CES Preview

It's nearly January so it is nearly the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which takes place the first full working week of the year, so this year it starts on the evening of 7th, with an opening keynote (this year from LG, taking over from Intel, who took over from Microsoft, who took over from Apple back when Apple didn't boycott CES for their own shows—or was that Comdex in Vegas back when there was a Comdex) with the main show taking place starting the next morning. I will be in Vegas with 150,000 of my closest friends. CES fills all the halls of the convention center, plus several nearby hotel exhibit space and ballrooms too. Last year, the first day was chaotic since we had heavy rain, and it was apparently taking 3 hours to get a taxi from the hotels to the convention center. I always just use the monorail and that seemed to be running just fine.

This year's Design Automation Conference will also be in the Las Vegas Convention Center, in North Halls 3 & 4, from June 2nd to 6th. I think I'm safe in promising you that it won't rain in Vegas in June.

I will be at CES and so you can expect Breakfast Bytes posts covering what is going on. I fully expect everything to be 5G if it has a network connection, autonomous level 3+ if it is a vehicle. And AI inside for everything, whether justified or not. Because every consumer product is getting more intelligent, and I expect to hear the word "smart" a lot. To show how smart products are, I expect a lot of Alexa (and Cortana and Google) powered everything.

Putting all that together, maybe this is the year that Douglas Adams' Babelfish really happens, and we will see earbuds (so much more comfortable than a real fish) that translate languages on the fly. The technology is getting close. And if you want to know more, or at least a great anecdote, about Douglas Adams, read my post SEMICON China: Big, Really Big.

Rockchip Is 100th Licensee of HiFi

A few days ago, HiFi passed a milestone with the 100th licensee of HiFi. In fact, there have already been several more licensees since. I asked our Tensilica group who the 100th licensee actually was, and it turned out to be Rockchip, who are Chinese but big enough you should have heard of them (most fabless semiconductor companies in China are small). They are ranked as a TOP50 fabless semiconductor company (worldwide, not just in China). They are based in Fuzhou, in Fujian province. If you are not Chinese, I doubt that you have heard of either. It is basically the nearest part of China to Taiwan, or about 400 miles up the coast from Hong Kong.

Cadence at CES

Of course, Cadence is most well-known for EDA tools, but nobody goes to CES to look for EDA tools (come back to Vegas in June for that). The focus of what we will be presenting is using Tensilica processors in consumer product applications such as audio processing, video processing, and on-device AI inference:

• DNA 100 AI Processor...for more details, see my post The New Tensilica DNA 100 Deep Neural-network Accelerator.
• HiFi 5 DSP...for more details, see my post "Alexa, What Is HiFi 5?".
• Vision Q6 DSP...for more details, see my post A New Era Needs a New Architecture: The Tensilica Vision Q6 DSP.
• Automotive sensor applications for ADAS and infotainment...for more details see my post Automotive Sensors: Cameras, Lidar, Radar, Thermal.

Some of the things that you can see. Well, let's start with things you can mostly hear:

• Waves NX virtual reality 3D audio
• NXP/Far-Field/DSP Concepts smart speaker
• Rokid Kamino18 smart speaker AI SiC
• TensorFlow Lite Machine Learning
• Realtalk ALC 5680 smart speaker

Now things you can really see, mostly involving vision:

• Show-attend-tell running on the DreamChip SoC (for more about this SoC see my post Dream Chip: A Vision for Your Car).
• Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for face and gender detection.
• Face++ HDR Bokeh on OPOO/Vivo mobile phones.
• Geo Semi Pedestrian detection and driver monitoring.

Consumer Products

Hey, it's CES, so we will have a big table of consumer products driven by Tensilica. Here is just a little sample of one corner of the table.

Book a Meeting

Our booths and demos are by invitation only. So if you want to find out more, then book a meeting at CES. We will be in South Hall 2, Suite MP25561.

Tsukiji

If you read my post Last Chance to See Tsukijo Fishmarket  then you know Tsukiji is closing. Well, it finally happened. So when hipster sushi bars tell you their fish is flown in fresh daily, ask them where from. Tsukiji is the wrong answer. Toyosu is the new Tsukiji.

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