Opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Open Source Digital Signal Processing?

Over the past few years, the use of open source software in embedded systems has become mainstream.  In part, this is due the sheer necessity:  Systems just keep getting more complex, incorporating more and more functionality, but design teams aren’t getting larger, and code-writing productivity isn’t improving dramatically.  In many cases, this means that the role of embedded software developers has shifted from writing code to integrating components—but finding the needed components can be Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—You Can’t Compete if You Don’t Show Up

I was recently reminded of a very old joke―old enough that I remember hearing it from my dad when I was a kid: There were two grocers, Smith and Jones, on the same street. Smith had a sign in his window, "Avocados, 20 pence a pound". A woman goes in and asks for some. "Sorry love", said Smith, "I haven't got any in just now; come back on Wednesday".  So she goes on up the street to Jones. But his avocados are 2 pounds-fifty a pound! But at least he has them in stock.  "That's a bit Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Get a Taste of Their Own Medicine

I recently returned from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Well, actually, I got back over a month ago, but it feels like I just got back.  My ears are still ringing. CES is a phenomenon.  It’s big. It’s loud.  It’s crowded and inconvenient.  Come to think of it, the experience of being an attendee at CES is a lot like the experience of buying and using consumer electronics.  In several ways, CES gives consumer electronics manufacturers a taste of their own medicine. For Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Rise of Licensable Cores

Ten years ago, I wrote about how licensable processor cores were beginning to play a more important role in the industry.  Among other trends, I observed that large chip companies were beginning to adopt licensable cores for application-specific chips such as cellphone baseband SoCs, rather than using proprietary cores that they developed in-house.  This trend has certainly strengthened over the past ten years. It’s one thing for a company making application-specific SoCs—which often Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Internet of Things That See

The term “the Internet of things” refers to a vision of the future where many objects—automobiles, appliances, sensors—will be connected to the Internet. I hadn’t given this idea much thought until I attended the recent SDR ’10 Technical Conference, hosted by the Wireless Innovation Forum.  This is an excellent conference, and the keynote talks I attended were well worth my time.  What caught my attention at this year’s conference was that three keynote speakers—from Verizon, Huawei, and ST Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Wireless Leads the Way—Again

Considering how ubiquitous and indispensible they are today, it’s amazing to think that digital cellular phones were a novelty 15 years ago.  In the mid-1990s, digital cellular handsets were just beginning to be deployed in large volumes.  At that time, these handsets were becoming the “killer app” for digital signal processors.  Chip suppliers such as Texas Instruments (TI) and AT&T Microelectronics ramped up their DSP processor development efforts to compete for design wins in this Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Floating-Point Future

Back in the early days of embedded digital signal processing software, floating-point processors were expensive.  As a result, they were reserved for a few lucky engineers doing prototyping work and developing equipment for low-volume, price-insensitive applications.  Everyone else used fixed-point processors.  In addition to being cheaper, fixed-point processors were faster and more energy-efficient.  But fixed-point processors also require more work:  Algorithm developers usually write Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Last One-Man Dog?

What’s a “one-man dog,” you ask?  It’s a dog that works for one person and one person only.  (It’s also the title of a 1929 movie about a dog that solves a murder mystery, but that’s a story for another day.)  What does this have to do with embedded processing or DSP, you ask? Well, I use the phrase “one-man dog” to refer to a processor architecture that is captive to a single semiconductor vendor.  When we started BDTI in the early 1990s, it seemed that just about every digital Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Machines that See: The Next Embedded Processing Frontier?

Lately I’ve been thinking about what I call “embedded vision” technology—that is, the use of computer vision technology in embedded systems.  Similar to the way that wireless communication has become pervasive over the past 10 years, I believe that embedded vision technology will be very widely deployed in the next 10 years. It’s clear that embedded vision technology can bring huge value to a vast range of applications.  Two of my favorites are Mobileye’s vision-based driver assistance Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—When the Left Hand Wrestles the Right

Recently, I asked the CEO of a large semiconductor company, “How important are small companies as partners and suppliers of your firm?”  His response was immediate and unequivocal:  “Extremely important.  By definition, small companies are more innovative and quicker than large ones.  We need to harness that for our success.” I suspect that nearly all big-company CEOs would say the same thing.  As Daniel Isenberg, professor of management practice at Babson College said in a recent edition Read more...