Huge Challenges With Billions Of Things


Communication is poised in the next couple of years to cross a line between humans and things—things talking directly to other things as well as to people—setting in motion a series of technological, social and legal issues that will take years or decades to resolve. On one hand, this is made possible by leaps in processing performance and power management in mobile devices. In his keyno... » read more

Trending Back To ASICs


True to its cyclical nature, the semiconductor industry is swinging back toward ASICs from more diversified approaches such as FPGAs. This dynamic is evident at companies such as Apple. “At one point we thought Apple was being a contrarian,” said Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics. “Everybody else on the systems side was shedding their silicon people. The easiest counterpoint to what Apple wa... » read more

Processor Subject To Change


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With power complexity driving sophisticated management techniques, SoC design engineering teams are turning to a new class of customizable processor architectures from ARM, CEVA, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tensilica and others to take advantage of the best in power saving techniques. While these new architectures are novel approaches, the concepts are not especially new,... » read more

Redefining Performance In Mobile Devices


By Ann Steffora Mutschler While mobile product trends can be reliably unpredictable, devices are definitely moving towards supporting more software-based browsers, plug-ins for browsers, and downloaded codecs to go to browsers. This results in coming up with a best guess for performance targets. Throw power tradeoffs into the mix and things really start to get interesting. In terms of defin... » read more

LTE Heightens Power-Consumption Concerns


By Ellen Konieczny The air interface dubbed Long Term Evolution (LTE) hails the coming of fourth-generation (4G) cellular communications, which will benefit from both increased capacity and speed. Among the lofty goals of 4G technology is the promise of users being able to widely access streaming media, such as mobile television and video, in real time. Before such capabilities can be made ava... » read more

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