Toyota has been in the news a lot lately. Something you might not have heard about is the standards battle they’re involved in. It’s an interesting situation and the stakes are high. The automobile industry is moving into a new era of engine technologies. And there’s an “engine format war” being waged. Which will win – the petroleum/electric hybrid or pure electric?

Toyota firmly believed in the hybrid engine and invested huge sums in its development.To date, it has produced more than 25 million hybrid vehicles. Yet other companies, such as Mitsubishi, and Nissan, thought otherwise and have since developed affordable all-electric vehicles.

In May of this year, Toyota announced an alliance with a small startup company, Tesla, to jointly develop all-electric cars. And Toyota is making a sizable ($50M) investment in Tesla. Tesla, based in Palo Alto CA, has delivered more than 1,000 sporty roadster vehicles which currently retail for about $100K. (That’s expensive for most auto consumers.)

Last year, the state of Colorado gave residents a $42,000.00 tax credit to those who bought a Tesla. It was part of an incentive program to get people to buy low-emission cars. (I didn’t buy a Tesla, even at the “bargain” price of $68,000.00.)

In Colorado, where I live, the name Tesla has special meaning. Nikola Tesla moved to Colorado Springs in 1899 to do research and experiments with high-frequency high-voltage (millions of volts!) electricity. Tesla is well-known as the brilliant scientist who invented the AC motor. Without this invention, the world’s electrical power might have been DC instead of AC. Talk about a standards war – the DC-AC one was a doozy, with animal electrocutions, life-threatening challenges, and eccentric personalities being the order of the day.

In the present standards struggle, does Toyota’s interest in Tesla mean they have conceded the hybrid’s days are doomed? Is Toyota making a bold move into the all-electric vehicle to prevent losing the engine format war? Or will the automobile industry continue to support two standards? We’ll know in a few years.

As I pass through 32,000 feet after departing from Shanghai’s Pudong airport, I thought I would reflect on an extremely intense “marathon” across China over the past week. Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai … multiple customers by day, delayed flights by night … oh yes, I also fit in 26.2+ miles of running throughout the week. A morning run before the traffic builds up provides an intriguing feel for the real people and their environment relative to the polished hotel lobby postcard routine.

They say a marathon is a 13 mile run followed by a test of endurance, ambition and pain tolerance. The endurance, ambition and intensity of the folks I interacted with across China is exciting and tough to match anywhere else. The dozens of staff at ARM China provide excellent examples of this. At the same time, I am also amazed at how much the government is able to collectively shape the commercial landscape.

I am embarrassed to admit that my prior Chinese entry visa expired far too long ago. Change in China is so rapid that if you blink you may miss something significant. In the past, conversations centered primarily around cost-down products, while this time very high-end applications seemed to be a frequent topic.

We read about amazing growth statistics everywhere we turn. It is difficult to understand the implications of compound change without experiencing it first-hand. Companies without a presence and strategy will surprised and miss a discontinuity. Smart people exist around the world.

Striking factory workers remain in the news. The unrest is partly driven by demographics where the supply of labor turns out not to be infinite. Higher wages will arrive and drive industry expansion further inland. I hear of sharp wage trajectories on the technical side, and have to wonder if some natural limits, which are well outside of official statistics, are already in play.

There was also a lot of talk about the Yuan valuation in the news. Much of the exports are driven by foreign companies so it was pointed out that money is just moving from one bucket to another.

Looking forward, an earlier post on killer mobile applications drove a torrent of email, so next time I’ll add some specifics using RunKeeper as an example starting point. Stay tuned…

While Eric Schorn is currently Vice President of Marketing for the Processor Division at ARM, this post is strictly personal and the opinions expressed do not reflect the official position of his employer.

The 47th Design Automation Conference is over and blog posts about the conference are appearing all over. (Sean Murphy is collecting them through the end of July on his website.) Instead of the “standard” post, recapping all the events and highlighting the latest technologies that were featured at the show, I thought I’d take a different approach and write about some things that you won’t read anywhere else.

