Silicon and Sensors at CES 2015
January 2015 – The underlying driver of the CES show is the advancement of semiconductors and sensors. The entire IoT movement is being driven by sensors and the sensors kits are the basis of differentiation for most of the smartphones. A number of these companies were at the show highlighting their technology with the products that use them.
A unique solution on the show floor was from Invensense. Their motion control and optical image stabilization control chips have long been the core of gaming controllers, cameras and tablets. Their motion control sensors have now moved up to being the first sensor to be integrated into an official tournament approved sports product. Their position and accelerometer sensor has been integrated into a tennis racket to be the first smart sports product that is allowed for tournament play. While many sports have training items (skiing, golf, baseball, football, and others) none of those items are allowed into tournament play, and traditional non-electronic equipment must be used. The smart racket tracks swing, position and speed, location on the head where the ball is contacted and statistics on the player movement in addition to the racket.
Imagination Technologies had a variety of tech on display. The focus of our tour was their audio solutions and video products. They were showing a range of audio processors that are suitable for home theater systems and others solutions needing surround sound processing, including televisions, media players and portable devices. In addition the audio products they were showing their vision system solutions. The high speed image processing was shown in automated driving applications for vehicle control based on image detection, as well as face and object detection for surveillance a stream video applications. The demo showed systems that were scalable from single camera B&W imagers to multiple camera color imagers at high frame rates. The limitation was in the application software chosen and the amount of power dissipated with the solution, however there were no architecture constraints. These image processors are applicable for both OEM and aftermarket solutions into the real time camera marketplace.
Silicon Image always has a major presence at the CES show both with their own space and in the show floor in consortium and products. The coordinators for HDMI and MHL, they had these groups with their won spaces. MHL was showing their new Super MHL connector and specification. The new spec jumps past the MHL 1.3 guidelines and is addressing the needs of High resolution video. The new cable and connector system, along with new data formatting, will address the full HDMI 2.0 interface as well as 8K 120fps video with deep color (48 bit) while delivering up to 40W of power through a single cable. The big addition to management this is the data transfer of more metadata along with the content. The new cable and spec supports up to 36Gbps for video, and is backward compatible to exiting MHL solutions. One of the major improvements is with remote controls that now issue and ID so the functionality of the devices can be determined to provide the most control over connected devices.
In addition to the MHL rollout, Silicon Image re-launched SiBEAM as a new subsidiary company. This company will focus on the next generation gigabit wireless products. These include the 60GHz wireless data connections and ultra-high speed wireless data sharing between mobile devices. They were demonstrating point to point storage and media transfer between a mobile device and the 60Ghz wireless connected transmitter/receiver stacks. This like NFC is self-handshaking, however as it is designed for large data transfer is not just a handshake protocol, it is also the network stack for the data. SiBEAM will be selling components to OEMs to develop products around the communication technology which is both low power and has an integrated antenna in the chip based solution.
Adding to their diversity, Silicon Image was showing the integration of the 2014 acquisition of the UpdateLogic products. This is a network based customer service connection that allows single location support of any of the connected media products (STB, Media players, TVs, etc). It additionally has a mobile device interface to allow the camera in the tablet/phone to be used to show wiring configurations and issues to the support person in the remote location. The connectivity is secured by a point to point connection, and allows for the non0local support person to even operate a virtual remote control for the device in order to minimize interaction and complex instruction sequences being given to the customer/user. This product and the associated chip set is being marketed by Silicon Image.
