VDC Research: Embedded Microprocessor, Board & Systems Market Blog

New Media, New Opportunities - Extending the Value Proposition of Media Servers

The rampant adoption of all-IP networking infrastructures and continual advances in consumer electronics have allowed media content and services to evolve in tandem. Consumer requirements are intensifying with expectations of HD video, high data speeds, and superior audio quality – and will deepen with new, rapidly growing applications such as video conferencing and unified collaboration. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture has guided leading media server vendors to offer powerful and flexible hardware capable of supporting various formats and applications. For hardware vendors to compete in this increasingly competitive market, though, they must provide sufficient support and exemplary added-value in their products and solutions.

Communication service providers (CSPs) and other media providers are ditching early proprietary platforms in favor of new scalable and modular open systems to harness several economic and technological benefits. Today, most leading media server vendors, including HP, IBM and Radisys, offer server architectures capable of easily scaling out to current and future application requirements. Though performance, cost, and reliability are always top priorities to solution investments, vendors need to incorporate a variety of value-adds to influence OEMs’ selection of embedded hardware to manage media and data content.

First, OEMs must support vast application/technical formats and standards, and clearly communicate them to prospective clients. Outside of processing power and memory/storage capacity, media providers want to know about codec/format support, RAID support, available operating systems, support for industry standards, and application limits (such as maximum concurrent video feeds) without having to dive through spec sheets. Radisys goes one step further and lists “revenue generating applications” directly on product pages clearly outlining the potential capabilities of given embedded hardware. The broader the support, the greater the addressable market.

Software is a critical area that OEMs can drive further value and revenues from media server hardware, but one with extensively more competition from ISVs and other hardware vendors. Alcatel-Lucent’s Centralized Operations Manager, for instance, is an element management system that consolidates and simplifies IMS and next-generation network management functions. Alternatively, ISVs tend to stick with application-specific solutions. Though in-house software development may be outside the scope of some current vendors, partnerships should be explored to satisfy this important application criterion.

Last, but certainly not least, technical documents and training offer untold ease-of-mind to end users when evaluating media-processing solutions. IBM offers extensive training, available online and on-site, spanning their broad portfolio of media management solutions and supported applications. Training, as is the case with IBM, can be developed into a formidable revenue stream and be a tremendous opportunity to strengthen brand loyalty among customers.

M2M can Authenticate Actionable Intelligence for Hospitality Industry

During a recent conversation at VDC, the topic turned to a problem often seen by users of travel and restaurant advisor sites. It is often difficult to determine legitimate user ratings from those that were created by employees or competitors of the venue in question. We believe that Google, Apple, or another industry participant could mitigate this problem by using an M2M architecture solution. Here is how it would work:

 

The persons who would want to be authenticated reviewers of hospitality venues would register at a cloud-based site. The mobile devices they carry would be linked to their profile. The reviewers would have to opt-in to allow GPS and Wi-Fi location based tracking and logging.

If the reviewer wishes to submit a rating for a venue they log into the cloud-based application. The cloud based application verifies that the location data from the reviewer’s mobile device matches the pattern of a legitimate customer. If the verification passes, the rating and commentary are accepted. The identity of the reviewer could be obscured if needed but, if their reviews were found to be questionable, they could be disqualified in the future.  It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than what many of these rating sites have today.

At the Design West – Embedded Systems Conference 2013 – Part 1 the Embeddy

Last week, while attending the 2013 DESIGN West/Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose we presented the VDC Research Embeddy Award for the best new embedded hardware product. As part of the selection process the VDC Embedded Hardware team met with more than 30 companies to discuss product announcements and a variety of industry trends impacting the embedded hardware market today. Before we get to the award winner, we will start with a few highlights from some of the suppliers we spoke to at the show.