Conversation Central was a hit. To date, there have been more than 1,000 listens to the 27 shows. From the outside, it looked like a smooth production (thank goodness), yet I had several moments of panic when participants couldn’t make it and we experienced technical difficulties. We even switched our internet service account type at 8:00 am on Monday – our first show started at 9:30. Despite these adrenaline rushes, we had “plan B”s in our back pocket and a producer (Roy Stahl from Synopsys) who magically fixed everything.

The 5 Conversation Central shows with the most listens so far are:

1. UVM: Verifying the Universe - Guests Tom Alsop & Hillel Miller, Host JL Gray

2. A New Era of SoC Design - Guest Subramani Kengeri, Host Phil Dworsky

3. Conversation Central Wrap-up and Sneak Peek - Guest Karen Bartleson, Host Rick Jamison

4. Standards Compliance - Guest Alpesh Shah, Host Karen Bartleson

5. Unconventional Blogging - Guest Brian Bailey, Host Harry Gries

I spoke to Gabe Moretti in the Conversation Central session, “Archangel Gabe Debates with Karen on her Book”. I handed him a stone tablet just for grins and he flashed a million dollar bill (not real, of course) that he claimed was my gratuity to him.

Sachin Sapatnekar, the general chair of DAC 2010, was interviewed in Conversation Central by Rich Goldman, who wore 3D glasses for 30 minutes while hosting the session and didn’t get a headache.

All the Conversation Central sessions are available for listening, and we encourage comments. There’s a show for everyone, and each one is only 30 minutes. Rate and tell us what you think about the shows you listen to.

At DAC, we gave away more than 400 copies of my book The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards to anyone who wanted them. Some of the books went to employees of a major semiconductor company who are getting started in standards, some went to students, and some to long-time standards participants.

More than once, I overheard something like this: “Remember when we were young and came to DAC and wondered how all the old people knew each other? Now, we’re those old people.”

Rich Goldman and Mike Santarini have big hearts. Reportedly, they were blubbering in the audience during the high-school panel, “You Don’t Know Jack”, when a 16-year-old girl thanked all of us for our contributions to her world.

Some members of the press couldn’t get into some sessions that bloggers could. (They weren’t happy.)That’s quite a switch from a couple of years ago when bloggers couldn’t get into the press room, and they weren’t happy.

The Synopsys media dinner was delightful (except that the Mr. Stox restaurant let Mentor Graphics host their customer party at the same time ;-) ). The people at my table talked about earthquakes, radar detectors, and VMM whoopee cushions.

Twitter and blogging were nothing new at the 47th DAC. Last year, Twitter was a phenomenon at DAC, with the Twitter Tower and the hashtag, #46DAC, and I taught a special session “Twitter for Newbies” that was attended by the one and only Richard Goering. This year, #47DAC tweets made 551,104 impressions after the first week from 1500 tweets, the maximum allowed to be analyzed by Twitter(#46DAC tweets made 189, 368 impressions). Richard Goering was in the top 5 twitterers.

Three little DAC factoids:

1. If a company books a block of rooms at the Marriott, someone gets a suite (more like an apartment).
2. Band-aid blister ampoules are amazingly effective.
3. Newcomers to DAC didn’t know about the bagpipes.

With the 47th DAC behind us, we’ll keep Conversation Central going (let me know if you’d like to hear any specific topics or guests) while planning what we’ll do at the 48th DAC. See you there!

I'm at Freescale's technology forum, also known as FTF. I had to opportunity to sit in on a press briefing with Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale. People from the press asked questions, and for the most part, Beyer gave answers. I appreciate his no-nonsense style.

