DAC Wednesday 2017: IoT, Innovation, AMS, iPhone, Hardware Contest, and Bagpipes

22 Jun 2017 • 10 minute read

Yesterday was Wednesday at DAC here in Austin. For reports on the last three days, see:

IoT Keynote

The Wednesday keynote was by Tyson Tuttle of Silicon Labs on Accelerating the World of IoT. His "big number" forecast for IoT was 70B connected devices in 2025 generating $11T in economic value. To put that in perspective, the GDP of the entire world today is about $78T, so perhaps $100T in 2025. We are automating the world economy. The value is in the applications. Today, total semiconductor industry is only $350B (although if you take the economic value generated by semiconductor it is enormous—little EDA at around $8B is an incredibly leveraged resource).

Silicon Labs has 60 customers over $1M and 5000 total, so a very long tail.

The majority of things will be wireless. We are simply not going to wire up billions of things. A lot of the opportunity Tyson sees is adding connectivity and intelligence to old school devices. For example, a garage door opener can be made smarter so you can check on your phone if the door is shut and close it. That's nice but not compelling. But in the commercial area, there are needs to make sure doors don't stay open too long (if the building is air conditioned). That has a financial payback. In fact, industrial applications are the place where most of the value is.

Another example is a company that makes cordless drills and tools. They are a pioneer in putting lithium ion batteries into drills, which gives them more torque than plug-in drills. It can run all day and recharge at night. They added bluetooth connectivity. If you don't have your smartphone nearby, the tool won't work, so there is no point in stealing it. When the smartphone sees the drill, it records the location so there is automatic asset tracking. It can have special torque curves for special applications like installing solar panels, and record who installed the screws and when.

Tyson is actually a chip designer by background, and did his share of phase-locked loops and similar blocks. Now he is more thinking big picture as to how all this is going to come together. Here is a plot of what an IoT SoC looks like: embedded flash, RF, ARM, energy management, etc.

The core value in IoT is simplicity. You have to make complex hardware and software easy to use so that an industrial customer can design it in and not have to worry about FCC certification or device drivers. Simplicity of design-in and support are important for scaling the business.

Another big deal is security. Node-to-cloud must be secure, especially provisioning, disabling debug, keeping encryption keys safe, firmware upgrades. All this has to work smoothly or users will never be secure. Once a chip is sold it has to evolve, in particular as security threats arise.

Tyson reckons that lighting is the next killer app (it is in industrial, smart home, and smart city). Volumes are high (40+ lightbulbs per house in US). With new construction, there is no longer any need to run wires to the switch so savings. Can use color so that you wake up with a lot of blue and in the evening more yellow. Bulbs are at an inflection point where adding connectivity is a small part of the cost. Interestingly, in the opening keynote, Joe Costello talked about lighting, too. But he has a much bigger idea and lighting is just the way to get the cost of initial installation paid for.

There will be platforms too, like the Amazon Echo, which had 70 functions when shipped and is now more like 1700. Any new device that comes along, people want it to work with Echo. "Water the garden" linked to sprinkler system. But it needs to be intuitive so that people who couldn't program their VCR can connect a new sprinkler controller to their Echo. Many devices will be like that, not requiring their own infrastructure, instead piggy-backing on something already existing.

His final slide: IoT is the biggest opportunity of our lifetime. It will disrupt healthcare, retail, transportation, and more. That's over half the economy. Tyler is very sanguine that it will displace jobs, and that is a good thing. We'd all be working on farms instead of doing fun things like chips. However, I'm not sure that the progression from agriculture to manufacturing to services goes anywhere good for the people who are not going to be designing these IoT devices and creating the software. As Tyson pointed out, driving vehicles is the biggest job segment for high school graduates who didn't go to college. But it's by no means obvious what they do next when autonomous vehicles make those jobs obsolete or, at least, many fewer.

Is Integration Leaving Less Room for Design Innovation?

Paul Teich of TIRIAS Research wondered if all the differentiation has gone from hardware design. Modern SoC designs integrate most of the design choices, while new packaging techniques integrate best-of-class manufacturing process choices for logic, memory, human interface (tactile, audio, and visual), communications (wired and wireless), and sensors. Unless you can fund your own chip design, it is by far cheaper to select off-the-shelf chips for specific application classes in multi-chip modules. The question then becomes: how do you differentiate your IoT widget?

Until recently, designing your own SoC was a lot cheaper than today, whereas now only the largest markets can justify the investment. System-in-package (SiP) approaches have recently become cost effective and so now are an alternative. It is basically process technology versus multi-chip packaging.

As SiP has become more cost effective, some integration at the die level has actually gone away. Radios were integrated onto the die but that has now been dropped since it is so much more efficient to do the radio in 65nm or even older processes, and pair that up with a leading-edge digital die.

