Travelling On The Silicon Road

I had mentioned about technology fitting serendipitously in developing countries in an earlier post. Just came across this news item which shows yet another use of a consumer device for an unintended but highly useful application.

Pediatric eye surgeons in India and elsewhere find that the iPhone’s security and features makes it the best platform to be used in tele-opthalmology to cure Retinopathy of Prematurity (RoP). An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push retinal images collected from patients in remote locations to the doctors’ iPhones. They can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones to the doctors in the location nearest to the patient. Laboratory assistants take pictures of the retinas of prematurely born babies and transmit them via broadband to pediatric eye surgeons, who could be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
It is envisioning of applications like these that will help to bridge the digital divide

Read an interesting story by EDN executive Ron Wilson about technology fitting serendipitously in developing countries.
 

NXP’s NFC (Near Field Communications) technology, the underlying technology of its contactless SmartCard MIFARE product was primarily targeted for subway ticketing and the like.
 

And it has found a market in rural India – in a high tech village banking scheme!
 

India has several villages which do not have a local bankbranch – the meager cash flow does not provide adequate return on capital to justify establishing a branch. Enter NXP – a trained villager with a cell phone handset with NFC and fingerprint scan capability acts as a lone banker. Authorization and authentication is provided by the swiping the client villager’s smart card and swiping his finger. Transaction takes place by dialing the central bank through the handset and records are updated on the smart card.
 

Everyone benefits – The village gets banking and NXP gets the market!
 

Do read the complete article

In his editor’s note, Majeed Ahmed of EETimes, Asia comments on CSSP (Customer Specific Standard Product) as an interesting turn point.

QuickLogic has broken from its FPGA past (hard time competing with the Coke and Pepsi of FPGA world i.e. Xilinx and Altera) by coming out with CSSP – an alternative design solution integrating the “application specific” functions (akin to ASSP) while incorporating a programmable fabric which allows additional “customer specific” functionality for flexibility and differentiation.

It is indeed a mutation in the semiconductor fabric, as pointed out by Majeed and a step towards trying to address the increasing challenges of the market. However I see it is another variant of the structured ASIC technology; trying to get a foothold between flexibility and cost plus time to market

…. and too early to term it as a new cross road in chip evolution.

Mobile connectivity was the main thrust in the recent Intel Developer Forum. The company said its 45-nm Penryn-based Montevina processor technology due out in 2008 will be the company’s first Centrino processor for notebooks to offer the option of integrated Wi-Fi and WiMAX wireless technologies in an adapter code-named Echo Peak. This option would ensure customers do not necessarily need to make a choice between 3G and WiMAX.  Montevina also boasts the capability to run both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for media applications. The new PCs and motherboards will be rolled out by Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Panasonic. Intel is investing with KDDI in a trial in Japan in addition to the well publicized trials by Sprint & Clearwire in the US.
 
In the old times, system providers used to put their bets on any 1 standard (amongst the few major competing ones) and come out with a product based on that standard and see how the market reacts. Now, they roll out products supporting all the standards (or at least the major ones) lest they lose out on the market share. So it is 3G and WiMAX, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray…….
 

I read this interesting article by Cliff Edwards in the recent edition of Business Week.

It talks about how Intel’s “Broadband Man” (EVP, Sean Maloney) garnered support from Samsung, Motorola, Nokia and Sprint to get this technology to its present state.

The key technology was obtained by Intel when it purchased a company called Iospan Wireless from a Stanford university professor Arogyaswami Paulraj. Maloney then went on to woo the industry heavyweights for this standard (AT&T had earlier, in 2000, tried a precursor to WiMAX in Project Angel. The project however was a non-starter because of lack of industry standard and support)

While Intel has declared 2008 to be the year of WiMAX, the technology and businesses built upon it still have a lot to prove and better & cheaper devices are needed to get to mass market adoption. However, several big companies have a lot at stake here and it does look poised to alter the communications landscape; or as Ottelini said: we are on the cusp of a new global network.