How We See CE

Last week I wrote a story in a rather pessimistic tone about some recent developments in the home networking industry. Today, I'll try to provide a more optimistic view.

One of the reasons why the market for wired home networking products has not developed faster is the fragmentation of the industry. Today, consumers who want to create a wired network in their homes have to choose between five incompatible options; using coaxial cable (MoCA), using phone lines (HomePNA) or using power lines (with 3 non-interoperable options: UPA, HomePlug and HD-PLC). You can even combine then to create more incompatible options (using HomePNA technology or powerline technology over coaxial cable, for example, is also a popular option for some applications).

There is nothing wrong with those technologies,...Read More

When I first talked in this blog about my views on the future of the networked Consumer Electronics (CE) industry, I tried to share my optimism about how networked CE products were rapidly becoming "must have" products even for mainstream users. The demand for IP-enabled devices like gaming consoles, networked DVRs, network attached storage, VoIP adapters and digital media adapters is rapidly increasing, and according to Mark Kirstein from Multimedia Intelligence, by the time my Tivo-addicted son becomes 8-year old, the market for network interface semiconductors (including ethernet, wireless, powerline and coaxial networks) will grow to nearly $2.5 billion.

Given that most of the necessary technologies are already available, this growth trend only requires two key elements to continue: ...Read More

Information storage is a principal, "main street" factor in information processing systems, from large IT applications to smaller consumer-based uses. HDDs (hard disk drives) have been the dominant storage technology for over 50 years. Will HDDs continue to dominate storage applications? Or will flash memory and SST (solid-state technology) take over storage? What does the future hold for HDDs and SST? Is the future, as we’ve been saying at IDEMA, cooperative? Or does the storage industry face a "Battle Royal"? IDEMA has brought some of the greatest minds in the information storage industry together at DISKCON USA 2007 to help answer these questions, and more.

Consumer Electronics: One of the largest growth areas for information and content storage is consumer electronics. These devices, enabled by the constantly decreasing co...Read More

[Moderator note: "Mass Storage: Flash, Magnetic, or Both?", which Joel Weiss discusses in the following writeup, will be the subject of my September 27, 2007 feature article in EDN. Joel and I both welcome your comments on his perspective of this controversial topic.]

Every day seems to bring a new prediction that hard drives will soon go the way of the floppy disk, due to the emergence of solid state drives. I understand the appeal of a good story as much as anyone. But what is the real story with hard drives versus solid state drives? Quite frankly, when you look beyond the hype, it’s clear that hard drives are (and will continue to be) the dominant storage choice.

At IDEMA, we see hard drives and solid st...Read More

When it comes to hard drives and solid state (flash) memory, can you see the future? I think the future is cooperative and collaborative; in other words, we’re going to move beyond the past competition between HDD and SSD to a more cooperative and collaborative environment. The reason for this is simple—people have a range of storage needs, and different storage needs create different requirements. The digital lifestyle has created a greater demand for storage devices in general as we desire to move information or content from our offices to our homes, to our cars, and to our handheld devices.

Some of these devices require storage that exhibits extremely fast input /output times (i.e. nanoseconds) to store and retrieve information but needs only relatively small capacities, and price and volatility are also less of an issue. Examples include DRAM fo...Read More

Consumer electronics and the technologies that enable their evolution are interesting things. For example, how many people 20 years ago would have thought I would be typing this post at 36,000 feet somewhere above the 50^th parallel? Did anyone care that they could not do something like this back then? Admittedly 20 years ago, I could have cared less about being able to use a PC on an airplane and having the world as a virtual office. What I did care about was why I couldn’t play my favorite two-player Nintendo games with friends a few miles away as easily as when they were a few feet away. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the problem was that we were not "connected". Before getting too far down that path, though, allow me to digress into a brief introduction about myself.

A few years after enhancing my hand-eye coordination on my ol...Read More

Let’s have a few thoughts about content consumption. This is probably the most critical and important part of the overall media ecosystem.

Having the best content creation and delivery is not enough; the consumption end of the chain must also be most carefully addressed. What works in the lab must also work 24/7/52 in the home. Consumers, used to watching no-failure TV so far, have a very low tolerance level when it comes to service disruptions or outages. Quality-of-service and availability are key factors – even when the content has already arrived in the home. That also goes, of course, for the CE devices installed in the homes.

A lot of care has been taken to make sure that devices interoperate (as we have seen in the MPEG-2 world) and indeed this trend continues with the video codec powering next generation video delivery, i.e. MPEG-4 AVC/...Read More

I was very happy to very quickly say "yes" when Brian asked me to participate in this blog. It is a wonderful challenge and opportunity to come up with interesting thoughts and meaningful comments regarding our industry, in order to inform the tremendously broad readership of Brian's latest blog project.

