SAN JOSE, Calif. — A trade group plans to publish a specification for building an Internet of Things software stack using the Internet Protocol. The effort is part of a growing trend toward implementing IP in embedded systems. The IP for Smart Objects Alliance (IPSO Alliance) will publish at least one reference architecture this year…
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Broadcom will lay off about 2,500 employees as part of a decision on June 2 to exit the cellular baseband business for which it could not find a buyer. The news came in a call with financial analysts in which the company essentially reported neither profits nor revenue growth for its…
Two posts set Google+ a-twitter about Android Wear this week. Babak Parviz, a pioneer and public face for Project Glass, left Google for Amazon. (You made need to register at Google+ to see this link.) Separately, in a less high-profile Google+ posting of a video of an Android Wear watch, developers piled on a discussion…
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Even before its $3.2 billion acquisition by Google, Nest Labs was quietly building into all its products a low-power mesh networking protocol. Now it hopes to make it an industry standard, called Thread, for home automation devices. A handful of chip and system makers, including ARM, Freescale, Silicon Labs, and Samsung,…
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Aiming to ease the fragmentation in the emerging Internet of Things, a group founded by Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, and Samsung will create a specification for device-to-device communications. The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) sees its work as most directly competing with the AllSeen effort started by Qualcomm. The OIC is the…
SAN FRANCISCO — Panasonic will make SoCs in a low-power flavor of Intel's 14nm process technology. The Japanese company is the sixth announced customer for a foundry business that Intel says is strategic and expanding its packaging capabilities. “We are doing extremely well getting customers who can use our technology,” Sunit Rikhi, general manager of…
At least a half dozen headset makers hope to leapfrog Google's Project Glass. They are adopting the latest mobile processors and stereo 3D displays to deliver images covering a full field of vision that users can control with hand gestures and head motions. They demonstrated their latest prototypes running everything from games to factory-floor maintenance…
If your team is understaffed and your project is running late, you're not alone. Embedded design teams are getting a little smaller and slipping schedules more often, according to a new study. Respondents said 41% of all embedded design projects finished ahead of or on schedule and 59% were late or canceled. That's slightly worse…
It feels like trouble ahead for smartphones in general and Samsung specifically. The view from Barcelona showed Samsung looking like king of the hill. It announced at the Mobile World Congress its Galaxy S6 handsets, the first in the world run on chips built in a 14nm FinFET process. So how can a company leapfrogging…
Engineers quietly toiling to deliver high-speed systems gathered to showcase their latest accomplishments at last week's DesignCon here, some setting new watermarks with 100 Gbit/s Ethernet backplanes and 100 GHz-class testers. We toured the show floor looking for examples of their accomplishments as well as a few fun moments. Rachael Lee (below), a senior field…