October 16, 2012, CEA Industry Forum, San Francisco—Shawn DuBravac and Steve Koenig from the CEA presented the organization’s take on the coming holiday season. Because consumer spending drives the holiday season, and technology is of increasing importance to consumers, the study looked at the conjunction of these two trends. The economists described their methodology, which…
October 15, 2012, CEA Industry Forum, San Francisco—Colin Dixon from the Diffusion Group moderated a panel on home networks. Panel members were Brett Wingo from Cisco, Kurt Hoppe form LG Electronics, Kevin Meagher from Lowe’s, and Jy McLellan from Home Automation. Dixon explained that in ’06, the favorite location for a Internet connection was the…
October 16, 2012, CEA Industry Counsel, San Francisco—A panel reviewed the issues associated with health and fitness CE products. Rob McCray from Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance was the moderator. Panel members included Igor Gershfang from Walgreen, David Inns from Great Call, Clint McClellen from Qualcomm, and Brad Thomsen from Epstein, Becker & Green Law firm. This…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—David Allee from the Flexible display Center at Arizona State University described the past and current efforts in flexible display research. As TFTs move from amorphous silicon to metal oxide as the base material, the challenges of higher levels of integration become clear. The InGaZnO materials are mostly settling…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Chan-Long Shieh from CBRITE described the efforts in moving metal oxide TFTs (MOTFT) into production on flexible plastic substrates. The issues in moving a technology from a rigid substrate to a flexible one are not insurmountable, but require much more research. The motivation for the work is to address…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Neil Morrison from Applied Materials described the changes in the industry and their efforts to provide production ready equipment for these new technologies. Although applied has been instrumental in driving transistor dimensions down into the nanometer range, they also are working in the other direction for LCD and PV…
March 14, 2012, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA — Gary Patton, vice president of semiconductor R & D at IBM, described the world beyond 14 nm. The device and process developments will be hard, as the fundamental limitations of physics come into place. Scaling flattened out about 10 years ago, so the next generations…
February 29, 2012, RSA Conference, San Francisco—Christopher Young from Cisco described the security focus at Cisco. The changing nature of the various networks means that Cisco is in the middle of the disruption. Now, they have to solve today’s and tomorrow’s security challenges. First some statistics: 70 percent of all users break IT policies; 1…
February 28, 2012, RSA Conference, San Francisco— Continuing the discussion of BYO Devices into a secure network, Cisco Daniel DeSantos and Nasrin Rezai from Cisco described their Sentry program. Increasing mobility brings new requirements to people, processes, and the ocean of security models. By ’15, there’ll be more than 1 billion wireless devices, and every…
February 28, 2012, RSA Conference, San Francisco—Implementing changes in security are much more difficult in today’s environment where people are bringing in their own platforms. The speakers address some of the facets of this new environment. Goran Auramov and Dan Houser presented the perspective of Cardinal Health, a healthcare and pharmaceuticals distributor. In addition to…