| Share the Air(waves) | |
 With seemingly everyone in the world over the age of six owning a smart phone, the FCC estimates that the demand for wireless services will continue to increase over 50% year-over-year. While the cellular network load due to voice traffic has remained relatively flat, data traffic has soared. Cisco reports that almost half of data traffic is streaming video, and AT&T has discovered that the killer app on its network- as in network killer-is the iPhone, with 4% of its iPhone customers recently accounting for more than half of the data traffic on its 3G network. This is a problem that isn't going away anytime soon, and cellular network operators are desperately trying to deal a huge surge in demand they hadn't anticipated. More
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| Do you believe in 21st century Intelligent Design? | |
Late last month, columnist Mike Cassidy wrote about visionary Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma in the San Jose Mercury News and his words reminded me that it was time, past time, to make yet another blog-based plea for intelligent design. No, I'm not talking about "intelligent design" in the form of an alternative to evolutionary theory. Not that one. I'm talking about "intelligent design" in the form of adding more microprocessors and more software to all electronic designs in a valiant attempt to produce products are more aware of the context of their surroundings. In other words, products that are far less stupid. At the same time, I believe that this form of intelligent design can help you cut product manufacturing cost. More |
| Question of the Week: Are you using Built-in Self Tests? |  On many of the projects I worked on it made a lot of sense to implement BISTs (built-in self tests) because the systems either had some safety requirements or the cost of executing a test run of a prototype system was expensive enough that it justified the extra cost of making sure the system was in as good a shape as it could be before committing to the test. A quick search for articles about BIST techniques suggested that it may not be adopted as a general design technique except in safety critical, high margin, or automotive applications. I suspect that my literature search does not reflect reality and/or developers are using a different term for BIST. More |
| Moore's Law Affirmation Leads To O/S Consolidation |  Back in mid-January 2011, shortly after that year's Consumer Electronics Show, I made a series of predictions that (judging from the amount and tenor of feedback I received at the time) were "mildly" controversial. Microsoft had just announced in Las Vegas that its next-generation operating system, Windows 8, would run not only on legacy x86 CPUs but also on ARM-based SoCs (a development effort whose initiation apparently predated the launch of the first-generation iPad by quite some time). It didn't take long for my prognostications to begin panning out. More |
| February Wireless Update: Maxim buys LTE RF Transceiver House GenASIC |  Since Intel bought Infineon, the number of merchant-market suppliers of multiband LTE (or even 3G) RF transceiver chips for cellphones dropped to zero. But Motorola has employed the Infineon multimode LTE RF Transceiver on some of its recent Droid handsets, presumably based on pre-Intel negotiations. Of course, Qualcomm, ST-Ericsson and other baseband suppliers have their own LTE RF transceivers, but buying one separately is tough. Multiband 3G/LTE transceivers are very difficult to design. Several companies have tried and failed, including Sequoia Semiconductor and BitWave Semiconductor, and likely others. Probably the only current supplier of such multiband RF Transceiver is Switzerland-based Advanced Circuit Pursuit AG. ACP has licensed its IP to ST-Ericsson, but is still offering its own chip and IP products. More |
| Wireless Innovation Forum 71st Working Meeting | 
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| International Society for Quality Electronic Design | 
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| Training Courses | |
 Fundamentals of Solar: Off-Grid
This course covers the fundamentals of off-grid, stand-alone photovoltaic (PV) systems, with the aim of providing engineers with a good overview of the technologies, topologies and electronics that make up such systems. The course content includes: · Introduction to Photovoltaic Systems · Grid-Connected vs. Off-Grid Solar Systems · Solar Energy Storage · Charge Controllers · Power Conditioning · Energy Harvesting · Integration Issue.
Fundamentals of Solar: Grid Connected
Photovoltaic (PV) solar technology is at the heart of the multi-billion dollar clean/green/renewable energy industry, powering everything from road signs to entire cities. This course covers the fundamentals of grid-connected PV systems, with the aim of providing engineers with a good overview of the technologies, topologies and electronics that make up such systems.
Fundamentals of Microcontrollers
EE Times Fundamentals course provides an introduction to microcontrollers (MCUs) including usage and selection of the devices. The course also includes a video explaining showing how to get started with an mbed evaluation kit. |
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