Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Come together ... over me

Common people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another - for a while…

We’re getting closer to the dream, the vision, of ubiquity mutual connectivity in the home – and maybe beyond a bit.

My vision, since 1999, has been that everything in the home will talk to everything in the home. Everything that can will be a server, and everything will be a client. Since 1999 I’ve had to modify my vision a bit, I’ve had to learn a strange new alphabet, B, A, C, U, and then N – what’s that all about? And I had to add handheld devices to the mix. But basically the dream is alive and getting closer everyday.

Some folks thought (including me for a while) that we would have a master server in our homes, a data furnace if you will. But it soon became apparent that storage was becoming cheaper and moving in a curve steeper than Moore’s law. We also saw the explosion and proliferation of non-volatile memory in most machines and our pockets. And we saw the ever expanding, and ever faster, proliferation of network technology.

Today’s media addict has at least one, and probably three handheld devices that he or she users as a player and also as a recorder or a storage device – an MP3 player, a mobile phone, and maybe a dedicated media player. All of them have a combination of tunes, photos, and videos on them. Stationary devices like STBs with HDDs, DVD players, PCs, and TVs have similar types of media either stored or streaming to through them; and semi-mobile devices like laptops do too.

We have all kinds of alphabet laws and rules to get these things talking to each other DNLA, UPnP, BlueTooth, 801.11(a, b, c, n, etc.), Ethernet, USB, MPEG 2, 4, WMV AVI, Flash, H.264, and on and on.  We got the stuff, with and without wires. We got the file formats, the display formats, and boy do we have the media, it’s coming out of our pores.

But there are petty jealousies combined with downright stupidity. And so you can’t serve iTunes to your PC via Bluetooth, or Frustrated Housewives to your PSP from the TiVo, or show the pictures on your camera phone to anyone via your TV, yet.

But we’re really, really close. In fact I’ll venture a guess that in two years or less this will not only be possible, but commonplace, and our kids will look at us like we’re from Mars when we tell them, “When I was your age…”

So we may not be able to stop global warming, election campaigns, or roadside bombs, but we will see peace in our homes in our life time – I guranetee ya.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Special Glass

Actually this entry should be named Special Plastic, because we don’t really use glass in our displays anymore do we? But we do specialize because one size doesn’t fit all (needs.) I have eight screens that I use.

Kathleen also has a 3.7-inch Creative Zen and she watches videos on it on long flights and the occasional bus ride. She also has a 2.5-inch iPhone and watches music videos on it.

If I get rid of the N95 (which could happen any minute I’m so disgusted with its performance and battery life) and get an iPhone, I might watch videos, but if I got an iPhone I’d have to carry a pocket camera again. I love the iPhone’s big screen but its processor is too underpowered to drive games and its 2 Mpixel camera is too low res for most of my picture taking requirements.

So while I wait for the next generation iPhone or equivalent, something with a big screen, and good image sensor and lens, a workable TV tuner, and enough CPU/GPU power to make game playing fun, I sit in the lotus position and ponder the Zen-like question, if they build it will I use it? The short answer is maybe.

I have been trapped on long bus rides where the light is weak and the noise too annoying to allow for comfortable reading (even with a Kindle because it doesn’t have a backlight.) I’m too weight conscious to carry the PSP and power supply with all the other gear I have, and that’s partially because even though it has a great screen, game play on it, for an old fart like me, isn’t much fun – I never could master a game controller, can’t remember which button does what and by the time I figure it out, zap, I’m dead.

So everything has its compromises, whether it’s screen size,  bandwidth, content, interactivity, battery life, GPU power and memory, or price. And we consumers adapt to those tradeoffs and willingly support the suppliers of these specialized or compromised machines.

