标签: gadgets

My chum Rick Curl, like me, collects the weird and wonderful when it comes to electronics in general and gizmos and gadgets in particular (unlike me, Rick can usually get them to work). Every month or so, Rick comes up to see me to pick up circuit boards and suchlike, in which case he will drop into my office to say "Hi" and to delight me with some electronic doodad he's run across. On his most recent trip, Rick brought a scrapbook that was owned by his Grandfather. Peering into this scrapbook is like looking through a window into the past:   The entire scrapbook is filled with newspaper cuttings from the Birmingham News (he's from Birmingham, Alabama). And not just any old cuttings about how to fry your grits or what hats men are wearing this season – these cuttings were all electronics-related. The first one I glanced at was copyright 1922:   Remember that these are from the regular daily newspaper, but they aren't trivial – they're more at the level you would expect to see in an electronics hobbyist magazine circa the 1950s and 1960s.   It makes you think. In those days, electronic systems like radios were few and far between – the fact that they were rudimentary by today's standards doesn't mean they were easy to understand – but average folks were gorging themselves on these articles (the paper wouldn't have published them if there wasn't an audience). By comparison, today electronics pervades the fabric of our lives, but you wouldn't expect to see any form of "how it works" article in a newspaper because so few folks would be interested. Truth to tell, I'm not sure what to conclude about all this – what do you think?

Technologies are impacting largely our life about how we work in office, how we socialize, how we study, how we communicate. It is inevitable to think Life without electronics in our daily life with our day to day tasks. Decade of 2010-2020 is called “Life Impact Technologies’, because each technology invented (will be invented) each year will give new way of executing life and daily operations.Infact technology is extending in to animals. Toshiba has launch world’s first laptop for dogs called “Petbook K9”.   There are two areas to watch out in 2013 : Distruptive technologies in the area of Advance Gadgets with Mobile technologies Technology advancements for 20nm below node, FinFET and multi-core architectures   We have seen that Smart gadgets like Apple, Samsung, Google phone and tablets are set to go new features in 2013. NFC (Near Field Communication) has already brought Mobile payment reality. Samsung SIII phone is roaring success with NFC. Next-gen Apple-Google-Samsung products will continue to roar. Display resolution, Camera resolution, 3D Display, 3D Gamin and TransferJet.   As per TransferJet regulatory committee “TransferJet is a new wireless technology that combines the speed of UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) with the ease of NFC (Near Field Communications). By doing so, TransferJet delivers a transfer speed of 560 Mbps available to the end user through a simple “touch."   The key concept of TransferJet is this “touch” model of user operation. This model requires only a simple touch motion from the user to make things happen. Touch is such a natural motion that people tend to “get it” very quickly. Clearly, touch is a very natural and intuitive motion. From a user standpoint, TransferJet can be thought of as a universal touch-activated interface which instantly connects a wide variety of consumer (and non-consumer) electronic products. The TransferJet technical specifications have been developed in order to realize simplicity of use based on the “touch” model.   It allows high speed data transfer between smart phone, laptop, PoC, consumer devices on touch-transfer in fraction of seconds. Toshiba, Sony Transferjet are key technologies conquer.   Advanced gadgets will be wearable gadgets coming for clothes and medical devices taking care of auto-blood pressure measurement, pulse measurement, heat-cold maintenance, music players, Toy-robot compatible advance gadgets.   Another key advances are happening in technology areas covering (1) 28nm and below technologies i.e. 20nm, 14nm, 10nm (2) FinFET and related Transistor research (3) multi core archtictures for all applications.    Ensuring designs to work on 28nm technology requires methodology, tool and library support. Hence lithography tool start up addressing needs with Lithiography optimized gate layer layout, Cut mask optimized cell architecture and gate length biasing leakage optimization.    Similarly FinFET, Suvolta’s powershrink transistor, NRAM (NanoTube RAM) has been emerging areas for enabling next decade of Electronic design.   Multicore technologies were largely driven by Microprocessor demands of quad-core CPU, Hex-core CPUs for processor giants like Intel, AMD,  however now it has been largely extended to handheld gadgets with Apple’s A4, nVidia’s Tegra, QualComm’s SnapDragon for mobile applications. High end Optical networking SoCs are now started consuming multi core architecture for networking applications for base stations , EDGE routers. Kalray has been sampling MPPA (Multi purpose processor array) with 256 core on chip. Adapteva has launched multi core architecture to meet performance and power requirements. Much of these has been start up , but with ready to launch product which will roar next generation devices for performance and speed both.   2010-2020 decade is transitioning decade for electronics industry, because gadget’s new features will drive all new chips and life style, while technology innovations will drive new innovations like FINFET, Multi-core architectures.   2013 will be another exciting year with Mobile payment, TransferJet, Advance Gadget features and technology innovations for  28nm processes, multi-core (100+) architectures. Electronics life style will be exciting journey….!     -- Nilesh Ranpura, Project Manager-ASIC, e-Infochips He has 14+ years of experience in VLSI Design Cycle, Methodology, Verification, Physical design. He has key experience in the areas of Bus Interfaces and Networking devices. Participated on multiple projects for Physical design and Multi-million gate count SoC verification architecture definition and Complete Product devlopment .