Connectivity enhanced Microcontrollers: Microchip usually makes several significant embedded hardware announcements at DW/ESC shows and this year was no exception.  VDC was given a detailed briefing on several new connectivity modules that OEMs can use for many applications. If the OEM's product already has a computing element, the new microchip modules are designed to easily integrate the needed Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, MiWi, and/or proprietary network types. If the OEM’s engineers have not settled on a processing element to interface with sensors or product components they might consider the modules that include integrated MCUs. The good news for OEMs is that the selection of any of these Microchip modules will likely eliminate product testing for overall FCC compliance and production test and calibration. Microchip demonstrated how a lighting OEM might integrate these new products in a way that would enable lighting products to be controlled in M2M applications including network based portals and authenticated mobile devices.

Secure M2M: Our next stop at the show was with Icon Labs and they were highlighting a new barrier/firewall device that was well suited for supporting M2M on legacy equipment in industrial applications. The unit we saw was targeted for a market price of ~$1K but included many security elements using Intel Atom processing and embedded software from Icon Labs’ partners including Wind River, ZiLog, McAfee, and Green Hills.

New Rugged Handheld Devices: At our next stop, the VDC EHW team was greeted by the enthusiastic ADLINK team and they had every right to be that way. There were a number of interesting products in many categories.  We were particularly interested in ADLINK’s foray into the enterprise handheld device market with the IMX-9000 which includes barcode reading capability, multiple connectivity protocols all contained in a stylish but rugged enclosure that is said to withstand IP67 and 1.5M drop tests. While at the ADLINK booth, we saw the new Advanced TCA processor blade. The new aTCA-9300 is well suited for media delivery platforms because of the need for scalable processing to deliver content in the needed forms and formats for the transmission and end use by the target device.

Media Processing: As a bit of background, it is not feasible to store content in all forms and formats suitable for delivery to, and use by, the huge numbers of things used to view them. This means that content has to be converted on the fly and that means there is a huge need for embedded processing products to perform these tasks.

ASICs and FPGAs: We received updates on the latest developments in the world of ASICs and FPGAs. We spoke with Altera who divides the majority of the FPGA market with Xilinx.  Altera  provided an update on the SoC FPGA line that was introduced in late 2011. The Cyclone V and Arria V FPGAs incorporate ARM CPU cores with FPGAs to allow OEMs to develop more powerful and flexible product designs while economizing on needed circuit board space.  One advantage that FPGAs normally have over ASICS is that they take less time to design and can be brought into production faster. If design issues are discovered at later stages, they can be corrected faster and at lower cost. The Altera inclusion of ARM cores allows OEM engineers to leverage many development tools that are available for ARM and that theoretically increases the advantages over traditional ASIC processes.

On the ASIC side, we received a briefing by Triad Semiconductor on their ViaASICs  and the associated development toolset ViaDesigner. The goals of these two products is to eliminate the time-to-market and development cost advantages of FPGA products over ASICs. The process works like this. In the semiconductor fab, the wafers are started and arrays of circuits and functional blocks are laid down but not configured and interconnected. These are then stocked until needed. An OEM engineer then uses the development tool that determines how the Triad chip will be configured. The data from that tool is sent to the fab and they create the mask(s) needed to for the next steps in the wafer creation process. The next steps lay down the layers needed for connecting the functional blocks creating a finished product.

New SBCs: Advantech highlighted a new compact design Single Board Computer (SBC) called the MIO-5290 that can be ordered with 3^rd Gen Intel i3 or i7 processors. With its ability to drive 3 independent displays with intense graphics, and the availability to add various I/O modules to customize the product, the MIO-5290 is well suited for many applications such as intelligent signage. The VDC team identified the MIO as one of the finalists in the Embeddy Award selection process.

Another finalist in the Embeddy Award selection process was WinSystems SBC35C series of products that utilize the 800 Mhz Freescale  i.MX 6Q Industrial Processor. There were several things that impressed us. The SBC35C board layout was very well thought out with industrial bus connections all on one side and the other needed connections on the other. The SBC35C can be run with Power over Ethernet (PoE) or a single DC source. The last thing that impressed us was the fact that the WinSystems team was showing their product the proper respect by handling the demo SBC with an anti-static bag. If they do that on the show floor, you can expect that their production and test process is also using similar precautions.

2013 Hardware Embeddy Winner: And now, without further ado, the winner of the VDC Hardware Embeddy award for the 2013 Design West / ESC show was AMD for their new G-Series family of SoC processors that we believe will make a big impact in the embedded hardware market.

