Opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—When Will Robots Do Our Laundry? (Find Out on April 25th in San Jose!)

If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know that I’m enthusiastic about the potential of “embedded vision” – the widespread use of computer vision in embedded systems, mobile devices, PCs, and the cloud.  Processors and sensors with sufficient performance for sophisticated computer vision are now available at price, size, and power consumption levels appropriate for many markets, including cost-sensitive consumer products and energy-sipping portable devices. This is ushering in an era Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Sound from the Cloud

In my December column, I wrote about how smartphones and tablets are subsuming some categories of consumer electronics, such as MP3 players and networked home audio players. Because smartphones and tablets are network-centric devices, their growing use as media players is contributing to another important trend: multimedia content is increasingly being delivered on-demand via the Internet. These days, I get nearly all of my new audio entertainment content, such as podcasts and streaming music, Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Will Smartphones and Tablets Subsume All Consumer Electronics?

In my October column, I explored the phenomenon of mobile application processors (the brains of smartphones and tablets) competing against more traditional types of embedded processors for use in embedded systems. But after writing that column, something happened that made me realize that mobile application processors don't necessarily have to be designed into embedded systems in order to compete against other kinds of embedded processors.  Smartphones and tablets themselves are already Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

We tend to think of digital signal processing as being computationally demanding, since it typically involves applying math-intensive algorithms to real-time streaming data. And, compared with many other types of embedded processing tasks, digital signal processing does indeed make heavy demands on processors. But that doesn't mean that DSP always requires expensive hardware. Lately, I've been impressed by the growing array of microcontrollers with digital signal processing features. Often Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Mobile Application Processors Shift to Embedded Applications

Texas Instruments recently stated that it intends to de-emphasize application processors for smartphones and tablets, and instead refocus its OMAP processors on embedded applications. And Qualcomm, which has been very successful lately in smartphone and tablet application processors, is dipping its toe in the embedded space as well. These are very interesting developments to me, because for some time I've been thinking about the role of mobile application processors in embedded applications. Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—What is a Gesture?

Last year, I wrote about how gesture user interfaces are becoming mainstream. Today, with the IMS Touch Gesture Motion conference coming up next week in London, I thought I'd revisit that topic from a different angle. Among my colleagues at BDTI, there's been a healthy debate going on about whether gesture user interfaces are a gimmick - essentially a solution looking for a problem - or something that really adds value. With tens of millions of Kinect devices sold, I think that Microsoft Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—How Can Digital Signal Processing Enable Machines to See? (Find Out on September 19 in Boston!)

Two years ago, I wrote about my growing interest in "embedded vision", the incorporation of computer vision capabilities into embedded systems, enabling those systems to extract meaning from image and video inputs. Though it's not usually spoken of as "digital signal processing," embedded vision typically uses algorithms familiar to digital signal processing engineers. These include algorithms to improve the quality of capture images (such as lens distortion correction, often performed using Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Slower is Better!

When people talk about processor benchmarks, the conversation usually ends up being all about speed. Other metrics, such as energy efficiency, are often given less attention or are completely overlooked. The unspoken assumption driving these conversations is that a faster processor is better. For most embedded signal processing applications, this assumption doesn't make sense. These applications usually have fixed processing requirements. Typically, the goal is to meet those requirements Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Is the Long Tail Getting Longer for Chip Suppliers?

The phrase "the long tail" has come into prominence in the past few years to convey the concept that in some markets, a large number of niche products, each sold in low volume, can create a larger aggregate opportunity than that represented by a small number of blockbuster high-volume products. In the retail world, the long tail has become larger - and consequently has grown as a business opportunity - as the costs of maintaining inventory and delivering products has fallen. To quote from Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Memo to CEOs: The Money Value of Time

The "time value of money" – the fact that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow – is an intuitive concept deeply entrenched in our business culture. The "money value of time" also gets a lot of attention; it's generally recognized, for example, that getting a new product out ahead of competitors' offerings often defines the difference between success and failure. Lately, though, I've been flabbergasted by the extent to which some of the largest and most respected technology Read more...