There were three questions that intrigued me, and for three different reasons. First, someone asked Beyer what's changed recently within Freescale with respect to R&D. He didn't hesitate in answering that design cycles needed to be shortened, and in some cases, considerably shortened. Beyer cited two specific examples. One was from a little over a year ago, when the company launched a DSP product about six months earlier than the original target. Pulling in that schedule was done for a business reason—if they wanted to make significant revenue from that product, it needed to happen six months sooner. And they were able to do it. The second product was the just announced ARM-based MCU line. This schedule was pulled in almost nine months.

A second question is one that's being asked often, but I don't understand why. The questioner wanted to know if Beyer felt that his company's recent ARM announcements would mean the end of the ColdFire line. People who know embedded designs and embedded designers know that that's not going to happen. In general, once you're designed into an embedded system, you tend to stay there. Embedded developers are loyal, extremely loyal. Hence, ColdFire is here to stay.

The third question was asked by me. It was spurred by a discussion about why Freescale had to get out of the cellular business a few years ago. Beyer said that after the split with Motorola, other handset makers didn't really want to do business with Freescale, as they were still looked at as "Motorola friendly," meaning that there was fear that the handset vendors' "secrets" would get leaked back to Motorola. Whether that was true or not is debatable. But it led to my question, whereas the shoe is now on the other foot: does Freescale want to continue to do business with Wind River, when in the back of its collective mind, it has to be wondering if its secrets are being leaked back to Intel?

Wind River assured us from Day 1 that they would operate independently from Intel, and that these fears were unfounded. And so far, they've been true to their word. But Beyer admitted that it's a dicey situation. He said that Freescale will continue to do business with Wind River because that's what its customers want. But he did say that he would continue to monitor the situation very closely.

Perhaps the title of this post reveals some of my thoughts around today’s general approach to digital rights management…

DRM has been increasingly appearing in the news lately with Google rumoured to be working on an iTunes rival, the UK regulators allowing the BBC to include DRM in HD broadcasts, various iPad-stimulated opinions on Apple’s market power, and e-reader software platform transactions. I will be relocating back to the US soon and need to find a replacement for my Spotify subscription which won’t work there.

Today’s approach, with some exceptions, primarily revolves around constraining, restricting, and/or preventing consumer access to content in order to force payment. Trust no one. Lobby the government for more laws. Lock it all down and assume evil intent. In the end, nearly perfect security is nearly unusable.

All of this works against my interests around flexibility, convenience, and enjoyment. It is no wonder that I own relatively little encumbered digital content. (Used books from Amazon, anyone?) While the sales of digital music is on track to surpass traditional channels, look at how long it will have taken us to get there.

How about a new focus on enabling the consumer to pay easily and fairly with less ambition for perfection on the protection side? What would the world look like then? Am I too naive? I think there is a huge opportunity here to get outside of the historical box…

While Eric Schorn is currently Vice President of Marketing for the Processor Division at ARM, this post is strictly personal and the opinions expressed do not reflect the official position of his employer.

Here's another blog I came across that should be of interest, as it looks at the recent popularity of Android, as well as last week's ESC Chicago. It comes from Josh Neland of Dell's OEM group. Note that this is a company that you might want to take notice of, as they're not just a PC company anymore. Actually, they've been in the OEM business for quite some time, but they've just now decided to tell people about it.

Here's Josh's blog:

When you go to most conferences, you are lucky to get a keynote speaker that will do more than give you the smooth sell about their company's latest product. At the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), you get Ronald Mallett to talk about time travel.

ESC is not your normal conference. It's a time for the most extreme niche technology vendors to show their wares. The one (if only) thing vendors have in common is the need to educate the engineering community about why a particular technology matters and how to apply it.
Classroom sessions are abundant and well attended. The engineers that put together the smallest systems on the planet are a unique bunch, and their needs are unique as well.
When I scan then educational tracks being offered, a surprising theme emerges - Android.

You can see a quick off-the-cuff analysis I did of keywords present in the classroom sessions' descriptions (available here). For clarity, I omitted a few generalities like 'Embedded' and 'Session.'