M2M World Congress – London – Highlights from Day 1 of 2

VDC’s CEO Mitch Solomon is participating in M2M World Congress (one of the industry’s larger M2M-centric conferences) this week in London, and sent in the following post from the field.

First off, the event is oversold and is standing room only, a testament to building interest in M2M (…and perhaps the strong promotional efforts of its producer).  The day consisted of roughly a dozen presentations and panels, covering a broad landscape of topics.  Speakers were largely from major wireless carriers, primarily European.  Below are a few key insights (…derived from a much longer list), just hours after the last session of the day:

All speakers believe the much-anticipated M2M future has arrived, and they see rapid scaling in their business (as measured by M2M SIM card sales and deployments).  Most M2M business leaders within large mobile network operators are carrying aggressive growth targets (handed down from corporate), as their companies look to M2M to drive growth that far exceeds what can be achieved in their established voice and data businesses.

The words “complexity” and “challenges” were used almost as much as “the” and “it” during the course of the day.  The difficulties associated with actual M2M deployments were widely acknowledged, often in the same breath as the notion of how large the opportunity is.  Clever solutions to the biggest M2M deployment challenges were elusive (understandably, as silver bullets are usually are hard to come by), though familiar suggestions like “test, test, and re-test” and “standards can help” and “pilot first, then expand” were offered up. 

The only word used more than “complexity” and “challenges” was…”partner.”  Which makes sense.  It often takes partnerships to solve complex technical problems such as M2M applications.  Every carrier was touting its partnerships, some of which extend geographic coverage while others deliver value-added software and services beyond connectivity.  This is the age of M2M promiscuity, as everyone tries to seduce everyone else lest someone be left on the dance floor alone.

For a myriad of reasons, the discussions were largely focused on technology and vendor strategies (particularly carriers’) instead of OEM use cases and customer benefits (…something many audience members were a bit frustrated by).  Some attempts by panel members to address questions related to devices and OEM use cases were made, and some light was shed.  Overall, however a clear impression was made that senior people with M2M on their business cards are still working their own way up the learning curve (like many others in the industry) when it comes to specific examples of how M2M-based applications can benefit their OEM customers.  This knowledge gap could be indicative of carriers and/or senior leaders at carriers being one or two steps removed from OEMs’ application development efforts, rather than a deficiency in an expected area of expertise.

With the second and final day of the event tomorrow, my hope is that panel members will share more about how OEMs are approaching, evaluating, designing, and deploying M2M based systems.  Discussions of the supporting business cases would be particularly valuable.  If so, it will cap off a very worthwhile two days of M2M immersion in London.

Want to win an Award at Design West?

Think your company’s product deserves to win an award?

VDC will be attending the Design West/ESC conference from Tuesday April 23 through Thursday April 25. At the show, we will be presenting our 9th annual Embeddy Awards. The winners will be announced LIVE during Thursday's morning keynote session.

So how can your company win the Embeddy award?

To be considered:

First, fill out this on-line form: http://svy.mk/WU0abA

You must also schedule a meeting with VDC to discuss the announcement that you are making at the show. You can arrange a meeting time with VDC by doing one of the following:

For Hardware related meetings

Contact David Laing, Senior Analyst/Program Manager, M2M Embedded Hardware
Platforms at:

dlaing@vdcresearch.com or
508.653.9000 x146.

For Software and Tools related meetings

Contact Jared Weiner, Analyst, M2M Embedded Software & Tools at:

jweiner@vdcresearch.com or
508.653.9000 x143.

Haven't decided if you're attending DESIGN West yet?

Please check out the DESIGN West website for more information on the conference program as well as information on all of the companies that will be exhibiting. You can also click here to register.