Specialization has its benefits, albeit with a certain degree of redundancy in terms of its apparent similarities to other machines.  After all, an iPhone does look a little like a Zen player, and a PSP. And a 17-inch laptop does look like a full-fledged game PC, and a 32-inch TV does look a little like a wall sized projector; so it’s natural to imagine one machine could serve the same purposes as others — a kinda Swiss Army video-GPS-eBook-TV-game-camera MP3 thingie.

But as alluring as a universal device might be, we’re still humans and we have physical limitations and needs, and for our unlimited entertainment, information, and work pattern choices, we physically need different sizes at different times in different environments. Even the beam-me-up-Star-Trek-communicator only did audio.

I don’t want to watch the Bourne Idenity on my ipod, or even my PSP, I want to watch it on the projector. And I don’t want to use Office apps on the projector, or the PSP, and cetainly not my phone — so the content and apps really deterime what size scereen and which machine we should use.

So that’s why we have, and will continue to have special glass (or plastic as it were.) I’m OK with that, in fact I kinda like it.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Is the sky really falling? Chips for the TV market

ST Microelectronics just completed the Genesis Microchip acquisition, Trident’s stock has dropped like a rock, and Pixelworks still can’t get itself sold.  Who could have predicted all this three years ago?  Actually, we did. Jon Peddie Research published the ATV Report in 2005 and it addressed the difficulty of a video processor company being successful in the new integrated digital processor market. 

So, I guess the question now is, what have you done lately? What does the future hold? 

It’s not as bad as many people may think.  Most people seem to think that:

1. Integration is only game in town.
2. The worldwide analog to digital rollover will be like the US and therefore the same assumptions are used for the rest of the world.
3. ASP’s are dropping like a rock with nothing slowing it down.
JPR is about to launch a new Quarterly ATV Semiconductor report that has some interesting findings to contradict the items above.

Contradiction #1 – Integration is a very important segment but it’s not the only segment.  Trident’s UX/WX has not taken the world by storm with its frame rate control.  Sony and Samsung both used their internal solution for their 120Hz TV’s.  The quality of Trident’s solution cannot beat the performance of stand alone solutions.  LG has chosen Micronas’ FRC chip for use inside their panel.  AMD with its Xilleon panel processor product has found a home inside a few panels from Samsung’s SDI group.  It now appears everyone is either offering or included in their roadmap an integrated version of FRC.  The performance of some of the IDP’s are good enough to be used in 42-inch and below bargain TV’s.  Don’t expect to see them in a 40-inch Sony Bravia line just yet.  Sony continues to use a merchant two-chip solution in many of their ATSC TV’s in the US.  Integration is also not the right path in other parts of the world.  See contradiction #2.

Contradiction #2 – The US’s tuner mandate is unique; other regions don’t have a tuner mandate.  The inclusion of a digital tuner is mostly market- and not government-driven.  In the European Union, the DVB-T market started with set top boxes.  The integration of the DVB-T tuner didn’t happen until set top boxes dropped well below 100 Euros.  The inclusion of an integrated digital processor (IDP) shipping in volume for the DVB-T market will be in 2008.  That’s several years after the ATSC market.  Also, the EU rollover is only for standard definition TV and NOT (I repeat NOT) high definition.  That’s where H.264 and DVB-T2 will come into play for the EU.  DVB-T2 more affectionately known as “T2” spec won’t be out until the 1H 2008.  There are enough changes in the EU technology requirements that it makes less sense to have a US ATSC type architecture.  Integrating demodulation does not make sense if it will change with T2.  Integrating H.264 decoding capabilities adds to the complexity of the design and increased silicon area.

Contradiction #3 –The price drop for the exact same part after one year can range from 12 to 16% in the video processor or IDP’s.  New products that include new features and performance will be priced higher.  New competitors from Taiwan are targeting the lower end and pricing aggressively.  Pressure from customers also pushes prices down.  So what is the overall effect is in the blended ASP’s? It certainly falling but not as fast as many assume.  The new ATV report shows that the blended ASP drop in 2008 from 2007 will be only 11%.