A Great Technical Conference

Many companies are finding great and creative ways to be involved with their customers. In the rapidly changing electronics industry, targeting customers who use electronic components in any specialized field, communicating with the right targeted customers can be challenging. Taking the same approach used in the mass advertising of consumer products would be a colossal waste of time and money since such a small percentage of the audience would have any interest in the product or, in many cases, even understand what the products are.

Freescale semiconductor has taken an approach that seems to work quite well. In late June, I attended the Freescale Technical Forum in Austin. (Conveniently located in Tekmos’ home town, Austin.) I do not have the official count of attendees but it was huge, taking over multiple ballrooms on multiple floors of the JW Marriot Hotel. According to my count, there were 269 sessions on many, many topics. Several sessions were hands on and their rosters were filled to capacity. I do not intend to give a review of the conference here. That can be found in other sources. I expect one or both keynote presentations will be available on the web. Additionally, there was a large room set up with many displays of products that contain Freescale components. An ideal place to make contact with technical people from a wide range of companies. There was a large truck outside that was set up to display many IoT products. The conference also highlighted many of Freescale’s partners. The combination of Freescale Semiconductor with NXP creates the fourth largest semiconductor company in the world. It should be noted here that Tekmos is a partner with Freescale. We developed many replacement processors and controllers that Freescale made up until the fab was wiped out by Fukushima Tsunami.

The main point of this article is to comment on what a good conference Freescale Semiconductor put on and how this type of forum can help the entire industry. I should also mention that this is the tenth year of the Freescale Technical Forum. I encourage our readers to seek out information from other sources about the content of the conference especially the technical. The technical content is outside the focus of the article, but I do encourage the reader to look into the new products announced at the conference.

The Tuesday keynote speaker was Gregg Lowe, the CEO of Freescale. Much of the emphasis was on IoT in automobiles. Again, seek out a web version of the presentation. Freescale processors and sensors are very compatible this aspect of the IoT. One of the human interest stories was a dramatization of how Freescale’s partner, Cadillac, using technology from Freescale, created a system that sets off an alarm if the driver falls asleep. This alarm likely saved the life of a Freescale employee’s grandfather.

The Wednesday keynote speaker was Steve Wozniak. Always good to hear his opinions expressed with a fair amount of wit. I expect this wide ranging talk to show up on the internet too.

I encourage both technical and non-technical people to look into what Freescale is doing, especially in the IoT space. Their processors and sensors are a great fit for automobiles that are already in the design phase. Look for the technical content on the web. If you get a chance, go to the conference next year.