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| Power Nomads |
By Jeff Bier, 8/20/2008
You see them at trade shows, in seminars, in airports—sometimes even in your own office building. They pace a room’s perimeter and scan its walls, eyes perpetually roving from floor to midline. They sneak behind counters and crawl under tables and thrust their hands into dark and cobwebby corners. Who are these people? And what do they want?
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Risky Business |
By Jeff Bier, 6/18/2008
If you were getting ready to buy a new high-end camcorder or a new car, chances are you’d spend some time reading independent reviews. Maybe you’d pick up a copy of Consumer Reports or Road and Track. Perhaps you’d scan Amazon.com for user evaluations. Whatever. The point is, you probably wouldn’t just make your choice based on the vendor’s marketing claims, right?
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—“DSP” becomes ubiquitous, passé |
By Jeff Bier, 5/28/2008
When my partners and I founded BDTI back in the early 90’s, “DSP” was in the process of becoming both a hot technology and a widely used abbreviation. The abbreviation meant two distinct things: digital signal processing, and digital signal processor. You could usually figure out which one was meant by the context, but in some ways they were interchangeable—if you were doing digital signal processing, you were probably doing it on a digital signal processor.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Corporate Bureaucracy Blocks Innovation |
By Jeff Bier, 4/23/2008
As the president of a small company that frequently works with big companies, I am often frustrated by how long it takes to get from a handshake agreement to a signed contract. The process can be absurdly slow and painful, and that’s bad for business on both sides.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—¿Hola? ¿Hola? I Can’t Hear You Now. |
By Jeff Bier, 3/19/2008
I spent some time at the Mobile World Congress in Spain last month, where pretty much everyone involved in wireless technologies showed up. I am happy to report that there were some very cool new technologies demonstrated there, like Texas Instruments’ miniature video projector that may one day be incorporated into cell phones.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response— How to Make Money in Video IP |
By Jeff Bier, 2/27/2008
Digital video is almost everywhere. And where it isn’t now, it soon will be. As a result, the market for digital video intellectual property components—hardware, software, you name it—is wide open, with lots of opportunities for money-making. And there are roughly five buzillion vendors jockeying for position within a highly fragmented field.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Embedded Processor Wars |
By Jeff Bier, 12/19/2007
For a while there, it seemed as though DSP processors and general-purpose processors (GPPs) were morphing into one another. In an effort to provide better DSP performance, general-purpose processors (GPPs) were incorporating increasingly powerful DSP-oriented features.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Fried Fahrvergnügen |
By Jeff Bier, 11/14/2007
Do you ever look at a piece of hardware and wonder, “Why, oh why, did they build it like that?” This is what I’m thinking as I look at my 2001 Volkswagen Passat, a car that is now completely dysfunctional because of an unfortunate (yet easily foreseen) intersection of water and electronic circuitry. Let me explain.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response— Revisiting Heterogeneous vs Homogeneous |
By Jeff Bier, 9/26/2007
Back in 2001 I wrote a column about the merits of using heterogeneous designs for signal processing-oriented applications. My argument went like this: signal processing applications typically encompass diverse data rates, data types, and algorithms, and it often makes sense to address these needs using a collection of similarly diverse processing engines rather than taking a one-size-must-fit-all approach.
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