An example announced in the last two days was the AMD EPYC. It is a four-processor chip module. Each processor has eight cores. With one chip, it is a desktop, and four chips is a server processor. Each chip has two memory controllers, so that there are eight memory controllers on each module. Only one of the chip's system management blocks is used (although they all have one so that the chips are identical).

IoT devices, in particular, are moving in this direction since they need to have MEMS sensors, radios, antennas, as well as digital and analog. The selection of exactly what die are required, and which supplier is best of breed can be left much closer to manufacturing time than with an SoC.

However, in general, the chip is not the product.

A good product example is Amazon's Alexa. It has natural language processing. Intelligent devices like this need really aggressive processing since "it's matrix multiplies all the way down." This allows it to hear you across a noisy room and do its "far field voice recognition." It needs multiple microphones to do this and their OEM kit has seven microphones and an ARM Cortex to hear "Alexa" and whatever you say after.

Reiterating a point from the keynote, Paul urged everyone to design with service in mind. Data generates insight, and it is insight that is the business.

Mixed-Signal Lunch

Wednesday's lunch was the mixed-signal lunch, officially titled Overcoming Mixed-Signal Design and Verification Challenges in Automotive and IoT Systems. The panelists were from STMicroelectronics, Amkor, Bosch, and Cadence. I will cover the discussion in detail in a post next week.

International Hardware Design Contest

This is a new contest. This year it was sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor and it was an FPGA-based (surprise, Lattice makes FPGAs) IoT. There were 29 teams, 27 from academia and 2 from industry. It really is an international competition too, with teams from China, Hong Kong, India, Greece, Singapore, Taiwan, Brazil, USA, and Germany. The top five teams were invited to DAC and earlier in the week gave a live demo of their entry.

3^rd place winner ($1000): "Multiple Energy Source Powered IoT Design" by the SOC team (the last on the above list)

2^nd place winner ($1500): "IoMT Pilot: Towards FPGA-Based Collision Detection for 3D Printing Safety" by the team from University of Buffalo

1^st place winner ($2500): "Low Power, Low Cost Audio Based Security IoT System" by the iSmart team

For the 2018 competition, the industry sponsor will be drone manufacturer DJI. The challenge will be a neural-network drone targeting system. The details will be announced in July with enrollment starting in August. Designs will be submitted every month and the ranking will be updated monthly. Evaluation criteria will include accuracy and power consumption.

iPhone Teardown

Scott and Evan of iFixit tore down an iPhone 7 to wrap up Wednesday. They do this for a living, making repair manuals for lots of phones, tablets, laptops. But also Patagonia clothes and bicycle spokes. The manuals are all open source and free. "Repair is freedom," they like to say. But most repairs requires specialized tools such as tripoint screws. They sell toolkits, and that's how they actually make their money.

They said that it is a pity that:

Apple is very good at not letting people talk about collaboration. So many people here have had something to do with things in this phone, but nobody can talk about it.

The iPhone 7 is the one that has no headphone jack. So one of the things they were interested in when they first got it open, was what had replaced it, in the sense of occupying the space where it would have gone. It turns out to be a little piece of plastic that allows for equal pressure inside and outside the phone for the barometer/altimeter but still maintaining the waterproofing. Also, in that part of the phone is the taptic engine. The home button is actually solid state and not really a button at all, but the taptic engine vibrates momentarily and creates the tactile illusion of pressing a button.

They gave the iPhone 7 a 7 (out of 10) for repairability:

Battery easy to access. Solid state home button eliminates a point of failure
Improved water and dust resistance means adhesive everywhere (which makes repair harder, but is a necessary evil for waterproofing)
Display assembly is first to come out and so you can replace the screen without needing to dismantle much, but the water resistance makes it more complex than before
Tripoint screws mean iPhone 7 require up to four different types of drivers (meaning screwdrivers, not device drivers!)

Bagpipes

Years ago Hewlett Packard would crank up their sound system and play Amazing Grace the moment the show closed. Somewhere along the way, this got switched to real bagpipes and, once HP no longer had a booth at DAC, Forte Design Systems took over arranging for the bagpiper to close the show. Cadence acquired Forte and has kept the tradition going, and even the name "The Forte Bagpipes".

By the way, if you want to see the most impressive display of bagpipes, go to the San Francisco Caledonian Society Highland Games, which are in Pleasanton the Saturday and Sunday of every Labor Day weekend. All the bands in competition play at the end of the day, so you have about 600 bagpipers playing Amazing Grace (the tune that the Forte Bagpipers play to close the show).

What's for Breakfast?

We filmed this week's "What's for Breakfast?" video here at the conference. So you can see what topics I picked from DAC to give a whole post to next week. As to the question, are you allowed to eat barbecue for breakfast?