Articles by Mike Deeds

Mmm — Brains. There are a lot of residential Internet-of-Things devices available that can connect to my home Wi-Fi network and provide some functionality: Thermostats, security cameras, light switches, connected speakers, and so forth. Some devices even defy classification. Cardinal Peak gave all its employees the choice to receive an Amazon Echo this past holiday... View Article

When I was a freshman in college, we had an engineering seminar where the Dean told us that we should expect to re-educate ourselves many times throughout our career. This has certainly been true in my career. In the Web and Mobile development world it seems like if you blink your skills are out of... View Article

Mike Perkins and I wrote an article for Electronic Component News about the various approaches — hardware and software — to building a video encoder or decoder. Raw IC processing power has multiple manifestations including General Purpose CPUs (GP-CPUs), Systems on a Chip (SoCs), custom ASICs and FPGAs. Not surprisingly, all of these approaches can... View Article

I've had several discussions with potential clients that go something like this: "We currently manufacture our product in China and we'd like more control over the hardware design and software source code." When these firms try to get the design files, they realize that they don't have full access to what they thought was their own intellectual property.

We’ve had the pleasure to work with Texas Instruments’ high-end video processor families (DM8168 and DM8148) over the past few years on a number of different projects. These are highly integrated Systems-on-Chip (SoC) that contain many independent subsystems such as an ARM Cortex CPU, a DSP, video compression/decompression engines, a 3D graphics accelerator, and a... View Article

My last post suggested ways to reduce parts costs in a low- to mid-volume product. This post explores ways to keep development costs low while still creating a cost-effective product. You can’t escape the fact that it takes money to create a low-cost product. It is estimated that the first version of the iPhone had... View Article

I take it as a given that when a client approaches us with a new embedded product idea, they will require a very demanding set of features and a minimal price tag. The “minimal price tag” part always applies to the development effort required. For products with a hardware component, it also applies to the... View Article