Tekmos' Blog

Many Technology companies are spending significant money and the attention of high level managers. There are so many conferences and symposiums that one could make attending them a full time job. The need to stay current on developments is not limited to high tech companies. This article addresses one aspect of the Innovator's dilemma for companies that are not in the forefront of innovation.

The need to be aware of the developments in IoT is much greater than many companies realize. If part of your company makes garden variety electrical products, such as doorbells, you may wake up to the fact that companies, such as Ring, are making devices that let the homeowner see who is at the door on their smart phone, wherever they are. While these devices may be pricey now, it is the way things are going.

Many people remember when Kodak was almost the only name most people knew regarding taking family photographs. Of course, Polaroid was the name if one wanted the print almost immediately. Many young people do not even recognize these companies' names now. Business classes will probably study these cases and have opinions whether the companies could have adapted to the changing times better than they did.

Are sump pump manufacturers watching for the best time to have links to smart phones? What if your company has never considered having your sump pump send a text to the homeowner when the backup battery is low or about to fail? By the time you start developing a product to match your competition, they may have already made significant inroads to your market share.

There is no precise definition of IoT. Many consider it to include devices which may not actually be connected to the web. Self-driving cars and trucks are examples. The large manufacturers of cars and trucks seem to be closely attuned to technology advances but even that is not clear. Detroit was caught off guard when Japanese cars started to eat their market share. It will not be that long before self-driving cars are commonplace. One wonders if the changes in technology are really being tracked by all the supporting companies that supply both OEM companies and after-market companies. Today there are cars that can parallel park themselves. Which companies will lose market share when they are behind in making the electronics and software to let you summon your car from the parking lot to the mall entrance? It is not hard to imagine using Uber to get a ride and find that the car you summoned does not have a driver. If your company makes after-market parts for cars, you must keep up with the trends in retrofitting or have your competition steal your customers.

There are so many aspects of IoT (Internet of Things), that one can hardly list all the topics and issues. The number of IoT conferences these days is so large that one could just about go to one every week. Tekmos decided that one conference we really wanted to take in this year was the Internet of Things Developers Conference held May 25 and May 26 in Santa Clara, California.

The Unify Program at Tekmos focuses on the ability to unify many chips into a single package. Unify is a methodology, a capability, or a usage of technology, to yield several advantages. The users of the Unify Program are most likely to be the developers of IoT. The best place to describe the Unify Program is face to face with the IoT developers.

A short definition of Unify is the combining of chips from different technologies into a single package using a Tekmos ASIC as the base. It combines sophisticated cutting edge, off-the-shelf, chips that are inexpensive because of their volume, with added circuitry along with a Tekmos ASIC. the Tekmos chip performs like a silicon PCB. By implementing this as the Tekmos chip base with other die stacked above it, issues of mismatch pinouts between the standard parts are solved. This stack of die is in a single package. The small size of the resultant "System in a Package" (SIP) can be important for many IoT products. (Think wearables, such as fitness monitors.)

Other real advantages are cost and time to market. For example, a design with Flash memory and a microcontroller could use highly sophisticated ICs, which are already developed, mounted on a relatively inexpensive customized ASIC built with an older, less expensive technology. A common theme here is only pay for the technology you need in the parts of your system that require it. A high end processor can be mounted on a slower, less expensive technology base. The processor is inexpensive even though it uses cutting edge technology because its volume in the general market is high. This IC is combined with a specialized base ASIC that makes the design very hard to copy. Since 90% of the design implementation as utilizes commercially available parts it so far less risky than building a large expensive complex chip from scratch.

As expected, there were a number of conversations with developers that need to have small form factor and low power product designs. We are excited about the future for offering these benefits to many customers.

On the second week of May, Lynn Reed and Bob Abrams went to the HiTEC Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. HiTec is dedicated to high temperature electronics. While there are many applications that require electronics to work at high temperatures, the largest commercial usage has been in the oil industry. Oil exploration is a very expensive endeavor. Being able to put electronics deep underground is necessary in order to determine what is going on a couple miles down where it is quite hot, perhaps 200ºC to 300ºC. The lifetime of electronics can be quite short under these harsh conditions. Tekmos has introduced several state of the art products that are rated at 250ºC with proven operation to over 300ºC (570ºF).

There are applications that also require high temperatures, such as geothermal. Generally, designers make trade-offs between the highest operating temperature and cost. Silicon based parts seem to offer the best trade-off for oil exploration applications. The Tekmos approach can offer the best trade-off because it is silicon based and at the high end of temperatures which can be achieved with silicon.

Unfortunately, oil exploration is in quite a slump because of the lower price of oil. The attendance at the conference was down significantly from prior years due to current economic conditions. The conference was still successful because it is the quality of the contacts made that is important, not the quantity.

When we travel on business, we try to take a little time to do something that is related to the place we are visiting. Not having much free time on this trip, our outing was limited to a stroll and dinner in Old Albuquerque. It is an interesting area with a number of quaint shops and restaurants. Before dinner, we took in a local group playing by the gazebo in the town square.

The crowd seemed to be mostly local people enjoying the music, inspiring some of them to dance. After a great Mexican dinner, we went back to the hotel to get ready for the next day, having enjoyed some of the local talent and a chance to get away for a few hours.

Tekmos looks forward to exhibiting at the Internet of Things Developer's Conference May 25-26 in Santa Clara, California and will feature Tekmos Unify, our solution to the IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) goes way beyond and interconnects virtually unlimited numbers of smart objects and changes the way we interact with our environment. To help rein in the vast IoT world, the IoT DevCon 2016 will focus on technologies ranging from the ultra-low power microcontrollers to the multicore-enabled aggregation hubs to the software and security infrastructure required for monitoring and management of the enormous bundles of data.

Stop by booth #11 to learn more about Tekmos' Unify, ASICs for the Internet of Things.