Blog Review: Nov. 26

Mentor’s Nazita Saye has stumbled on a defibrillating drone that can rescuscitate victims well before emergency services arrive. That’s a new one.

ARM’s Brad Nemire has found an interesting new Kickstarter device, too. It measures everything from heart beat to body posture with earlobe sensors.

Cadence’s Brian Fuller follows a speech by economist Austan Goolsbee, who is optimistic about the long-term future—even with some blips over the next 12 to 18 months.

Synopsys’ Eric Huang is back with a half-dozen jokes (scroll down). Check out the one about penguins.

Ansys’ Bill Vandermark sifts through a bunch of engineering articles and zeroes in on the top five. Check out the one on new subatomic particles, which were theorized by Canadian physicists and discovered at CERN. There’s also a link to a battery system for solar and wind power grids.

NXP’s Laurent Dardé sheds some light on the three operating modes of near-field communication, where it came from in the first place, and why it’s important.

Mentor’s John McMillan discovers another use for 3D printers—circuit boards.

Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff points to a new film about Alan Turing, one of the cryptographers who broke the German Enigma code in World War II, and explains why it’s still relevant.

Semico Research’s Adrienne Downey uncovers a new wireless technology called “Kiss Connectivity,” which is a point-to-point, short-range near-field type of communication that can stream data at 6Gb per second. Check out who’s behind this one.

ARM’s Tim Hartley digs into parallelism in graphics algorithms—the easy, embarrassingly parallel ones and the really hard stuff.

Cadence’s Kishore Kasamsetty reviews the evaluation criteria for DDR PHY in a short whiteboard video.

Synopsys’ Hezi Saar points to the universal flash storage standard and why it’s so important for hitting time to market.

Mentor’s John Day looks at Infiniti’s first-ever technologies over its 25-year history and how many involve electrical and electronic systems.

ARM’s Eoin McCann interviews David Murray, Duolog’s CTO before the company was acquired by ARM, about IP integration and where the problems are likely to crop up.

Ansys’ Larry Williams quotes a friend at UC Irvine, who believes the IoT will rain money. The big question is where to put the buckets.

And in case you missed last week’s System-Level Design newsletter, here are some noteworthy blogs:

Technology Editor Brian Bailey observes that time can be too accurate, or not accurate enough, but it is rarely right.

Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister contends that the requirements for the next era of verification have been set, making for an interesting 2015.

Synopsys’ Tom De Schutter unveils survey results showing that software complexity is the top software development challenge, followed closely by late availability of hardware.

Open-Silicon’s Manohar Ayyagiri compares HMC 2.0 bandwidth and power to DDR4.

eSilicon’s Mike Gianfagna contends that online quoting is a game changer because it allows any size company to be taken seriously by the supply chain.