Stay tuned to hear more details about VDC's participation at Design West. (Hint: we will be sharing some recent research on the IoT)

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

The U.S. Approach to Data Privacy is Better for Big Data

Big Data produced by our M2M world (and harvested from its inhabitants) has become immensely valuable in driving innovation, amplifying productivity/efficiency and encouraging growth. Such value cannot bear without compromise, and such is prevalent with globally diverse regulations of data privacy and control. In light of recent European litigation surrounding Google and the “Right to be Forgotten”, the topic has been rekindled in the United States where data privacy is moderated in a much-looser fashion. The U.S., however, is unlikely to adopt stricter measures in the next few years as to not squelch their own interests and recent Big Data investments. This hotly-contested, relaxed approach will pave the way for Big Data innovation and spotlight privacy-conscious businesses.

The U.S. currently has fairly restrictive measures in place regarding the collection and distribution of health and financial data, but few limitations elsewhere like with social data used in precision marketing. The government is unlikely to follow Europe’s path towards safeguarding its citizens for several reasons. For one, several federal agencies (including the National Institute of Health, Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, among others) announced in March 2012 a $200 million investment designed to improve tools and techniques to utilize the mounting piles of data across several scientific disciplines. The U.S. government is on the Big Data bandwagon with aspirations of emulating the various successes of leading early-adopters like Walmart, T-Mobile and Barnes & Noble. Additionally, the U.S. government is unlikely to tighten regulatory control because:

• The current congress is incapable of passing a budget, let alone complex privacy legislation.
• Our maturing millennial generation has shown to be savvier with privacy controls, and is generally more open with personal information. (Just look at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
• The lobbyist armies of Google and Facebook continue to grow.
• A widespread lack of comprehensive understanding revolving Big Data persists among individuals, businesses and the government itself.

The relatively relaxed nature of U.S. data privacy regulation will greatly benefit Big Data adoption and maturation. Privacy can be traded for value in the online marketing world, for instance, so that specific offers can be more relevant and useful to consumers based on their individual interests and needs. But no matter the industry, regulatory compliance will always cost businesses money, resources and time that would be otherwise best distributed to R&D, educational workshops/seminars and/or any other business functions. Setting another technical barrier in developing Big Data solutions and use cases could stifle innovation, and would certainly delay or marginalize opportunities for expansion and use. By offloading the bulk of data privacy responsibilities onto the market’s shoulders, OEMs and service providers are able to deliver robust Big Data products leveraging a variety of growing data pools to end users.

Since the U.S. government is doubtful to tighten regulatory control, data privacy can be a highly-influential differentiating factor in attracting or retaining customers to products or services – not just in the United States but from a global perspective as well. Users understand that nothing is for free, but transparency in how data is collected and used can greatly nullify concerns of exploitation and possibly attract new business. The U.S. wants Big Data to grow, and by relinquishing some control to the market they are allowing Big Data to grow on its citizens as well.

 

The Next big Thing in Smart Phones is LITTLE

Last week, Samsung unveiled its latest Galaxy S4 Smartphone. The first wave of news indicated that it would be powered by Samsung’s new 8-core Exynos 5 octa processor.  This is exciting to us because it represents one of the first commercial rollouts of the ARM big.LITTLE technology.  Samsung intends to sell the Exynos 5 to other device makers as well. These types of processors although targeted for use in high-end mobile devices, may find M2M and embedded market traction as well because of the many functions that are included and the technology that balances processor speed and power consumption.

The Exynos 5 octa includes four powerful A-15 cores, each one paired with a subsidiary “energy sipping” A-7 core. The ARM technology allows seamless switching from one core to the other, depending upon the application. This heterogeneous approach allows the Exynos 5 to be as much as 70% more efficient than processors utilizing homogeneous cores.

The use of heterogeneous cores is not new, but other versions we have seen often have required some application design finesse to achieve a balance between energy conservation and performance. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, on the other hand, allows software developers to concentrate on the use of the four A-15 cores because the instruction sets for the A-15s and the subsidiary A-7s are the same.

Smartphones are not the only mobile products that can benefit from the big.LITTLE technology and processors such as the Exynos 5 octa. If Samsung or another supplier commit to making these military and/or industrial versions of these devices and to making them available for the extended periods of time that these markets require, we might see them make inroads in areas such as telematics M2M and/or micro unmanned platforms. These small-sized platforms have to operate autonomously for as long as possible, so power available for processing is a precious commodity. As with smartphones, loads on processing in mini unmanned and M2M platform applications can vary significantly, depending on the situation. Therefore, a 70% energy efficiency improvement might become the difference between a successful mission and one that is terminated before reaching its goal.

