Longtime readers of this column will know that I've been predicting the proliferation of visual intelligence in a wide range of products – including consumer electronics – for a few years now. Over that time, there have been a few high-profile successes of vision in consumer electronics. For example, the first-generation Microsoft Kinect, while not a hit with serious gamers, sold tens of million units and enabled many casual users to enjoy console gaming for the first time.

Emerging and evolving options for high-level design of FPGAs is a topic of ongoing interest at InsideDSP. Recently, for example, BDTI covered the latest version of Calypto's Catapult C-based design environment. Similarly, in August 2012 InsideDSP discussed the C-based high-level synthesis (HLS) facilities that Xilinx bundled in some versions of its Vivado FPGA design toolset.

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person--or which book, or whatever--you'd like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?

Well, choosing a processor is kind of like that. Except that, with a processor, it's not a game. Once you've chosen a processor, and designed your hardware and software around that processor, it becomes very expensive--and very time-consuming--to switch to another processor. So, you're likely to be stuck with whatever choice you've made for a good long time: five years, easily; maybe more.

High-level synthesis (HLS) is a trend that BDTI has been following for quite some time, beginning with its several-decade-old academic foundations.

For decades, multiprocessor systems were rare and most developers never had to think about how to program them. This began to change roughly a decade ago. In the spring of 2005, both AMD (Athlon 64 X2) and Intel ("Smithfield") unveiled x86 CPUs with dual processor cores on a single die. More recently, not only has the number of both physical and virtual on-chip cores steadily grown, the multi-core trend has also expanded into mobile and embedded applications. As multiprocessor chips become more prevalent, the ability to program them efficiently has become more important.

The phrase "garbage in, garbage out" is usually associated with writing and using computer programs. In fact, the concept originated with Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computer. Amusingly, Babbage wrote:

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'...I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Algorithms are the essence of digital signal processing; they are the mathematical "recipes" that transform signals in useful ways. Companies developing new algorithms, or considering purchasing or licensing algorithms, often need to assess whether an algorithm will fit within their processing budget—and thereby within their cost and power consumption targets.

The December 2012 edition of InsideDSP included the article "Texas Instruments' Latest KeyStone II SoCs: Is A Special-Purpose Server Strategy Feasible?," which discussed TI's 66AK2Hx SoCs for specialized server applications.

Smartphones and tablets may hog the limelight, but advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) represent another hot technology sector.

My colleagues and I at BDTI recently completed a project to help a chip company select a licensable processor core to perform computer vision functions in a new SoC design. In the process, we learned many things about these processors. But, more interesting to me, we also learned something about human nature.