The last week of February is MWC Barcelona, formerly known as Mobile World Congress but now officially just initials. It is, obviously, in Barcelona, Spain. If you are in Germany, or Silicon Valley, other conferences are available! That week is also Embedded World in Nuremberg Exhibition Center, DVCon in the San Jose Doubletree Hotel, and SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in San Jose Conference Center. The week before and the week after there is nothing on my calendar, so it's a bit annoying that everything is scheduled to coincide like that.

Barcelona

One of the attractions of MWC is that it is in Barcelona, which is a fascinating city to visit, and with great weather. I still think Disney was short-sighted to put EuroDisney in a rainy run-down area in the Paris suburbs, rather than near Barcelona, apparently their original plan.

Barcelona is probably most famous for two things: Las Ramblas, and La Sagrada Familia. Or two things for foodies, tapas and paella.

Las Ramblas is a broad mostly pedestrian street that meanders through downtown and is full of restaurants and bars (and tourists—and supposedly pickpockets, although I've never had any problem). The reason that it meanders, is that it used to be the river, which was covered over and now flows underneath. By the way, Fleet Street, synonymous with the British press (I think the technical term is a metonym, or maybe it's a synecdoche) is where the River Fleet used to run through London before it was covered over (in 1766). The most interesting place to visit on Las Ramblas is the famous food market, La Boqueria, at La Rambla 91. Here's a video I made a couple of years ago (there's no sound, I was going to use it for a Breakfast Bytes weekly video but ended up doing something else).

La Sagrada Familia is that cathedral that has been under construction since 1882. Currently, it is planned to be complete in 2030 or so. The architect was Antoni Gaudi, who is also famous for many other buildings and a park in Barcelona. If you've been to Barcelona before, you've almost certainly been to look at some of them (and the cathedral). If this is your first time, then you have to make a tour of at least a few of them. You can book tickets for the cathedral online, and skip the lines.

Another famous Catalan is Joan Miro (that's a guy, Joan is the Catalan for John). He has his own museum, not that far from the conference center. There is also a fascinating Picasso museum that is arranged in chronological order with lots of pictures from when he was a teenager and doing a lot of religious paintings. Before he developed the various styles for which he is most famous, he was clearly a very talented but classically trained artist, winning competitions with paintings you'd never guess were "Picassos".

MWC Barcelona

The conference itself is more of a tradeshow than a conference, although there are lots of keynotes and sessions. The most relevant keynote speakers for people in semiconductors and EDA are:

• Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
• Simon Segars, CEO of Arm
• Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco
• Martin Casado, Partner at16z
• Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of Daimler-Benz
• Plus lots of mobile operators such as Sprint, Vodaphone, Korea Telecom

Cadence

Cadence has a booth (6L34). The focus of what we are showing is the Tensilica product line, with a focus on the Vision processors, HiFi (for audio and voice), and Artificial Intelligence.

• Waves NX, wireless AR/VR headphone (3D audio)
• NXP/DSP Concepts smart speaker
• TensoreFlow Lite Machine Learning demo board
• Alanko on the HiKey board
• Sonarex on the HiKey board
• Nestwave GNSS (GPS)
• Show-attend-Tell on the DreamChip board
• CNN face and gender detection on the DreamChip board
• Neural Network compiler on HiSilicon board
• Millisecond-class facial recognition on Oppo and Vivo mobile phones
• Geo Semi driver monitoring on the Geo board

Consumer Products

There will be a display of consumer products containing Tensilica processors. Since attending a demo at MWC requires an NDA, there will be a lot more there than I'm not allowed to tell you about here. But here is a photo of Oppo and Vivo mobile phones from the equivalent table at CES last month. You might not have heard of Oppo and Vivo since they only sell in Asia. They are actually two lines from the same company, BBK Electronics (OnePlus is the third line of phones from them). Added together, BBK is the #2 mobile phone manufacturer (in units), behind Samsung but ahead of Apple (based on Q3 numbers, I've not seen Q4 numbers yet).

Visit Us

Visit the Cadence booth at Fira Gran Via, hall 6, stand 6L34 and see our vision and audio demos, and consumer products already in the market that use Tensilica DSPs. Visits are by appointment. Click to book an appointment.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.