As this blog is posting, there is some information to suggest that the North American release of the Samsung S4 may not use the Exynos, instead using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. There are a few possible reasons for this potential processor swap. The first being given is that US carriers are presently more receptive to Qualcomm’s cellular modem technology. We believe that it is also possible that the supply of Exynos 5 octa chips is limited because of wafer fab capacity or yields. Lastly Samsung, like many phone suppliers, keeps each product platform fresh by introducing new derivatives. These incremental upgrades can serve to keep products popular with consumers, thereby maintaining revenue margins for suppliers and cellular providers.

Is Yahoo’s Collaboration Strategy Flawed? M2M & People Play Key Roles

Based on my experience, there is a point to Marissa Meyer’s new policy at Yahoo. Collaboration can indeed happen when people work in a same physical area. When I worked as a product support engineer back in the late 90’s, our team would take calls from field engineers as the second tier of customer support. There was countless times where the team members would overhear a conversation from a person on a call and offer assistance because they had a good idea about what the problem was. If anything, the challenge back then was proving to people that collaboration could happen without everyone in the same space.

In 2001, I was part of a small group of engineers researching concepts and creating standards to improve product serviceability. While looking at best practices, we discovered that a design engineering team in California was using a Microsoft product called NetMeeting on a “skunk works” basis. Quite simply, they did this at no expense and without the knowledge, support, or approval of the IT department. They used a discarded PC as a NetMeeting directory server and stuck it in a back room.  These engineers were using NetMeeting as a way of holding group meetings without having members travel between buildings on the campus. What our group discovered was that there was a NetMeeting compatible Sun Solaris software application called “SunForum”. This was big news to us because it meant that a software engineer using a PC in Boston could directly support an application engineer working on a Sun-based machine in our company’s Paris office. Up to that point, the conventional process would be phone conversations and e-mails until the point that the lack of progress forced someone to travel. If you loved travel, you hated the new M2M connectivity and if you hated travel, M2M collaboration was great news.

In 2013, remote control software should not be news to anyone. In fact, there are many software applications and hardware platforms that teams can use to collaborate. At the same time, these same platforms can also destroy collaboration and productivity. For example, an engineer wearing headphones and listening to streaming radio is unlikely to hear a neighbor’s communication and offer assistance.  What might work in these cases would be secure on-line chat forums and those could work wherever people were and which devices they were using. In summary, if people want to collaborate, they will find the tools and working styles to do it. If they don’t they will resist. Forcing everyone onto the same company campus won’t change that dynamic by itself.

Will Cloud Based Virtualization Solve Sony’s PS3 - PS4 Platform Migration?

This week, Sony announced some details for the next generation of the Playstation 3 (PS 3) game system. The new product will be called the Playstation 4 (PS 4) which makes sense because once you build a brand, you do not want to create confusion or disruptions with your customer base. From a technical perspective brand continuity is not as easily accomplished while making significant architecture changes between platform models. This is precisely the issue that Sony could have with the PS 4 because of the changes in embedded processing.

The PS 4 will now be using an x86 64-bit 8-core AMD  Jaguar processor as opposed to the Cell architecture used in the PS 3. In addition, a next generation AMD Radeon GPU will provide 1.84 Teraflops of graphics processing.  This embedded processor shift is attractive for game providers because there is likely to be more x86 programming expertise available than was the case with Cell, and the relative familiarity of the processing and graphics capability should allow more projects to be feasible.

If there is a negative note it is that the change in embedded processing architecture will result in the PS 4 not being directly backward compatible with PS 3 games. In other words, the PS 4 will not be able to locally run the PS 3 game disks. If allowed, the lack of compatibility could add a level of complexity to existing PS 3 owner consumer decisions including:

• Do I have enough physical space and unused TV connection ports for both a PS3 and a PS4?
• If so, will my all-in-one remote be able to operate both of them without a problem?
• If all of my PS 3 games will be obsolete, should I wait to see what the new version of the Microsoft XBOX 360 is like before I migrate to next generation gaming?
• At what point will there be enough new PS 4 games for me to consider abandoning all my favorite PS 3 games?

