When Exposed To IoT, Big Iron ATE Will Rust


When the first “smart” refrigerators were released in the early 2000s, consumers weren’t sure what to do with them. When Nest released the smart thermostat, though, a revolution happened. Humans were taken out of the loop because the thermostat learned on its own about desired temperature and how quickly it could cool or heat a house. And it could synchronize all of this better than a hum... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Analysis Some consumer IoT products are actually useful and helpful in daily life, such as the Nest Learning Thermostat and the Honeywell Lyric for home automation, David Pogue writes. Then there are the products that make most people scratch their heads – IoT water bottles, the IoT toilet-paper dispenser, the IoT toothbrush, IoT umbrella, IoT fork, the IoT egg tray, and so on, he notes. “... » read more

Alexa, Can You Help Me Build A Better SoC?


Consumers have fallen love with clever products like Amazon Echo, Nest, Google maps, Waze and Zillow that somehow make life a little easier and more fun. The underlying technology that makes these apps so rich and useful is machine learning and it seems to be showing up everywhere. Maybe it’s time to ask, “Alexa, can you help me build a better SoC?” The Next Frontier in SoC Architectur... » read more

Will We Ever Have Just One Remote Control?


The concept of home automation powered by a single remote control has been discussed for decades — at least since the first airing of the Jetsons in 1962. And the tech world has been working fervently to deliver on the concept for just as long. In some respects, we've landed. But there's still much more to explore on the path to a seamless, secure and scalable whole-house connectivity solu... » read more

Rethinking The Cloud


Data center architectures have seen very few radical changes since the commercial introduction of the [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"] System/360 mainframe in 1964. There have been incremental improvements in speed and throughput over the years, with a move to a client/server model in the 1990s, but from a high level this is still an environment where data is processed and stored centrally ... » read more

One-on-One: Steven Woo


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Steven Woo, vice president and distinguished inventor at [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus"], to talk about the IoT and where the real problems are showing up. SE: What are the big challenges as we move toward an [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"]-connected world? Woo: The challenges we see, moving forward aren’t particularly related... » read more

IoT Growing Pains


The Internet of Things is having one of those defining moments — and not in a good way. Only a limited number of things will work together at first. Only in rare case will they actually cross boundaries between vertical markets such as consumer or home, automotive and medical. And in no cases will there be any guarantees, at least in the short term, that communications will be reliable, secur... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled two new tools. The first is a rapid prototyping platform that the company claims will shorten bring-up time by 70%, with 4X improvements in capacity, with IEEE 1801 support for low-power verification through its emulation platform. The second is a single and multi-corner custom/analog extraction tool, which it claims will improve performance by 5X. The tool has been cert... » read more

IoT, A Market And Technology Set To Explode


While a fully-connected Internet of Things (IoT) world is still away off, an increasing number of devices are being built that can communicate with each other through wireless connections such as WiFi, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN or Cellular. Current technology trends point toward a more seamlessly connected world, and for that to happen we must have cost-effective, low-power and highly connected dev... » read more

Beyond The CES Hype


Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to realistically assess all the activity at CES 2014. The big screen TVs, the shiny new cars and all the excitement over Internet of Things certainly dazzled the CES show floor. But how much of it is hype and what will really become sustainable products? Smart lighting, smart refrigerators, smart cars, and a smart thermostat are all part of what is... » read more