EDN.Comment

A modest proposal for IP
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor, 6/11/2009
The US patent system needs fixing to the point that there are debates over just whose interests we should fix first.

802.11n: Complicated and about to become even messier
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 5/28/2009
Approval work for this next-generation Wi-Fi standard may wrap up by year-end, but the situation is about to become even more muddled.

What are you doing?
By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News, 5/14/2009
Success with Twitter is like anything else: Align with the right partners, and you'll find that there's real value here in making connections, delivering information, and staying informed.

Canceling Sirius: so frustrating, it made me furious
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 4/23/2009
Tough economic times understandably encourage subscription-service companies to do their utmost to hold onto customers. Sometimes, unfortunately, they achieve this goal by making the cancellation too difficult to accomplish.

Power line: Does market success require resets?
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 4/9/2009
The three key technology suppliers for the 200-Mbps PHY (physical) rate are unwilling to bury the hatchet and come up with a standard approach.

Museum contends with multimedia rights
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 3/19/2009
Wherever technology goes, legal issues regarding copyright ownership seem to follow.

Time for a change in patent law
By Paul Rako, Technical Editor, 3/5/2009
Contrary to what you might think, patent laws are not in place to help the little guy.

Technical and political suggestions for Detroit
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 2/19/2009
Do the Detroit automakers deserve a bailout, or should they be left to go the way of the dinosaurs?

OLEDs: better off once the delusion is dead
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 2/5/2009
The initial hype for OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) is already deflating and will continue to do so.

Evolution and innovation
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 1/22/2009
"A thriving ecosystem, whether in nature or economics, emerges from an evolutionary culture that nurtures diversity, doesn't artificially pick 'winners,' and embraces failure early and often."

CES 2009: With Dirk Meyer and Phenom II, AMD keeps on trying
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 1/12/2009
Will AMD's change in leadership and Phenom II allow it to better compete with Intel as economic crisis continues to grip the globe and PCs increasingly become commodities?

CES 2009: Blu-ray's continued struggles and the ramping ascendancy of online
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 1/9/2009
Our man in Las Vegas surveys the digital-video scene, including both physical media and online options. Whose fortunes are rising, whose are evaporating, and who's just playing the spin game?

CES 2009: The price of falling prices, and a path to Intel's potential demise
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 1/8/2009
Atom is a short-term success, but does the netbook trend represent a long-term threat to Intel's beefy revenue and profit margins—as well as a potential salvation for graphic-processor makers?

Broadcast content restrictions: A bad idea that just won’t die
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical editor, 1/8/2009
The broadcast flag may be extinct from an ATSC standpoint, but it has re-emerged in the form of selectable output control.

CES 2009: When (if ever) will home servers shine?
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 1/7/2009
Though undeniably useful, NAS (network-attached-storage) products thus far have proven difficult for consumers to grasp and implement. Will the category ever catch fire in the mass market?

CES 2009: High-def video predictions refined
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 1/6/2009
Although tape's days as a storage medium seem limited, Canon has just introduced one more tape-based HD camera. Meanwhile, Ambarella announced a chip family that indicates the fast improvement pace that H.264-centric silicon is on as it strives to overtake legacy MPEG-2.

Signs of optimism in economic crisis
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 12/15/2008
Despite the worldwide economic crisis, year-end events that I attended provided reason for optimism.

Bias and opinion in tech and in life
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 12/5/2008
Unlike some other journalists, I don’t believe that being balanced means presenting an exactly equivalent number of pros and cons for each side of an issue. I do the research, in as undistorted a fashion as I can muster, and then I present the data and my conclusion.

From lithography to test
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 11/27/2008
The need for the OPC DFM technique is becoming increasingly important as lithography companies turn to double-patterning as an interim approach that will serve until EUV lithography becomes available.

Tech innovation addresses societal, environmental challenges worldwide
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 11/13/2008
Intensive research and development in nanoelectronics and nanotechnology is critical for tackling societal and environmental challenges facing the world today.

Physics and economics
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 10/30/2008
Might engineers or scientists have some up-to-date tools to offer economists? And would the economists use them?

White spaces and black hearts
By Paul Rako, Technical Editor, 10/16/2008
Those pushing white-space proposals, including Google's Larry Page, need some lessons in real-world RF interference, and the industry should put white-spaces plans on hold until we see how badly the digital-TV rollout hurts broadcast television.

Why tout a demo board nobody can buy?
By Paul Rako, Technical Editor, 10/2/2008
Marketing types are dying to talk to people, go to lunch, and network. Engineers, on the other hand, want to crawl into a corner with some hardware and be alone.

The turn of Apple's worm: Success accelerates its stumbles
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor, 9/18/2008
Paranoia was perhaps acceptable when Apple sold its products to only a few-market-share-percentage points' worth of perennial loyalists.

Oil prices, technology, and the cost of ignorance
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor, 9/4/2008
Many opportunities exist to use a little understanding, a little technology, and a little capital to make a significant decrease in fuel consumption. But rest assured that these things will not happen.

Hang up and drive; hang up and walk
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 8/21/2008
The cell-phone market is potentially huge. Sanjay K Jha, then chief operating officer of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technology, said in a June 11 Design Automation Conference keynote address that 2 billion people are wireless subscribers today and that, by 2020, 9 billion people will become potential customers.

Semicon West boosts solar power
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, 8/7/2008
The international emphasis at the show suggests that North America has missed a key opportunity to capitalize on solar power, and, unfortunately, the situation is unlikely to improve.

The trouble with software people
By Paul Rako, Technical Editor, 7/24/2008
When you think about it, almost every major development in the last decade has been the result of overcoming the problems that software managers cause.

Where is EDA going now?
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor, 7/10/2008
Some important changes have been altering the EDA landscape for years, and these changes—in the geographic composition of the chip-design community and in the nature of the chip-design process—are now impossible to conceal.