Inflection Points : Wireless and Programmability

Chris Rowen, Founder and CTO at Tensilica, shares his perspective on currently evolving inflection points in the wireless and programmable design spaces. The market’s migration to a single wireless standard that will enable wireless designs everywhere and in everything.

This trend will encourage embedding of LTE wireless connectivity into a huge variety of system-on-chip designs, just as wired I/O standards like USB have become nearly universal for local wired connections.

Chris also observes that

Hardwired designs are giving way to more programmable designs because the software abstraction offers so many benefits in reducing development costs, increasing the pace for adding new differentiating features, and accommodating the combination of legacy wireless communication protocols (from those three families of rival standards) and new high-performance standards like LTE.

Check out his thoughts on these issues and the adoption of heterogeneous multi-core clusters that are helping to solve today’s data challenges.

I encourage you to read all of the posts for this series; maybe they will inspire you to share your observations. I would love to be able to consolidate different perspectives and lessons learned for everyone to benefit from. I suspect there are some valuable lessons to be gleaned from comparing such stories.

To make following this series easier (especially as multiple series overlap each other), I am including the index below to previous posts, both for this and the guest post channels.

Guest posts:

2010, February 8 : Wireless baseband inflection point – SDR as a technological breakthrough

2010, February 1 : Of Windows, Newton’s, iPad’s and 10GBASE-T

2010, January 28 : Technology inflections : digital signal processing

Posts made here

2010, February 8 : Inflection Points : Wireless and SDR

2010, February 1 : Inflection Points : timeline (networking)

2010, January 28 : Inflection Points : timeline

2010, January 26 : Inflection Points