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A couple of weeks ago, CES2021 was held. This is the mega consumer electronics show (that’s where the CES comes from) held annually in Las Vegas. It’s attended by 100,000 folks, and the exhibits stretch across millions of square feet. This year, CES was held virtually.

Not that I would have attended in any other way. This is a consumer-oriented show, and Critical Link’s work is on the scientific/industrial side of the application spectrum. Still, I’m a tech guy, and a gadget guy, so I’m always eager to browse the reporting to see what I’m missing by not being there.

There was, of course, the usual amount of gimmickry. Last year’s smarter toilet was joined by an even smarter bathtub. And something called a smart lipstick, which lets the user create their own personal color blend. It will retail for about $300, and my wife is definitely not interested.

A few things did catch both my eye and my interest.

General Motors revealed its battery-powered personal aircraft, GM’s Cadillac entry into the air taxi future.

The sleek, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft would be GM’s first foray into aerial mobility, and the company says this four-rotor aircraft is powered by a 90-kWh EV motor at speeds of up to 56 mph. Beyond that, details are scarce  — GM stopped short of offering more technical details, let alone committing to production or detailing a time frame in which we can expect to see these eVTOLs, as they’re known, in the air. Based on the images, this looks like a single-seat drone, presumably for short urban hops executed autonomously. (Source: CNET.)

This is bound to cost a lot more than the $300 smart lipstick, but what kid dreaming about a “flying car” didn’t grow up into an adult dreaming about a personal air taxi?

A little more down to earth is the ColdSnap from Sigma Phase, which promises to be the Keurig of ice cream makers. Like Keurig, it makes a single serving, only instead of coffee, it dispenses a cup of ice cream, or a frozen margarita. Unlike Keurig, which you can get a K-Cup for for about fifty cents, the pods are projected to cost $2.50 – $3.00 when the ColdSnap is available next year. The device uses a souped-up version of the same compressor/condenser technology used in fridges and freezers.

The company says the machine simultaneously pulls heat from the pod, creating a cooling effect on the liquid ice cream mix, and engages a part within the pod that churns the ingredients during the cooling process. Air is sucked into the can to make the required loft in the ice cream. (Source: CNN)

The machine will cost about $500, and is a heavy-weight appliance by countertop standards, weighing in at 50 pounds. But the weight trade-off makes it possible for the ColdSnap to produce a cup of ice cream in 60-90 seconds.

LG showed off the LG Rollable, an expandable smartphone, which it expects to release this year. A cooler variant (cooler to me, at any rate) on the foldable phone. Foldables were introduced a couple of years ago, with great fanfare, but they took a while to perfect. The ones on the market now are pretty reliable. But the foldables just seem like a more conventional technology than the rollables, i.e., nothing that we haven’t seen before in a similar form factor. The rollables, on the other hand, have an expanding and contracting screen. Way cool. The downside, apparently, is that the screens are somewhat fragile and, unlike the foldables, which fold in to protect the screen, the rollable screen is unprotected. So users need to be ultra-careful. This will all get worked out, and this is one technology I’ll be keeping my eye on. Much as I like ice cream, I’d rather have a rollable phone than a Keurig-style ice cream maker. (And, realistically, I know I won’t ever get my hands on a personal air taxi.)

As always, seeing what’s up at CES was great fun. Even though I won’t be there, I really do hope that when 2022 rolls around, they’ll be able to convene for real. When it comes to technology, there’s really nothing like hands on!

 

 

As the year ends, I always find it interesting to look back at what’s happened during the past year in terms of technology. While I was wandering around looking for ideas, I came across an article by Kevin Ryan- “The Ten Greatest Investions of the Past Decade” –  on Inc. from this time in 2019. Admittedly, I’m a year late with this, but Ryan’s summary of the major technology breakthroughs of the “teens” decade is still worth reading through if only to remind us of what a difference a decade makes.

First up, Google Assistant, which Ryan views as “perhaps the closest thing yet to what’s known as general artificial intelligence.” With its ability to make your spoken wish its command, Google Assistant can take care of a number of tasks (like setting up calendar reminders) and query the internet for the answers to important questions like ‘what teams made the Final Four in 2003?’ (And, yes, the Syracuse Orange was one of them.) Before you ask where Alexa and Sir are, according to Ryan “when it comes to accurately understanding what you want, it’s leaving Siri and Alexa in the dust.

Jumping from the consumer to the life-changing, there’s CRISPR, the gene-editing system.

Essentially a process for slicing out undesired strands of DNA–i.e., disease–and replacing them with new ones, the tech is being used by scientists and startups to try to cure diseases from sickle cell anemia to cancer.

As anyone who’s watched loved ones suffer from any number of terrible diseases, the promise that CRISPR holds is amazing, and a real cause for hope.