'Android' appears 8 times, more than Security, Safety, Multicore, Debugging or Drivers - the typical bread and butter of the embedded community.

Note that Android almost tied Linux. Microsoft (or Windows Embedded) is not even mentioned.
What a feat Google has performed: two years after being released, Android is where the action is at in the mainstream communities and in the extreme communities.

Also notice that hardware is almost absent - and this is a conference where NAND memory vendors are taking out booths.

So you have embedded system developers now focusing on two key operating systems. It is not hard to see that a new generation of engineers is no longer interested in re-inventing the wheel, as long as the wheel fits. What a shift this is; twenty years ago embedded systems meant you were writing your own OS.

Dell's message to ESC participants has always been to consider off-the-shelf hardware before going custom, as the resources it takes to duplicate a Dell product could be much better spent on innovation in your area of expertise. But before the Streak, we were relegated to the PC form-factor with one or two Atom offerings.

With the announcement of the Streak, Dell has stepped into the true embedded arena with an off-the-shelf product that meets the size, mobility and power needs of a huge new market. We are already seeing OEM customers interested in replacing their small integrated displays with the Streak - the idea of building their own hardware from scratch makes less and less sense.

Now Google is doing the same thing for Operating Systems - really pushing the specialists to evaluate what makes them special now and what will make them special in the next ten years.
Do you think the trend will continue? Is Android the new "it kid" in operating systems or are they in it for the long haul?

I came across this blog from Jeff Osier-Mixon of MontaVista. Jeff is one of the track chairs for the ARM Technology Conference, and he's obviously excited about it.

I have the honor to be the track chair for the Embedded Internet session track at the ARM Technical Conference, November 9-11, 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. This is the premier ARM-specific conference of the year, with over 60 classes, sessions, and tutorials. This is an important conference for all developers who target ARM processors with any operating system, but I believe it is of primary importance to embedded Linux developers, particularly those using Android.

The Call for Participation is open through June 25. If you would like to speak at the conference, now is the time to get your slides together and submit your abstract. The track with which I am involved will discuss the Embedded Internet – hardware, software, and cost considerations for managing network connectivity in embedded devices. I would love to see some proposals covering hardware and drivers, particularly 4G drivers for Linux, and business reasons for choosing one component, driver, or software stack out of the many options available.

Some important dates to remember:

• June 25 is the last day to submit proposals. That’s just two weeks from now, so get ‘em in.


• June 30 is the last day of early bird registration. Register now and save $300.


• August 30 is the last early registration day, still a good savings but not as good as early-bird.


• November 8 is the last day for advance registration, still saving $100 over onsite registration.


• November 9 the conference begins in Santa Clara.

Two years ago, I updated everyone on the Liberty standard which was the first open source standard in the electronic design automation industry. Synopsys made our .lib format (which evolved into Liberty) an open source standard in 1999, opening a new page in the standards game. Today, I’d like to talk briefly about the newest open source standard for EDA, the Interconnect Technology Format (ITF).

ITF is a very well established, mature format, and technology files written in this format exist for a large number of process nodes that designers are using today. It is the underlying format used by Synopsys’ interconnect parasitic extraction tools such as StarRC. As an open source standard, ITF will enable all designers and foundries to support and qualify extraction technology files based on same format. Further, all EDA vendors’ tools will be able to support the format, providing increased efficiency and improved interoperability.

It is one thing to open up this format; yet it is quite another to enhance it in an open forum. A new technical committee under IEEE-ISTO called the Interconnect Modeling Technical Advisory Board (IMTAB) will provide exactly that. Eleven industry leaders make up the initial IMTAB. EDA companies (Apache, Magma, Mentor and Synopsys), foundries and IDMs (GlobalFoundries, ST), and representatives from the user community (AMD, Altera, LSI, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) are the initial members for the IMTAB. The group is expected to meet at least twice a year to consider the enhancement proposals, debate the pros and cons, and vote on proposals to extend the format appropriately. Future needs for the ITF standard, such as modeling of Through-Silicon Vias (TSV) for 3-D interconnect parasitics, will be addressed by the IMTAB.

