My vote for the cool SOC of the year (2003) is the Xilinx Virtex II Pro. It's a PPC 405 with a giant fpga. It's also a lot of IP which does all of the normal things like ethernet, serial, etc...
Maybe everyone knows this but looking over the interface docs I was having some major deja-vu from some work I did for IBM a few years back. It sure looks like the guts of the IP all came from IBM. Personally I like this because my impression is that IBM folks up in VT did a really nice job most of the time. (except for those odd PPC DCR registers - oh well, can't ask for everything)
Anyway, I've always been frustrated by this controller or that and always wanted to tweek things in the cpu/peripheral interface. Now it appears I can. We'll see... I plan to try.
The Year of the ARM SOC
Seems like everyone and his brother is making an ARM SOC. I'll swear there are 50 different vendors making them. Do we need all of these? I guess so. Intel, Sharp, Fujitsu, Samsung to name a few. It is nice because each one seems a little different.
It's also nice because building a small embedded device which runs linux is now pretty much a commodity. Anyone can string up a cpu with some SDRAM and flash and make something pretty powerful. Amazing.
I'm trying it with a Sharp ARM chip. We'll see how it goes. One thing is for sure - I have great respect for cad operators who can layout a dense board quickly.
"The day the music died..."
What hath venture capital wrought?
dateline 2000: Way too much money chasing to many bad deals. Way too much money put into marginal or even bad ideas. Insane valuations. Insane investments.
dateline 2002: many, many, many failed startups. everyone is running scared. M&A has slowed or stopped. IPO's have gone away. Companies are running out of money and can't sell anything.
We end up in the "last money in wins" scenario. Greed rules. Fairness and ethical behavior are left for sissies. Money is put into companies with terms which would have been denounced as ridiculous in the "good old days".
If I see another company "refinanced" with a last round liquidation multiplier of 4x and all of the previous shareholders crammed down into worthless common, I'll puke. Or go postal. It's hard to say.
Certainly all of the angel investors are going to run for cover because this strategy leaves them with no return after taking significant risk.
Hey big company CEO's - where do you think those juicy little start ups come *from*? They come from angel investors, that's where. And later, the VC's come in. But in the beginning there are only angels. If you screw the angel investors by buying companies and giving the original common shareholders nothing, guess what they will do? They will stop investing. And guess what will happen to your stream of juicy little start ups? it will go away.
There, I said it.
System-on-chip cpu's are coming like a train. The first one I spent time with with Motorola's 8xx line, the 860, 850 and 823. These chips had all the peripherals on the chip on one big melange. Static memory interface for flash, SDRAM interface for memory, an MMU, serial ports and built in ethernet.
Needless to say it ran linux well, thanks to people like href="http://www.embeddededge.com">Dan Malek. About the same time two chip SOC sets like the Intel SA1110/SA1111 came about and helped in the low-power area. More about ARM and low-power later. Why can't MOT ever make a low-power cpu?
The 850/823's are great but I wish MOT would allow people to write microcode for the serial engine inside it. It's certainly running some sort of microcode and it would be nice to be able to fix bugs and do custom work with it.
I can't much too many really flattering things about Intel and it'a ARM work except, "how many times can you EOL the SA1110 before no one will believe you?". Sure seems like the marketing people keep trying to kill it when at the last second the sales people say "but hey, we're selling a *lot* of these". Maybe it's just me :-)
I next ran into the Alchemy (now AMD) Au1100 line. Nice SOC. Everything but the kitchen sink and all the ants (bugs) too. Still, they seem to have a nice road map and do seem to be fixing some of the bugs. Seems that all too often large companies by IP and slap it into their chips without bothering to test it in a rational way. Sure it passes someones vectors or testbench but the tests don't reflect what normal mortals do... I keep finding the same USB host and function bugs. Some day I'll meet the guy who wrote that verilog :-)
The AU1100 line is very fast (400Mhz) but also rather power hungry. And not very incline to sleep. On the other hand the ARM SOC's can't get past 200Mhz but have many low power features.
I'm looking forward to next year, with even more SOC's and more power conscious SOC's.
"Metricom to close Ricochet"
This is sad. I thought that this idea was strong enough to live in some metropolitan areas at least. The problem (IMHO) is that VC's often kill the idea by pushing the "big score/massive expansion" rather than the "slow but sure wins the race" strategy. I can't tell you how many CEO's I've talked to recently who have told me about their board meetings over the past two years. All the same. Yelled at for not expanding fast enough ("sure, we'll make sure the money is there") followed by getting yelled at for having no cash ("why did you spend all the money?").
I think this would be excusable if most of the VC's in the world had never actually run a company before, but I've seen this behavior out of almost all of them (not all, thankfully), including the ones who have had harsh P&L responsibility in the past. hi ho.
Bryan Prohm, a wireless industry analyst for Gartner (market research and consulting firm) has previously described it as "the only logical Darwinian outcome."
Who is this guy and what's his rational for making that sort of statement? I think he missed the point. I doubt he ever used the technology.
Would you wear a computer? I'm not sure I would. Except for maybe my wrist watch, cell phone, pager, oh, and the keys to my car.How about one which had a 600x800 eyepiece? or one that had an audio earpiece/microphone? Seen anyone with a phone and ear microphone lately? (they really work well - I tried one).
There are research folks all over the country (and world) working on wearable computing platforms. Some are pretty innovative. They include thinks like cameras, microphones, GPS receivers, accelerometers and IR sensors.
The notion of "context sensative computing" is often connected to these platforms; For instance, the camera will "recognize" a face and put info on the screen about the person. Or the GPS notice what building you are in and guide you to the office you or looking for. Or the bathroom. Or the nearest printer or coke machine. Seems dumb on the surface, but I'd like a cell phone which would tell me how to get out of a building during a fire.