Broadcom Going Smart Devices

Broadcom has come out with a new “smart” chip which it hopes will be at the cutting edge of wearable PCs, such as smartwatches, heart and blood-pressure monitor.

Dubbed Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices (WICED) smart chip, Broadcom’s designs are supposed to support wireless charging for devices that are too small to connect via a power cord. The devices run an ARM Cortex M3 applications processor that reduces size and cost for OEMs and supports A4WP wireless charging and enhanced data security modes in addition to secure over-the-air firmware updates.

This is an integrated ARM CM3 microcontroller unit with radio frequency and Embedded Bluetooth Smart Stack, all on a single chip. Brian Bedrosian, Broadcom senior director of Embedded Wireless and Wireless Connectivity said that his outfit wanted to push the boundaries on what wearables are capable of with our new smart chip. Broadcom competes in the marketplace with companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor, Marvell and Xilinx.

The Broadcom WICED Smart chip is currently sampling with evaluation boards and SDKs. It is expected to become available sometime in 2014.

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Blackberry Goes Infotainment

Blackberry’s QNX Software Systems has announced a partnership that will allow its infotainment system to be placed in car’s digital instrument clusters.

The technology will allow drivers to see their music lists and album art, turn-by-turn navigation directions and local news in between instruments such as the speedometer and tachometer.

BlackBerry announced its collaboration with Rightware, a maker of automotiveuser interface design tools, at the Telematics Detroit show here. The collaboration combines the QNX Neutrino operating system and the Rightware Kanzi user interface.

QNX demonstrated the instrument cluster in a Mercedes-Benz concept car. The system also uses MirrorLink, an industry standard for the integration ofsmartphones into infotainment systems. The system is able to mirror Android-based smartphones to both the infotainment center on the console and the instrument cluster display.

With the MirrorLink connection, the instrument cluster can display realtime information, such as local speed limits, turn-by-turn directions, traffic reports and incoming phone calls. Because the cluster is fully digital, it can dynamically change views, highlighting the most important information and using advanced visualizations to help the driver process information more quickly.

“QNX Software Systems and Rightware have already worked together on successful production programs, including the exciting new Audi virtual cockpit,” said Peter McCarthy, director of global alliances for QNX.

With the Kanzi software, developers can create UIs with photorealistic, real-time 2D and 3D graphics. The QNX OS enables the Kanzi UI to access vehicle data and services, including navigation, multimedia, speed, RPM, and car diagnostics. It essentially provides an abstraction layer based on QNX’s persistent publish/subscribe (PPS) technology.

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Is Ethernet For Autos?

The most ubiquitous local area networking technology used by large companies may be packing its bags for a road trip.

As in-vehicle electronics become more sophisticated to support autonomous driving, cameras, and infotainment systems, Ethernet has become a top contender for connecting them.

For example, the BMW X5 automobile, released last year, used single-pair twisted wire, 100Mbps Ethernet to connect its driver-assistance cameras.

Paris-based Parrot, which supplies mobile accessories to automakers BMW, Hyundai and others, has developed in-car Ethernet. Its first Ethernet-connected systems could hit the market as soon as 2015, says Eric Riyahi, executive vice president of global operations.

Parrot’s new Ethernet-based Audio Video Bridging (AVB) technology uses Broadcom’s BroadR-Reach automotive Ethernet controller chips.

The AVB technology’s network management capabilities allows automakers to control the timing of data streams between specific network nodes in a vehicle and controls the bandwidth in order to manage competing data traffic.

Ethernet’s greater bandwidth could provide drivers with turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays.

“In-car Ethernet is seen as a very promising way to provide the needed bandwidth for coming new applications within the fields of connectivity, infotainment and safety,” said Hans Alminger, senior manager for Diagnostics & ECU Platform at Volvo, in a statement.

Ethernet was initially used by automakers only for on-board diagnostics. But as automotive electronics advanced, the technology has found a place in advanced driver assistance systems and infotainment platforms.

Many manufacturers also use Ethernet to connect rear vision cameras to a car’s infotainment or safety system, said Patrick Popp, chief technology officer of Automotive at TE Connectivity, a maker of car antennas and other automobile communications parts.

Currently, however, there are as many as nine proprietary auto networking specifications, including LIN, CAN/CAN-FD, MOST and FlexRay. FlexRay, for example, has a 10Mbps transmission rate. Ethernet could increase that 10 fold or more.