As technology keeps advancing, new opportunities for standardization continue to arise.

Apps stores are the talk of the industry lately – whether it is Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM, Vodafone or several others – and very soon the term “API” will leap into the popular vocabulary. While it is true that the Smartphone wars will be decided by profitable software developers voting with their feet, the app store is only today’s battlefield. We have come a very long way...where next?

When I got out of university, I landed a job behind an IBM 3279 terminal emulator running batch jobs on MVS which we affectionately called “man versus system”. Applications were things run on big-iron machines by a few back-office experts, and I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing ;)

While the arrival of the PC certainly broadened the reach of computers, only the vast minority of users have ever become computer literate beyond office-oriented applications. Nowadays everyone runs a browser and I have a host of applets/widgets on my desktop. However, mentally I associate the PC with either being trapped in the office or hunting for a power source (in an airport) with a sore back. It is high time that the traditional PC, its applications, and its dated dynamics are superseded.

Thankfully today’s computing world is getting far more mobile and far more personal with far more user reach. The preponderance of popular press column-inches spent discussing apps stores suggests that they have now arrived as the new fountain of usefulness. This may be true, but after the dust settles a bit we’ll see fundamentally new directions in applications emerge which are far more interesting than the channel.

Broadly speaking, if you look at how things currently stand you see dataset creation, dataset transformation, and dataset rendering paradigms. What are they missing? Connectivity. Beyond the arrival of yet more sensors (BTW: a very good thing), future applications will deliver value through the integration and utilization of distributed information. Think mash-up, recent Facebook developments, the prevalence of “share this” buttons, web services and so forth. Connectivity is relatively young in the grand scheme of things. Yes, it is happening in some places already but certainly nowhere near mainstream.

Imagine all the datasets you interact with on a daily basis today. Imagine even a sliver of the pervasive internet unfolding in the future. What value could be delivered if these datasets could actually “touch each other” and new useful information synthesized? That is where the excitement lies...

While Eric Schorn is currently Vice President of Marketing for the Processor Division at ARM, this post is strictly personal and the opinions expressed do not reflect the official position of his employer.

Everyone’s invited to listen in and talk with special guests at this year’s Conversation Central. Yes, it will be a live event at the 47th Design Automation Conference, but it will also be live on the Internet for anyone who is unable to attend DAC or happens to be away from Synopsys’ booth during the conference.

If you’re at DAC, come to Synopsys’ main booth #595 to sit in the audience of any (or all!) of the 27 Conversation Central sessions.

To listen to a show from any other location (whether you’re at DAC or not) by phone, simply call within the US: toll free (877) 439-2972 or internationally: +1 (646) 200-4379 when the show you want to listen to is scheduled to start. That’s it! To ask a question or talk with the guest, press 1 on your phone and you’ll be put in the queue to go live.

To listen to a show using your computer, go to www.synopsys.com/ConversationCentral at the time a show starts and click on it. To ask a question or talk with the guest, you’ll need to have a free blogtalkradio.com account AND a Skype account. (If you don’t want a blogtalkradio.com account, you can use your Facebook account instead.) Go to www.synopsys.com/ConversationCentral, make sure you are logged into BlogTalkRadio, begin listening to the show, click on “Click to talk”, then follow the prompts (including clicking on another “Click to talk” in a popup window) to start Skype on your computer. This will vary depending on your browser and how you have Skype set up. When you’ve called in with Skype, dial “1” to be put in the queue to go live. (The dial pad of Skype is accessed with the “Other call functions” drop down.)

After DAC is over, you can listen to all of Conversation Central shows as we’ll record them for later listening. Go to www.synopsys.com/ConversationCentral, click on the shows you like, and enjoy! Plus, we’ll continue to bring you regularly scheduled sessions of Conversation Central throughout the year on a variety of interesting topics.