Author's Latest Posts


How I Survived CES


To come away from the annual Consumer Electronics Show with a shred of sanity, you need to focus on what matters. It’s easy not to. The minute you step foot into the crush of any exhibit floor you’re dragged into a massive undertow of technology that’s hard to swim from. The hype is palpable, the noise deafening, the products endless. Because of this sensory overload, it’s easy to la... » read more

Electronic System Design In 2015: Busting Through Bottlenecks


It’s December, and that means it’s time to review what just happened in electronics design in the hopes that it will help light a path into the New Year. To simplify a year’s work in a global, sophisticated, ever-changing industry, you could say 2014 hinged on to two main tipping points: The marriage of EDA and IP was consummated. The road to the future forked. Let’s look at #1... » read more

The Multicore Processing Conundrum


We drive relentlessly into our technological future and often it seems like we’re upgrading our high-performance vehicle as it speeds forward. That’s no easy task, to be sure. We were roaring along fine, observing Moore’s Law, and then we hit a speed bump. So design teams quickly adopted multi-core designs to compensate for the fact that pushing up speeds on single-core CPUs was a melt... » read more

The Democratization Of System Design…


One of my favorite technology columnists, Andy Kessler, argues in a new Wall Street Journal column that we’re entering a fourth major era of computing: “The original mainframe computer of the 1960s automated back offices and transactions, bringing efficiency and lowering costs. That cycle ended in the early 1990s when the personal computer picked up steam. By the mid-1990s the Web was help... » read more

Where Is Gene Roddenberry When You Need Him?


As we chatted the other day, my colleague Scott Lewis said something so deceptively simple that it made us stop in our tracks. “We need another Gene Roddenberry,” he said. The Star Trek creator in the 1960s introduced the world to an array of futuristic technologies (the tricorder, wireless ear sets and so on) that in effect became our collective electronics product roadmap. We have m... » read more

If It Ain’t Broke, Start Fixing It Right Away


"If it ain't broke don't fix it." It’s a line that can lull businesses into fatal complacency. It lies at the heart of Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma writings: The products or services driving a successful business "ain't broke," but they usually prevent companies from anticipating or responding to disruptive innovation outside their walls. Our electronics ind... » read more

Amazon Fire And The Importance Of Interface Design


The flames have died down a bit from the red-hot coverage of the launch of the Amazon Fire smart phone, but the impact of the announcement lingers for me. Love or hate Amazon (I love the company), you have to tip your hat to CEO Jeff Bezos. He’s redefined smart phone design with this offering and in the process forced our industry to think about how we support system designers like Amazon. ... » read more

Computer Vision’s Enormous Challenges Ahead


SAN FRANCISCO — There is a constant, humming tension between what Moore's Law delivers and what consumers expect from electronics systems design. We're on the verge of seeing this in the coming decade in computer vision, an application that has enormous potential to transform society. In the meantime, enormous challenges and decisions lie ahead on the road to transformation. Embedded Vi... » read more

Google Project Ara And The Low-Power Imperative


You’ve no doubt seen the slides: 50 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices by 2020. That’s an amazing number, but consider this: What if they each draw 1W? All things begin equal, we’d have to build another 50 nuclear power plants in the world to handle that additional energy requirement. (Something tells me that outcome is unrealistic). Power takes center stage as we evolve into ... » read more

Platforms, Standards, Methodologies Conquer Design Challenges


We in the electronics design world always have spent a lot of time wringing our hands (will we ever get to design below 1 micron??) And while the problems are not imagined—they’re often soberingly real—we tend to plow through them, or, when necessary around them. Today, amid increasing complexity and risk, we’re leveraging platforms, standards and new methodologies to slay these d... » read more

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