I do not want to waste too much of your time and bore you with what I have done or what I am doing, but in a nutshell here we go. Since 2001, I have been the CEO of dicas digital image coding GmbH, founded in 1999, which is an MPEG-focused video coding specialist and a leading developer of ISO MPEG-4 real-time video coding solutions (hardware and software) for next generation Broadcast, IPTV, Mobile TV, Internet Streaming, Multimedia and Security applications. Under the brand name mpegable we offer a family of MPEG-4-,...Read More

After 32 years in the HDD (hard disk drive) industry focused on recording media, I find myself expanding my horizons. I’ve recently become president of IDEMA, the trade association for the storage industry. I’ve had a long history with IDEMA; I was on the Board of Directors from 1990–2000, and Chairman of the Board from 1997–2000. Like myself, IDEMA once focused exclusively on HDD-related storage but today, we are expanding our horizons to include hybrid HDDs and, potentially, fully solid-state storage.

Prior to joining IDEMA, I was vice president of engineering for Seagate Technology’s recording media operations, where I oversaw the company’s media R&D efforts. Before that, I spent six years with Akashic Memories, where I directed all product research and development while overseeing business dev...Read More

Last week I was attending a conference on IPTV in San Jose, and one of the keynote speakers, Charles "Kip" Compton, at Cisco, told an interesting story about how kids today experience TV. The story mirrors my own kid's experience, so I'll borrow it and pretend that I actually made it up.

My son, who is two and half years old, has no idea about the concept of TV broadcasting schedules; he is so used to always having his favorite TV shows and movies available on demand (from our Tivo, for example) that it could never occur to him that TV shows are broadcast at specific dates and times. This is not a problem at home, but sometimes he really does not understand why he cannot watch ...Read More

I'm Chief Technical Officer for Digital Entertainment Products. I joined Texas Instruments in 1989 as a systems engineer wide-eyed about the opportunity to join a small start-up group, ironically in the memory products division, working on a new processor architecture for improved definition TV.We had plans to grow with the worldwide transition to HDTV as standards finalized over the next couple of years. Soon after that, it became clear that the US standard for HDTV was going to be reset so it could be introduced using digital video instead of analog technology.The project I was working on moved primarily to Japan and continued evolving for several generations, providing advanced display processing solutions.

With the ramp down of the US-based team, I was walked literally across the street, between buildings at the TI Houston facility, and joined a new media processo...Read More

I work at DS2, a company that develops Integrated Circuits for high-speed communications over power lines. During the last 7 years, I have been involved in different areas at DS2; System Architecture Design (where I was involved in the initial design of our 45Mbps and 200Mbps powerline chipsets), Test Engineering, Technical Support, and Technical Marketing (which is my main activity now). I have a Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Valencia, Spain). For the last year and a half, I have lived between California and Europe, which means that:

1. I have a lot of Frequent Flier miles, and
2. I spend a lot of time complaining about things that I like from the USA that I cannot find in Europe, and vice versa.

The funny thing here is that what I miss when...Read More

Dr. Robert Adler, inventor of the TV wireless remote control (1956), died on February 15. He was 93.

I’m certain that Dr Adler was both delighted and dismayed at what happened to his invention. Delighted that consumers can not only change channels, but can now control an increasing number of audio/video sources and destinations. And this leads to the dismay – the remote has gone from an amazing enabler for couch potatoes to a frustrating device with an often confusing and obscure user interface. This, of course, was not his fault – I concede that this is a tough problem, but I get the feeling that most consumer electronics companies (in the best case) make too many assumptions about their audience, and (in the worst case) don’t do any usability tests beyond the in-house design engineer.

I also want to thank Brian for starting this ball rolling. With the roster of contributors that he is assembling, I’m certain that this will go in several interesting directions. My particular slant on “How We See CE” will be primarily from an audio perspective, but, as Brian knows, I have no end of opinions on everything, as I have been consuming electronic products for quite a while now!

Now for my story. While my DSPS Marketing Programs Manager position at Analog Devices has me involved with all of the markets our processors are in (more on that later), my prior background and life-long passion is audio - specifically, pro audio/music industry “stuff”. Yes, I’m an “audiophile” ….an electronic musician and recording engineer. …an audio geek, and proud of it. So how did this all start? I felt the pull of music ...Read More

I have over 20 years' experience in digital signal/image/video/display processing and have a deep passion for what I call the “Visual Processing Pipeline.” This process starts with the creation of a visual element (pixel) either from a natural source such as a camera or an artificial source such as a graphics model, and it culminates in the resulting response in the human visual system, with numerous complex processing and storage steps in-between. I have spent my whole career studying the various stages of this pipeline and continuously improving the objective (“information content”) and subjective (“pleasure”) results. This has taken me through a very scenic career that includes developing statistical image models and graphics rendering algorithms, defining and architecting innovative graphics and video ICs, developing flat-panel and head...Read More