Tekmos' Blog

The excitement that IoT offers great new possibilities to all phases of our lives is beginning to be tempered by the realization that having standards is critical and that agreeing on them takes a herculean effort. Talk to someone who remembers trying to decide between buying a VHS and Betamax VCR. The two video recording/playback formats lived side by side for many years. While each had their own merits, they were not compatible. If you had one you could not use products designed for the other. Incompatible IoT devices is a much larger problem because of the very large number of types of products and companies involved. Virtually all types of consumer products, from home entertainment to home appliances and from automobiles to retail sales can have IoT aspects to them. All manufacturing, commerce, and infrastructure will have some connection to IoT issues.

For example, plumbing may seem a long way from any IoT concern, except perhaps in remotely controlling flood gates or remotely monitoring water flow in streams. Consider that a washing machine can detect its own stuck valve and, using IoT, have the water main valve to your home shut off. This may sound far-fetched until one considers that water damage from such occurrences are a major reason for homeowner insurance claims. Without standards, it is unlikely that devices in unusual pairings will be able to communicate with each other.

Each potential vendor in the IoT space has an interest in some aspect of the standard. Any standard will likely cause some winners and some losers. Should all communications between devices go through the cloud? It would be far too cumbersome to have everyone's in-home entertainment center communicate through the cloud to dim the lights when movies start. Would there be a master list of all lightbulb serial numbers to know which ones to dim? How will the maker of the light switch dimmer interact with the changes requested by the entertainment system? In this arena, it certainly appears that communications for these devices must be local. This can be contrasted with the wide area issues of coordinating energy sources and users on the power grid.

It is difficult to get agreement on standards within a committee when each company participating has their own vested interest in standards favoring their approach. Perhaps worse than that, the number of standards committees is growing. Any major company will likely participate in competing standards committees to follow trends as well as to influence the standards being developed.

There seem to be two groups emerging to dominate the discussions: The Open Interconnect Consortium and the Allseen Alliance. Each want to be the single standard for IoT. Not surprisingly, the standards each is moving toward do not necessarily agree with each other. Much will need to happen before there is anything like a single standard. Meanwhile, products are being designed and manufactured which may not function well with designs produced after there is more agreement on standards.

Tekmos once again is a corporate sponsor and exhibiting at the International Conference on High Temperature Electronics, May 10-12 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and will be exhibiting at the IoT Developers Conference in Santa Clara, California May 25-26.

HiTEC is a forum for presenting leading high temperature electronics research results and application requirements and the Iot Devcon is a conference and trade show specifically for the IoT product developer.

Tekmos has presented a paper, and maintained a display table at the July 6-8 2015, International Conference and Exhibition on High Temperature Electronics Network at Churchill College in Cambridge, England, at HiTEC 2014 in Albuquerque, and attended earlier conferences. This annual conference, alternates venues between the U.S. and England, is dedicated to high temperature electronics, ranging from the relatively cool 175ºC up to the 1200ºC range for Silicon Carbide. It also covers high temperature materials and passive components. 

Attending the presentations does a lot more than just give Tekmos an opportunity to present our research. Listening to the presentation of other papers has led to some consideration of additional techniques that Tekmos may pursue. It is important to know what others are doing. The question and answer period following each presentation gives more insight and understanding than can be obtained from reading the paper alone. 

One advantage of exhibiting at a conference is that it provides feedback about what customers really want to see in products.  It also shows what the competition is doing.  Together, that provides invaluable marketing guidance for our own efforts. 

This month we have published our brochure describing Unify ASICs for the IoT.

System engineers need to meet the challenges of smaller physical packaging, lower power consumption and better connectivity solutions that offer fast time to market. The Unify - ASICs Brochure describes capabilities and approaches of how Unify ASICs achieve smaller space with low power by using standard parts combined with our low risk Unify ASIC. The Unify ASIC features a silicon interconnect combined with integration of logic and mixed signal technologies by Tekmos for better connectivity solutions.

The Unify ASIC designed by Tekmos for the customer, provides a breakthrough approach offering the lowest development cost for a System in a Package solution for new products. The Unify ASIC includes design security making it extremely difficult for others to copy a customer's product design. Unify ASICs protect market share and allow the customer to maintain higher selling prices over the life of their product.

Tekmos will be an exhibitor at the upcoming IoT Developers Conference in Santa Clara, May 25-26. We will be located in the exhibit area and look forward to your stopping by to see how Unify ASICs can improve your product developments.

The month of May seems to be a great time for many conferences this year. Tekmos is a major sponsor and exhibitor at the upcoming IMAPS HiTEC High Temperature device conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 10-12. Tekmos will be featuring our high temperature microprocessors, memory devices and ASICs, with ASICs able to operate up to 300ºC. We look forward to presenting our latest product offering for high temperature applications ranging from 175ºC to 300ºC. Please visit us in the exhibit area and learn more about our high temperature microprocessors and ASICs with long lasting operational life.

Throughout the past year, we have presented several articles on IoT, the Internet of Things. I was asked if I could summarize the ideas in a short couple of paragraphs. Of course, summaries always leave the writer with the issue of potentially throwing out some of the key ideas that make the topic interesting. I said I would give it a try anyway.

The Internet of Things is all about connecting diverse electronics to make them even more useful. The flow of information often starts with analog sensors, measuring almost anything one can think of, from temperature, speed, pressure, and location, to color, voice, and personal characteristics. Often the analog signals are made into digital ones and zeros and transmitted somewhere. There is often some type of processing of this information to add meaning or context. The data can then be used to inform people or machines which in turn take some action. The range of possible uses is extremely wide, from telling where your cat is to turning on air conditioning when someone is anticipated to be in the building. It can be used to automatically order replacement parts when a machine becomes aware that parts are wearing out or sensing that you are at the grocery store and sending a text reminder that it thinks you are running low on milk. But the IoT is not just a cute toy. For example, the amount of money to be saved by smart energy use is tremendous. There are predictions that the major use of IoT for the next several years will be retrofitting to make old machinery more efficient.

As one might expect, good things come at a price. As expected, there are a large number of technical issues. We talked about sensors and issues on making electronics smaller by such approaches as stacked die. The article on having someone taking over your car, while you are driving it, points out what is likely the biggest problem of all: making devices so that, either intentionally or unintentionally, the interconnectivity does not lead to major problems. While having your refrigerator send spam may be a humorous annoyance, having one's pacemaker subject to a hacker is truly frightening. During the next year, we will investigate more aspects of the IoT and some of the ramifications of implementing it. We will also look at how the technology is evolving.

Fears about nefarious use of IoT have moved from the theoretical to the demonstrated. A Jeep Cherokee, driven on a real expressway with traffic, was hacked and the engine shut down from a remote location, via the internet. This could easily be life threatening. It could make the problem of identity theft, a bad as it is, pale in comparison.

“Hackers remotely kill a Jeep on the Highway – With Me In it” was the title of an article by Andy Greenberg in Wired. Andy goes on to say:

“I WAS DRIVING 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.

Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.

As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought….”