Blog Review: Jan. 8

How do you choose an embedded operating system—and do you even need one? Mentor’s Colin Walls looks at the options, and the reason why there are no simple answers.

Cadence’s Richard Goering has evidence that Facebook is gaining in popularity for engineer. He’s not the first person to recognize this shift, but the big unanswered questions are, ‘What’s the average age of those users and where are they located?’

Synopsys’ Mark Greenberg serves up a primer on LPDDR4, along with a list of announcements about who’s developing it—all of the usual suspects, of course—and for what applications.

ARM’s Diya Soubra introduces a new concept—personal body area sensor network. But there’s a nagging question behind this about whether people will buy into this concept or shy away for fear of having their biometric data hacked.

Mentor’s Dennis Brophy, wearing his Accellera standards hat, points to the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard for verification coverage data. If you’re spending too much time on verification, there’s a link to download the latest standard. If you’re not spending much time, there are a lot of people who want to share your secrets—or avoid your products.

Cadence’s Brian Fuller highlights some of the smaller technology innovations that collectively can have a big impact rather than just focusing on the ones that get the most attention. These kinds of developments don’t always pan out, for sure, but the point is that sometimes they do—and there are a lot of them.

ARM’s Ellie Stone looks at moving Google’s VP9 standard for video compression onto mobile devices. The new standard can either do more processing using less energy, or it can improve performance at the same energy. There’s a video to go along with this, as well.

Mentor’s Nazita Saye learned a number of lessons in 2013, like why flying is considered magic in Europe but not in the United States, and how to cook a better turkey.

Cadence’s Tawna Wilsey takes a deep dive into a new transmission line library for RF tools. If you work in this world, bring a pen and paper. This is analog, after all.