It is here that Sony’s July, 2012 acquisition of cloud-based virtual gaming supplier Gaikai makes sense because it can be leveraged by Sony to mitigate the backward compatibility issue between PS 3 and PS 4.  The user places a PS 3 game disk in the PS 4. The PS 4 identifies the disk as being legitimate, and acts as an interface between the game player’s activities, the local graphics display and the cloud based processing resources. This cloud based architecture, if it performs well, should mitigate the PS 3 to PS 4 migration problem, but we believe that questions still remain. For example, the business model for revenues for those cloud resources and who actually provide and pays them will be interesting questions.

Lastly, it appears from the PS 4 hardware description that the AMD CPU and GPU selected by Sony will be purchased as separate components. There are significant product design and performance advantages to combining these functions into a single semiconductor die or package. In fact, this was a key product strategy when AMD acquired graphics expert ATI in 2006. For Sony, having a separate GPU may allow a more efficient architecture for the cloud-based PS 3 compatibility and other services.

Is Huawei’s New Device the M2M Equivalent of 3M’s Post-it Note?

We just saw a review about Huawei’s new Ascend Mate SmartPhone that features a 6.1” touchscreen, and it was far from positive. In summary, CNN Money’s Adrian Covert found the Huawei product’s market placement to be in the less than ideal “Phablet” zone between phone and tablet. We agree with Adrian in one area, it is probably not an ideal size for a phone. But, at the same time, we believe this class of mobile product can possibly experience the same type of success as 3M’s well known Post-It product.

Here’s a quick summary in case you did not know the 3M Post-It story. A chemist at 3M was trying to create a super strong adhesive but the formula failed for that application. It was only much later that the permanently tacky but not so strong adhesive eventually found a consumer and business market where it excelled. This is not to say that the Huawei product is, pardon the pun, tacky. In our opinion, the Huawei’s 6.1” product would be an excellent “Bring Your Own Device” M2M platform. It is just at the right balance where it easy to transport but also where the larger display can function as a Human Machine Interface (HMI) display. Furthermore, the larger form factor allows for a bigger battery and longer time between charges. Here is how that might work in a few m2M applications:

Industrial: Many industrial machines have to be adjusted for operator ergonomics and preferences. At the same time, due to multiple work shifts and operational flexibility, machines don’t always have the same operators. The operator arrives at the machine and places the mobile device in the docking cradle. The device provides a customized HMI and the operators preferred machine settings are transferred to the machine. The operator logs on and that act, coupled with the possession of the registered device, serves as two-factor authentication. Many operational processes can be enabled and enhanced by this type of M2M method.

Transportation/Automotive: In transportation market for M2M, infotainment and telematic are two classes of applications that would be a good fit for the Ascend Mate’s type of function and form factor. If it were docked on the driver’s panel, it could transfer driver preferences where it could optimize vehicle settings. Unsafe activities like texting while driving or game playing would be locked out. The lock-out feature would also make insurance companies very happy. This brings us to the telematic applications where insurance will play a big part in M2M adoption. Drivers can get insurance breaks if they continually exhibit safe driving habits. Since products like the Ascend Mate are intended to be a phone, they contain the necessary cellular connectivity for verifying safe driving. Since these devices would be docked to the vehicle instead of embedded in the console, they could move with the driver from vehicle to vehicle. That would work particularly well for drivers that frequently use rental and/or have shared vehicles. By providing driver and passenger mobile device docks as opposed to full infotainment displays/systems, auto manufacturers could save themselves and customers money. The passenger docks would, of course, allow full texting and gaming functionality.

A few final thoughts:

• Like many M2M solutions, universal standards have to be set or these types of HMI applications and products will never be transferable across and within markets.
• Huawei reports that the Ascend Mate touchscreen works well when users are wearing gloves. This is a good attribute to have in many M2M markets. 
• As stated in the latest VDC Views report on M2M, in many applications such as those found in industrial settings, it is generally preferable to use embedded components designed for those markets as opposed those targeted for consumer products.