All Blog Posts (124)

From the NMI Website: www.tiny.cc/FWS2012

We're pleased to announce that FWS-2012 will be taking place on April 24th and 25th at the iconic Wembley Stadium.

The Future World Symposium is NMI's flagship conference and exhibition and seeks to explore the road ahead. Over two days…

India seems to be going through a new era in high-tech – whether it is in software, with new product entrepreneurs emerging in huge numbers, or electronics and telecoms which are both in the process of having new national policies formulated.

There is certainly a wave of enthusiasm among technology businesses, and among policy-makers who want to create the environment for Indian companies to both serve the growing domestic market in…

Tech entrepreneurs Nigel Toon and James Collier had much advice for the electronics industry at the NMI Industry Summit in London in November 2011, particularly about building scale and using new business models to overcome current limitations to growth for the semiconductor start-up and entrepreneur community. In particular they talked about how semiconductors are not seen as good investments any more, and a future for semiconductors in which the silicon is free and is merely a vehicle to…

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS or "DTI" in old money) ran a showcase of British electronics early in December at 1 Victoria St., London. It was a great opportunity to exhibit to Ministers, civil servants, the passing public and the many visitors to the building. It illustrated…

A new £1 million global award for engineering will celebrate outstanding advances in engineering that have created significant benefit to humanity... Engineers are the real revolutionaries... exciting and dynamic profession...to reach the same status as a Nobel Prize...…

I've stolen the title of this blog post from a question asked by Peter Claydon at a recent SiliconSouthWest event and I thought it worth a comment or two.

According to the David Manners blog Peter answered "it probably is...". However an alternative view was presented in…

NMI has a brand new award this year: The Technology Entrepreneur Award.

We're interested in people you may know who have vision and the courage to turn ideas into business reality... if…

NMI held a great event recently (more details) where Low-Power Design/Verification was hotly debated. One of the key discussion points was on hardware and software groups not communicating, leading to sub-optimal solutions and a significant impact on power consumption.

If you want to know more, checkout the…

Ok, Microsoft is not dead, nor is Google either however their business models are being called into question by Forrester's CEO, George Colony. Introducing the term 'app internet', Colony explains why Microsoft's PC centric model is in trouble and why he thinks Googles Chromebook is "the greatest act of corporate idiocy that I've ever observed."

I have to admit that I shared a similar thought when I heard about the…

Ok, I admit it - I am a grumpy (getting older) man... but some things need airing.



I tried to have a call with my boss yesterday whilst driving (hands-free of course). He was in a car too and we both knew there was little chance of it lasting long enough to be of any use - sure enough we did not have "that all important call" when it was needed. In fact it was very short lived.



It caused me to reflect back to the early 90's when I was fortunate enough to have a mobile phone…

In 2010 Apple topped the OEM table for purchase of semiconductors - a trend that is forecast to continue in 2011 spurred by demand for iPads, iPhones and (to a lesser degree) iPods and Macs. When I saw the headline figure projected at $22Bn for 2011 -  it got me wondering how polarised the market actually is at the top end as the…

Former Electronic Engineering editor Ron Neale has tracked the progress of phase-change memory (PCM) for many years. His work on the technology dates back to when it was first proposed as a rad-hard memory for the military. Since then, PCM has promised to become a universal, low-power memory but, some 40 years, on has still failed to achieve it.

The development of a carbon-nanotube form of PCM could signal a way for the technology to deliver on its promise -…

When Panasonic said it would ship its first parts based on a 32nm high-k, metal-gate process by last October, technical analyst firm Dick James of Chipworks was confident the company would hit its deadline and beat many of the other companies planning HKMG.

It took a while but James says Chipworks has now found a Panasonic…

A little over ten years, David Miller of Stanford University argued that optical interconnects for electronic chips would ultimately become necessary:

“Optics is arguably a very interesting and different physical approach to interconnection that can in principle address most, if not all, of the problems encountered in electrical interconnections.”

Miller found problems…

The advantage of system on-chip (SoC) design is that the architects have a lot of control over the power consumption of the equipment because so much of the logic is tied up in one chip. Potentially, the savings can be big because system software can determine which of the functional units are running at any one time. That is as long as they make use of that control.

Writing for EETimes Designline, Satish Sathe of Applied Micro Circuits…

The battle between ARM and Intel in the mobile-device market has reopened the decade-old debate on whether reduced instruction set computer (RISC) design is more efficient than that of a complex instruction set computer (CISC). 

Because ARM is used in mobile phones and devices where Intel’s Atom struggles to gain a foothold, the natural assumption is that RISC is naturally more energy efficient than CISC. But that is not necessarily the case, especially as…

The best battery is a small one, right? Unfortunately the reality is lot more complex than that and a battery powered system might not last as long without a charge as you think if the battery does not match up well with the system it’s powering.

Keith Odland at Silicon Laboratories has written an overview of battery chemistries and their effect on system…

Writing at Chip Design magazine, John Blyler points to recent research by Chip Design Trends that indicates how power consumption – usually too much – has become less of a cause for respins than other problems. 

The graph used doesn’t show how the number of respins has changed but it suggests that common problems in older projects are now much more under control. The big grower for 2010 was the specification…

David Blaauw and colleagues from the University of Michigan – a team that has done a lot of work in near-threshold circuitry and other low-power techniques – have written about their programme to develop radios for tiny, implantable computers at EETimes.

The problem for radio circuitry in systems that need to be powered by a small cell for years on…

The Digital Electronics Blog has posted an “interview question” that asks how much power each implementation of a counter consumes. The design choices are between a standard binary counter, a Gray code counter and a one-hot counter.

In this particular example, the circuit does not have much in the way of leakage current and the power…