Formative Technology

Kevin Kilbane, Senior Product Manager, Optical Sensors, Silicon Labs Wrist-wearable fitness bands and smart watches are moving from basic accelerometer-based “smart pedometers” to include biometric sensing such as heart rate monitoring. This trend is being driven by manufacturers who are looking for differentiation in the rapidly growing wearables market and by educated consumers who want to maximize their performance and fitness with more effective training. Real-time continuous heart rate monitoring helps to motivate consumers to adapt their workouts based on heart rate zone feedback. Designers of these next-generation wearables face several challenges when implementing continuous heart rate monitoring in their Read More

Duncan Bremner, Founder and CTO, SureCore Limited Thanks to the film ‘Mean Girls’,  we can all remember how it was at school; the geeks were geeking, the sports jocks were jockeying, the plastics were strutting their stuff, and everyone else was just trying to get through the  day. Then BAM!!;  a new, in your face, upstart appears on the scene, ruffles everybody’s feathers and challenges the status quo. The same has just happened to the technology markets with the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT). No-one really knows what it is, how it will change their business models, and Read More

Charlie Cheng, President and CEO, Kilopass Technology, Inc. The statement that memory is a formative technology for electronics systems is non-controversial. Going one step further by stating that memory is increasingly important to electronics systems does not raise eyebrows either. Indeed, memory is omnipresent in electronics systems, from wearables to network routers, and often plays a key role in overall system performance. Demand for memory will continue to expand rapidly in the coming years driven by the surging number of connected devices and the Internet backbone required to support them. The appetite for memories, with increasingly exacting specifications, seems insatiable Read More

By Mike Salas, Vice President Marketing, Ambiq Micro Subthreshold power optimized technology (SPOT) has the potential to dramatically reduce the power consumption of the next generation of microcontrollers. Energy consumption is a critical factor in the design of portable systems, replacing performance as the driver for the industry. Reducing power enables longer battery life and/or allows a smaller, lighter battery to be used to not only minimize cost but to also reduce the size of the device and make it more attractive to users.  Ideally, it may even be possible to begin considering using energy harvested sources to replace batteries Read More