Love him, hate him, or love to hate him, Elon Musk is a true visionary. The SpaceX’s Reusable Rocket has cut the cost of getting a payload into space down to “one-quarter of what it cost a decade ago–which has helped make space accessible to startups.”

Venmo lets you quickly pay a small vendor, easily split the cost of a dinner with your tablemates, and speedily dispatch the virtual equivalent of cash to your desperate college student’s bank account. This year, Venmo may end up handling a payment volume of over $150 billion, and it has more consumers using it than most major banks do.

I’m not a big Venmo user, but I was an early adopter of the Nest Thermostat, and I’ve much enjoyed playing around with it.

Nest’s thermostat lets you preprogram a temperature schedule. It learns your habits over time and, based on motion sensing and devices that are connected to your Wi-Fi, can tell whether someone is home and adjust accordingly. This all lowers the amount of energy your home uses when you’re not home, saving customers money and the planet from unnecessary carbon emissions.

When the iPad was introduced in 2010, a lot of people didn’t know what to make of it. We had laptops. We had phones – and they were getting bigger and smarter. So who needed something in between? But tablets took off, and Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others got in the act. Now tablets are everywhere. For many, they’ve replaced the laptop entirely. In other areas – food services, retail, real estate, healthcare – they’ve introduced new efficiencies.

The ​Self-Driving Car is still a way from being fully realized, but it’s coming. And the technology involved is super-interesting, especially to someone like me who is both a technology guy and a car guy.

Thanks to machine vision and some super-sophisticated artificial intelligence, the technology promises to make the roads a whole lot safer, resulting in 90 percent fewer deaths, according to the most optimistic estimates.

Lyft and Uber are both very interested in self-driving cars, which means that, somewhere down the line, they’ll do for their own drivers what they did for taxicab drivers. I.e., replace them. Truckers will face a similar challenge. Any industry involving drivers is likely to be severely disrupted.

Sure they cost more than Edison’s incandescent bulb, but the Consumer LED Light Bulb is more energy efficient.

The bulbs use 20 percent of the energy of their incandescent predecessors and can last 25,000 hours–with average use, that’s more than a decade.

Thanks to regulations on energy efficiency, bulb producers like Philips and GE have jumped into the market big time.

What the Nest Thermostat did for home heating, the Ring Doorbell has done for home security. Using your smart phone, you can see and talk to whoever’s at your door. (Interesting side story: Shark Tank rejected the Ring idea in 2013. Fast forward a few years, and Amazon bought the company for $1B.

Elon Musk is back again on the list with the ​Tesla Powerwall solves the problem of storing excess solar energy.

Tesla’s Powerwall, launched in 2015, offers that ability with a high level of sophistication, letting you program your usage to collect energy during off-peak hours, then consume it at peak times.

Lots of other things happened during that last decade. Smartphones got smarter. And all sorts of things from dog doors to refrigerators to diapers got smart. Uber and Lyft took off, as did all sorts of technology-enabled apps for seeing to tasks like ordering take-out food (success!) and ordering quarters for the laundromat (not so successful!). In 2019, 5G broadband cellular was first deployed.

We’re one year into the Twenties now. Much of the exciting new technology being introduced has been in response to the pandemic. Wonder what the rest of the decade will have in store for us.

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If you’re curious about why I picked the lightbulb as the image for this post, well, the lightbulb is a symbol of ideas, of inventions. And this one’s a Tesla light bulb, so…

Of late, we’ve been focusing so much on stories around technology and the pandemic, that I ended up putting EE Times’ Silicon 100: The Class of 2020 on the backburner. But I finally got the opportunity to look through it and found it pretty interesting.

The list of “electronics and semiconductor startups that grabbed [EE Times’] attention during the previous year” is published regularly – this is the 20^th edition – and it’s the first one that covers 100 companies (vs. 60). The leap from 60 to 100 companies is a big one, reflecting the fact that investors have a lot of interest in hardware startups (the primary focus here, as opposed to software or services).

In his introductory article, list curator Peter Clarke attributes the willingness to investors to open up their purse strings to hardware companies after snubbing them in favor of potential unicorns (those firms likely to grow quickly to a $1 Billion valuation) in the software and/or services space to the end of Moore’s Law.

Clarke saw Moore’s Law as the reason why investors had earlier focused their hardware funding on “the latest ASIC of SoC that could exploit the next manufacturing process node,” ignoring other electronics activity. As opportunities in this arena decreased, and the “smart money” went into Uber et al.

Many venture capitalist firms stopped investing in hardware altogether. Much of the hardware investment that remained came from strategic investors, such as Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Bosch, or from government-backed regional development boosters who hoped to encourage job creation.