The effort to create a single vehicle Ethernet standard is being lead by Open Alliance and the IEEE 802.3 working group. The groups are working to establish 100Mbps and 1Gbps Ethernet as de facto standards.

The first automotive Ethernet standard draft is expected this year.

The Open Alliance claims more than 200 members, including General Motors, Ford, Daimler, Honda, Hyundai, BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen. Jaguar Land Rover, Renault, Volvo, Bosch, Freescale and Harman.

Broadcom, which makes electronic control unit chips for automobiles, is a member of the Open Alliance and is working on the effort to standardize automotive Ethernet.

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Panasonic Drops Plasma

Panasonic has announced it will discontinue production of plasma display panels (PDP) next month and close three factories that were building the HDTVs.

The company will stop selling plasma TVs for consumer use and PDP-related products for commercial use, such as Interactive Plasma Displays, with the current line of TVs. It expects to stop business operations at three of its display plants — the Amagasaki P3 Factory, the Amagasaki P5 Factory and the Amagasaki P4 Factory — by the end of March 2014.

Samsung and LG continue to produce plasma display televisions, but theirs are lower-end or entry-level models; they have generally put development dollars into LCD TVs, according to Paul Gray, a research analyst with NPD DisplaySearch.

“Samsung and [LG] were at best uncommitted to PDP,” Gray said in a blog post. And as for Panasonic, Gray said its “PDP research team had to counter every move in LCD and translate it to their technology…. Inevitably, they slowly lost ground.”

Since 2000, Panasonic has been the leading PDP maker. It led the global flat-panel display market by using PDP for large displays and LCD screens for small- and medium-sized displays. Only three years ago, Panasonic claimed 40% of the plasma display market.

In 2010, plasmaaccounted for 40% of flat panel TVs; this year, PDPs are expected to represent only 5% of the flat-panel market, according to according to market research firm NPD DisplaySearch.

Over the past two years, Panasonic has lost $15 billion through investments in flat-panel TV production, according to financial reports.

Plasma displays have increasingly lost market share to LCD TVs as they moved to LED backlights that narrowed the performance gap between the two technologies.

“With the rapid development of large-screen LCDs, and facing the severe price competition in the global market brought on by the Lehman Shock in September 2008, the company consolidated production in the Amagasaki P4 Factory, made a shift towards commercial applications and worked to improve the earnings of the business,” Panasonic said in a recent statement.

Panasonic will now focus its attention on “non-TV applications” and is moving to reduce its fixed costs for production of both plasma and LCD panels.

The move away from plasma HDTVs is reminiscent of the video tape wars of the 1970s and 1980s.

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LG Goes Self-Healing

LG is upping the ante in smartphone technology with a new handset that has a curved touchscreen, along with a special “self healing” technology that the company claims can prevent scratches on the phone’s casing.

The South Korean electronics vendor unveiled the new phone on Monday, calling it the LG G Flex. Digital renderings of the handset were leaked earlier this month. But in its Monday announcement the company offered further details on the phone, showing that it contains a few new technologies, along with its curved display.

The G Flex is the second phone to feature a curved display, the first coming from Samsung Electronics with its Galaxy Round handset. The top and bottom of the G Flex’s 6-inch screen are curved towards the user, while on the Samsung phone it is the sides that are curved towards the viewer.

This makes LG’s handset closer to the curve of a traditional fixed-line phone handset, a design choice LG said is optimized for the contours of a face. Users can more comfortably hold the phone to their mouth and ear, improving its voice and sound quality, according to LG.

The company also touted the design by stating that the phone offers an easier grip, and holds better in a person’s back pocket. In addition, LG said the curved screen gives an “IMAX-like” experience when viewing videos, allowing for a greater field of view.

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Microsoft Looks Into Smart Watches

Microsoft is developing designs for a touch-enabled smart watch, joining a number of other large competitors like Samsung Electronics and Apple who are said to be working on similar devices, according to a recent report.

Executives at suppliers to Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal that the company was sourcing components for the prototype of what could potentially be a “watch-style device.”

Microsoft has, for example, requested 1.5-inch displays from component makers for the prototype, an executive at a component supplier told the newspaper. It is unclear whether the company will decide to go ahead with the watch, the newspaper added.

Microsoft could not be immediately reached for comment.

A large number of vendors are looking at new product categories beyond smartphones and tablets.

