Cure The Common Cold…


The technology sector has no equal in the ability of its people to visualize what might be possible and then make it happen fast. If we were sorting out the common cold, the sniffles may already have been relegated to the past. Maybe that’s a claim too far but while imagining the future has always been a feature of our world I think we’ve gone into overdrive in the last few years. From a... » read more

Different Approaches To Security


Everyone acknowledges the necessity for cybersecurity precautions, yet the world continues to be challenged by an invisible, inventive army of hackers. The massive data breach at Equifax was only the latest in a series of successful cyberattacks on the credit monitoring firm. Lessons learned from the previous breaches apparently didn’t mitigate this year’s embarrassment for the company. ... » read more

The Challenge Of Fitting In


Connections between players in the semiconductor industry are becoming critical for survival. Whether the focus is a connected car, home automation, health care or the energy grid, each company in each of those markets relies on others to build useful products. There are several forces at work here. One is an emphasis on connecting everything, regardless of whether it is inside a single vert... » read more

ARM Cortex-A53, UPF & FD-SOI


The IEEE Standards Association Symposium on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Interoperability was held on Oct. 24. I found the first session, Interoperability Challenges: Power Management in Silicon, with presentations by Erich Marschner of Mentor Graphics and Stuart Riches and Adnan Khan (both from ARM) to be particularly interesting. Earlier this year, the IEEE announced a new version of UP... » read more

Notes From TechCon


ARM CEO Simon Segars put a different twist on the Internet of Things at this week’s TechCon 2013. He put it under the heading of the ‘mobile Internet,” which may prove to be a much more accurate description. This isn’t just about things talking to things. It’s about people and things interacting in ways never before possible, regardless of location. That sounds great in theory, but... » read more