Editors' Blog

All-in-one Image Platform

Even as we’re about to discuss more about gestures and motion, CEVA has announced a vision platform explicitly designed for mobile devices and with a specific eye to gesture recognition and other advanced applications.

The idea is to take the raw camera images directly onto its L2 memory and then do, at the very least, your basic image processing before sending completed jpegs or video files directly out to DDR memory, integrating all of the various functions in one engine and with only one trip out to memory.

But beyond this, further processing … Read More → "All-in-one Image Platform"

Is the radio handover not alread

by Kevin Morris

Is the radio handover not already happening in the US? It is on FM in Europe. To quote the venerable BBC, “If you listen to FM radio while travelling around the country, you may often need to retune your radio to another frequency for the same station. Many car radios have RDS (Radio Data System), which automatically tunes to the strongest FM signal, so you don’t need to retune the radio manually.” The same thing happens across other European countries.

… Read More →

Moving Up a Different Channel

by Kevin Morris

LDRA continues to move upstream in the design flow with its certification tools. We saw not long ago that they were interconnecting with Simulink to push testing further up that modeling path; now they’ve announced similar arrangements with National Instruments’ LabView platform.

The idea here is that, when modeling safety-critical systems – especially those that have to pass regulatory muster – you can get a jump start by testing the early snippets of code that might be modeled long before the … Read More → "Moving Up a Different Channel"

Broadcast TV Lives… With Multiple Incarnations

by Jim Turley

With the prevalence of cable in many parts of the world, you might think that broadcast TV is on the way out. For people dropping cable, it’s not like they’re going back to receiving the signal over the air; they’re getting their content via the internet instead.

So you might be surprised to hear that there are multiple standards for digital broadcast TV – including even versions intended for mobile platforms like tablets and phones. When you think “mobile” you might be thinking things like handoff and such (more … Read More → "Broadcast TV Lives… With Multiple Incarnations"

News from the Inside

by Bryon Moyer

We all know that process control is everything. And this is true more than ever before at each node. That is, if there is a notion of “more than everything.”

Of course, one of the critical parameters in pretty much any process is temperature. Monitoring it to make sure nothing is going awry is, to put it mildly, a good thing. How to do that then?

Most wafer-processing equipment involves one or more chucks to which a wafer is secured (usually by a vacuum). And those chucks often have temperature sensors in them, … Read More → "News from the Inside"

Certification Claims

by Jim Turley

There are handbags at dawn in the safety-critical RTOS market. Last week QNX put out a press release with the title, “QNX Announces Availability of First RTOS to Achieve Both Safety and Security Certification.” Today, Green Hills Software hit out with a letter to all the press. Green Hills has never been a company to mince its words, and in this letter it continues that approach, declaring that “This statement is false.” It goes on to say that “While practically any vendor could be accused, at one time or another, of making embellished, distorted, … Read More → "Certification Claims"

A Mysterious New Roll-On Material… or Two 2

by Bryon Moyer

Back when we looked at organic semiconductors, CMOS was a hard thing to do because the standard organic materials were generally p-type. Meaning that organic circuits would consume more power.

A couple of news items have come out recently describing a mysterious material developed by Polyera. The first release was from Norwegian company Thinfilms; they had worked with PARC on developing organic CMOS technology and ultimately announced printed addressable memories that incorporated the Polyera material. “Printable” in this case refers to a so-called “gravure& … Read More → "A Mysterious New Roll-On Material… or Two 2"

Shock Value

by Dick Selwood

The area of sensors is tightly intertwined with that of energy harvesting, since many sensors are in far-flung installations that are hard to power.

Early this year we looked at a self-sufficient energy harvester that fed itself on vibrations; it was able to generate up to 35.8 µW of power given vibrations of 1 G. Recently, imec announced at IEDM average generation of 42 µW, with a record of 489 µW under optimal conditions.

The installation? This is specifically for tires, using … Read More → "Shock Value"

IP in the Cloud

by Dick Selwood

EDA has yet another cloud computing participant, but this is of a different flavor from what we’ve seen before. While most efforts to date have been to make tools available in the cloud, IPextreme has opened an IP portal called Xena. The idea is to create an IP store so that customers can browse IP and purchase from Xena merchants. Use of the site is free to those customers; it’s the IP vendors that pay for the subscription.

Validating Serial Protocols

by Dick Selwood

When I was approached to talk about a new product from Arasan, I ran afoul of my favorite source of confusion from the Bureau of Arbitrary Definitions: I thought it was a verification story, when in fact it’s a validation story.

In case you think those two sound like pretty much the same thing, I always like to reinforce the confusion by defining verification as the act of proving that your design is a valid implementation of the design spec, while validation is the act of verifying … Read More → "Validating Serial Protocols"