A System on Chip or an SoC is an integrated circuit that incorporates a majority of components present on a computer. As the name suggests, it is an entire system fabricated on a silicon chip. The beauty of an SoC is that it integrates all the components on a single substrate. In semiconductors, a substrate […]
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Designer’s guide to smart home tech, Part 2
This continues the discussion on smart home technology basics. You can find part 1 here. What is Z-Wave? Behind the Z-Wave standard is the Z-Wave Alliance. It is a wireless protocol that will connect and control smart home and IoT devices today. Today, there are over 3400 certified Z-Wave smart home devices on the market. […]
What are the AMBA protocols?
As electronic miniaturization has been an all-time goal of chip manufacturers, motherboard-based computer/electronic systems have been eventually replaced by System-on-Chip (SoC) and Package-on-Package (PoP) ICs. Complex computer systems are now condensed to smartphones and other handheld devices. These sophisticated electronic devices and gadgets have an SoC at their heart which manages complete computing and control. […]
Designer’s guide to smart home tech, Part 1
According to MarketsandMarkets, a marketing research firm, worldwide smart home market revenue will reach $135 billion by 2025. The driving force behind this revenue climb is expanding sectors, including the IoT, home automation, and smart appliances. As shown in the diagram (part of a report produced by Jabil and Dimensional Research), the top smart home […]
What is the Z-Wave protocol?
Smart homes need wireless connectivity, and Z-wave has emerged as the ultimate solution for home automation. The Z-wave protocol is a wireless, radio frequency protocol designed primarily for smart home networks. All the existing wireless communication protocols had one or the other problem. Bluetooth and Zigbee often shortfall of range while Wi-Fi poses its own […]
RISC-V for ultra-low power processing and AI on the edge
RISC-V is an exciting and rapidly-emerging technology. RISC-V is software; it is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. So far, this FAQ series has looked at how “RISC-V is growing and offers stability, scalability, and security,” the “Growing availability of tools reducing the risk of […]
RISC-V for artificial intelligence machine learning and embedded systems
Several RISC-V development efforts are targeting applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and other high-performance embedded applications. The previous two FAQs in this series considered the capabilities of RISC-V and the near-term risks associated with the technology, and the growing availability of tools that are helping to reduce the […]
Teardown: The new Roku Ultra
Roku bills its new Ultra device as its fastest and most powerful player ever. Its features include 50% more range for its wireless capabilities, support for Dolby Vision (an HDR standard), Dolby Atmos (a surround-sound format), and Bluetooth, a fast channel launch, a lost remote finder capability, voice-remote controls and personal shortcut buttons, and the […]
Growing availability of tools reducing risk of using RISC-V
As discussed at the end of the first FAQ in this series, “RISC-V is growing and offers stability, scalability, and security,” there is a lack of testing standards and tools for RISC-V compared with mature ISAs such as Intel and Arm. This is an area that is experiencing accelerating developments and progress. The growing availability […]
RISC-V is growing and offers stability, scalability and security
RISC-V is growing rapidly. Semico Research has projected that 62.4 billion RISC-V CPU cores will be sold in 2025. While that’s only about 6% of the overall CPU core market, RISC-V is an emerging technology that most designers should follow and become increasingly familiar with. RISC-V is becoming more commercially attractive as a result of […]