But then, as the end of Moore’s Law came into sight, R&D activity moved out into other areas.

Engineering creativity extended into a slew of re­lated activities, including alternative computational architectures and business models such as open-source hardware, RF communications, sensors, 3D assembly and packaging and chiplet-style manu­facturing, and human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interfaces. Some of these activities required far less funding than the $100 million or so needed to get a leading-edge digital chip out the door, and so they started to gain some traction.

It also became clear that software and networking architectures that had proved powerful in the cloud running on servers could be supported by fresh architectures and ICs to reduce power consump­tion and potentially transfer similar functions to the edge.

The result? An explosion over the past few years of hardware funding – and the explosion of the number of startups that EE Times deems “worth watching.”

Here are the buckets – pretty much all of which Critical Link has our hands in – that the companies worth watching fall into:

AI / neural networks / machine learning semiconductor manufacturing materials research (Si, GaN, SiC, etc.) analog ICs SoCs memory ICs FPGAs power ICs

energy harvesting signal processing wireless chips automotive electronics IoT technologies sensors MEMS

Of these, “the consensus now is that artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G communications, and transportation solutions are set to drive the industry onward and upward for the next several years.”

Geographically, the US continues to rule the roost, accounting for 49 companies on the list. The preponderance of these (40 in total) are in California. There’s only one company from my home state of NY, and it’s in the Bronx, not upstate, where Critical Link lives. China, with thirteen companies on the list, ranked second, followed by England with nine. Israel had seven of the startups, Canada five.

After listing all 100 startups (with a thumbnail sketch of what they produce and who has invested in them), they take a deeper dive on ten of the companies.

The Silicon 100 is gated content that you’ll have to register for, but it’s well worth the read. I’m looking forward to the “future wonders” that will be built off all of this technology. I’m pretty sure that at some point, we’ll be looking at a number of these companies as component providers for our boards.

 

Over the summer, EDN Aspencore published a series of articles on how the electronics industry has responded to the COVID pandemic. In term, I’m doing a series of blog posts summarizing these articles. In my first post, I discussed Majeed Ahmad brief, which offered a “sneak peek into the brand-new design ecosystem built around the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.” My next post covered the articles on the use of Bluetooth technology, especially as used in bracelets. In this piece, I’ll focus on the articles that addressed technologies – ultrasonic sensors and SDK’s – used for social distancing and contact tracing.

In Ultrasonic for Social Distancing Tags, Junko Yoshida argues that this technology “might just be the wireless technology best suited to enabling contact tracing and social distancing.” The need to get employees back to work is heightening demand for “for apps and wearable devices that can alert workers when they violate social distancing precautions and come too close to one another…[and that can] keep track of which workers have come into close contact with whom, when and for how long.”

There are a number of different embedded devices under consideration: bracelets, clips on lanyards, badges, the ubiquitous smartphone – and there are a number of wireless approaches in contention. One of these is ultrasonic sensors used in tag solutions.

For measuring social distance, accuracy is the prime attribute. Ultrasound can provide accuracy at less than 1 cm, which is vastly superior to the other wireless technologies out there, including Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Privacy (or lack thereof) is another perceived weakness when it comes to BLE.

Proponents of ultrasound also argue that it’s preferable to ultra-wideband (UWB) when it comes to footprint – UWB requires an antenna – and power consumption. They also claim that, when it comes to false positives, ultrasound is a better choice.

Overall, this article is an interesting look at the different devices and wireless technologies that will help the workforce safely back to work. (It’s worth noting that the strong arguments made for ultrasound came from an ultrasound company.)

SDKs finetune BLE SoCs for contact-tracing, social-distancing designs by Majeed Ahmad, writes that:

While Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) solutions are finding a way into a variety of products to help slow the spread of COVID-19, the current technology for distance measurement and positioning—received signal strength indicator (RSSI) technology—is based on measuring the strength or power of the received radio signal. However, that is inherently flawed due to the sensitivity of objects in the radio path blocking or reflecting the radio signals.

Software can find a way around this, with SDKs that can take care of the distance measurement issues. A couple of different companies offer SDKs for their BLE SoCs. Dialog Semiconductor’s SDK enables their chips to “chips to interleave BLE data packets with constant tone frequency exchanges, which in turn, allows the on-chip 2.4 GHz radio to generate the signals needed for phase-based ranging.” This improves their BLE chip’s accuracy for distance measurement and makes them contact-tracing ready.

STMicroelectronics offers a reference design built around their Bluetooth SOC. The reference design “enables engineers to implement private and anonymous tag provisioning and notifications in devices such as bands and bracelets in outdoor or closed professional environments like factories, offices, and medical facilities.”

Good to know that there’s so much work going on to make it possible for companies to ensure the safety of their workers.