This isn’t the first time, however, that Microsoft may be looking at watches as a product. It launched a smart wrist watch around a concept called Smart Personal Object Technology it unveiled in 2002, but withdrew it after a lackluster performance.

The Redmond, Wash., company is seeing its key PC market under threat from smartphones and tablets, and the failure of its new Windows 8 operating system to boost sales significantly. IDC said last week that first quarter PC shipments totaled 76.3 million units, down 13.9% compared to the same quarter last year. (The decline was worse than the 7.7% previously forecast by the analyst firm, and the market could be headed into further contraction, the research firm added.

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Is Apple Really Security Conscious?

Is Apple proving how clueless it is about security by backing a method of replacing passwords with fingerprint readers?

Just days after a scandal where a South American hospital was staffed by phantom doctors who used silicon fingers of their colleagues to convince administrators’ finger print readers that they were working, Apple has decided that they are the perfect form of security.

Word on the street is that Apple is said to be planning to introduce an iPhone that can be unlocked by the owner’s fingerprint. Speculation about Apple’s plans for fingerprint recognition began last summer when the iPhone maker bought bio-metric security firm AuthenTec for $335 million.

It is believed that the iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint chip under the Home button, to “improve security and usability.” Meanwhile in an engineering journal, two Google security experts outlined plans for an ID ring or smartphone chip that could replace online passwords, which is a lot sexier than fingerprint scanning.

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Energy Star Goes To Tablets

Coming to a tablet near you soon, Energy Star ratings.

The specification will be part of the Energy Star version 6.1, according to documents posted on the U.S. Energy Star website. But a date for ratings on tablets has not yet been established, said Robert Meyers, product manager at Energy Star computers. Energy Star is a joint effort between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Energy Star specification helps shoppers identify the most power-efficient products when making purchases. The Energy Star program already covers laptops, desktops, monitors, light bulbs, servers, household appliances and other products that are identified with a label. The use of Energy Star-labeled products helped cut close to US$18 billion from U.S. utility bills in 2010, according to the organization.

The EPA and DOE originally floated the idea of including tablets as part of Energy Star version 6.0 for products like laptops, desktops, displays, thin clients and networking equipment, which goes into effect on June 1. Some IT vendors that participate in the Energy Star program argued against the immediate inclusion of tablets, saying that those devices are more like smartphones than PCs and have different assembly and equipment. They argued that tablets and laptops differ on components such as batteries and networking equipment, and thus cannot be grouped together with PCs. The EPA and those stakeholders are now trying to gather a consensus on the definition of tablets and how to rate the devices.

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Broadcom Goes UltraHD

As TV manufacturers show off UltraHD TVs at CES, communications chip maker Broadcom is introducing the guts of future gateways that will be able to deliver video for those sets into viewers’ homes.

Broadcom’s BCM7445 silicon platform, announced just hours before the show opened on Tuesday morning, will be able to process incoming video from cable, carrier and satellite services that has four times the resolution of typical 1080p video offered today, according to the company.

Like the eye-catching but expensive TVs on the show floor in Las Vegas, the BCM7445 is just one of the first of many steps to consumers watching UltraHD shows at home. New content, displays and delivery technologies will all be required for the new resolution, which is also known as 4K.

Broadcom expects its chip to be in volume production by the middle of next year, in time for mainstream UltraHD TVs that will probably hit the market for the late 2014 holiday season, said Joe Del Rio, associate product line manager at Broadcom. However, service providers, which will probably be the distributors of most of the gateways built with the BCM7445, may take longer to start sending UltraHD video to their subscribers, Del Rio said.

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Samsung Goes Eight Cores

It was only a matter of time before someone got the cunning idea to build an eight-core ARM chip and Samsung seems to have taken up the challenge.

The Korean giant will detail its first eight-core SoC at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The 28nm part features two stitched quad-core clusters, based on A7 and A15 cores, hence the name – big.little.

The A7 cluster runs at up to 1.2GHz, while the A15 cluster can hit 1.8GHz, and it packs 2MB of L2 cache. It sounds like an intriguing concept, a bit like Nvidia’s companion core taken to the next level. The “little” cluster is tuned for energy efficiency, while the beefy A15 cluster should deliver unparalleled performance.

But what about real life applications? Eight cores sound like overkill for smartphones and even high end tablets, so it is unclear whether the big.little chip will find its way into actual products anytime soon.

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