category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Economic Resilience
By Ed Sperling - 27 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

Check out the lines at the Apple store for iPhones and you have to wonder what all the economists are worrying about. It seems incongruous, but the electronics industry is faring well in the face of a global economy that is flat in the best of places, sluggish in others, and faltering everywhere else. So what’s up? Mobile computing is the answer. While predictions of the computer’s de... » read more

Who Owns What And Why
By Ed Sperling - 23 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

Who’s calling the shots these days—and how long they’ll continue calling the shots—is turning out to be as much conjecture as playing the futures exchange. There are so many changes underway that even engineers are crossing boundaries no one ever expected and ending up in companies outside of IC design or moving from seemingly far afield into the design world. Still, there are some c... » read more

Disaggregation And Re-aggregation
By Ed Sperling - 02 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

The proliferation of platforms, subsystems and IP of any sort, as well as the move to stack die in 2.5D configurations, will force a realignment of the ecosystem. For the moment, it appears that vertically integrated companies such as Apple and Samsung have a distinct advantage. It remains to be seen just how substantial that advantage really is, however. As chips become a collection of more... » read more

All Indicators Point North
By Ed Sperling - 28 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

Designing and producing chips has always been difficult, but the number of things that conspire to make it harder at 20nm is the longest in the history of the semiconductor industry. The list will grow longer still at 14nm and beyond, not to mention so expensive that one mistake will kill a company. While system engineers and architects look at the challenges on the front end, the problems ... » read more

The Next Frontiers
By Ed Sperling - 24 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

One of the interesting things about technology is that, at least from the outside, it’s hard to tell what’s actually changing. That’s not true on the inside, of course, where radical shifts are under way. The next big push in smart phones will be much greater intelligence. In the iPhone, Siri was just the tip of the iceberg. Future versions are likely to be much more interesting. Add ... » read more

Which Comes First?
By Ed Sperling - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

The increasing numbers of software engineers inside of hardware companies, coupled with predictions about how the software stack will increase over time to include applications, has produced a lot of speculation about what the starting point should be for design. Will it remain the hardware? Or will it be the software? The answer, gleaned from literally dozens of interviews, is beginning to ... » read more

New Winners And Losers
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

The realignment of the semiconductor industry has begun, most of it beneath the radar screen. In a disaggregated supply chain, any piece in isolation looks insignificant. But taken together, these shifts begin to paint a picture of a broad realignment and refocusing of the entire industry that ultimately will cement the fortunes of some and create new winners and losers out of others. The fi... » read more

Redefining Design Starts
By Ed Sperling - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

For the past decade we have been hearing grim tales about the number of design starts shrinking and how that’s hurting EDA. While that makes for sensational headlines, reality is somewhat fuzzier and far less grim. The big shift that’s underway isn’t so much a decline in design starts as a rise in SoCs. But SoCs are never really created from scratch. They’re a combination of commerci... » read more

Verifying The Pieces
By Ed Sperling - 06 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

It’s not uncommon to hear engineers express disbelief these days that a complex device actually works. This is both a sign of amazing advancement in system-level design, as well as a scary revelation that’s surfacing from all parts of the design world. What’s behind this uncertainty is the growing complexity of devices, which has moved design well beyond the comprehension of a single e... » read more

What’s Really Going On?
By Ed Sperling - 15 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

At the end of the year it’s common to make predictions about what’s coming next year or to look back at the events that have transpired over the past 12 months. It’s becoming more difficult to do both. To begin with, there’s the question of re-aggregation or disaggregation. While most industries swing back and forth between aggregation and disaggregation, that process has become inc... » read more

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