Message Board
ESC SV 2011 - Themed or Themeless
Duane Benson5/11/2011 4:53 PM EDT
The Embedded Systems Conference ended last week and after the show plus some unwind vacation time, I’ve been reflecting on this year’s event; what was there of significance and what differed from past years.
I've been going to ESC for half dozen years now. There always seems to be some sort of product or technology that stands out as the major theme. I don't think it was dinosaurs this year. As Jack Ganssle mentioned, LeCroy had an actual T-Rex skeleton in their booth. It took up an awful lot of floor space, but didn't have any contemporaries that would have helped to call it a theme.
It could have been low-power devices. All of the microcontroller folks seemed to be talking about their low-power chips. That may have been it, but I've seen a lot of low-power emphasis in past years too.
The closest to a “theme” that I sensed would be the proliferation of low-cost and / or self-contained evaluation boards. Eval boards have been around almost as long as the T-rex, but this new breed is different. These are really more of self-contained systems than simple chip evaluation boards.
A few years back, Texas Instruments introduced the Beagleboard; an open source, almost fully complete computer on a 3 x 3 inch board. Not long after, ARM and NXP released the mBed; a full-featured dev board with a cloud-based IDE and compiler set. Ti struck again the the Launchpad, an 8-bit MSP-430 family eval board selling at about five dollars. This year Renesas and a few others were giving out package development boards as well. I picked up an RL78/G13 board by listening to a presentation at the Renesas booth.
The lack of a clearly defined theme is bothersome to me. I’d like to know if, by manning a booth most of the time, I just missed the theme. I’m open to that possibility. To me, a theme for a show is a lot like a famous keynote speaker. It doesn’t change why most of us are at the event, but it can add excitement and give a focal point to the show. In general, I felt that show floor traffic was down from last year, when the recession was still on. This year, in the midst of the alleged recovery, I saw less traffic and less enthusiasm in general. If my take on the show is accurate, I don’t know how optimistic I can be about the coming year for the electronics industry.
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junko.yoshida
5/12/2011 4:20 PM EDT
Hi, Duane. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Your msg reminded me of the struggle every editor faces when he/she goes out and covers any conference or show on the road.
We all grope for "one hot thing" we are supposed to encounter, discover or get surprised about at any show.
Any takeaway msgs (I hate that expression, though); any big announcement; any running theme; just anything that we can hang our hat on when we write a story about the show.
We all have a panic attack when we can't find one big theme. We don't exactly make one up (well, we shouldn't, really); but as our deadline nears, we grow more desperate.
Then, suddenly somethings pops into our head. (it does happen, trust me)
For me, at this year's ESC, it was TI's FRAM-embedded microcontrollers. While TI wasn't exactly the first to embed FRAM, the ultra-low power thing was definitely a running theme.
And what we grasp as a big theme should be different -- depending on where we all come from. ESC is a big conference. It has many tracks and many themes. And usually, that is precisely the nature of "embedded systems"... in my humble opinion.
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BicycleBill
5/12/2011 5:15 PM EDT
Duane, I think that having to have a theme is an artificial marketing construct (I'm speaking as someone who has been in marketing here). Our industry and applications are too varied, too diverse, to have a single theme, other than something simplistic like "we're doing a lot of great, interesting stuff." And themes which espouse trends are often just wishful thinking, if you look back. Better to have no theme than a forced or false one.
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LUslaner
5/12/2011 6:00 PM EDT
ESC SV is where the design engineering community gathers to learn, collaborate and recognize excellence. Between the conference, exhibits, free training, award ceremonies, research, hands-on labs, and networking events -- there was a ton going on. Engineers were able to interact hands-on with the latest technology, hardware and software, and meet face-to-face with the companies behind the products. Check out the news from ESC and you'll get a much better idea of what went on at the event. http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4215642/All-the-latest-from-ESC-Silicon-Valley
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Brian Fuller2
5/12/2011 7:28 PM EDT
Duane, thanks for putting the thought behind this. Maybe it's like the dog in Sherlock Holmes in that the clue was he DIDN'T bark when he should have.
In other words, maybe the lack of a theme suggests a transition point in the embedded industry. I don't have the data to back this up, but I wonder if we dived into attendance and marketing going back 20 years, whether we'd find a "thematic lull" in between eras. Remember when all chip guys were "PC companies" and then all became "Communications companies" and then they all became "Consumer companies." (In fact you could chart the trajectory by following the corporate taglines of companies like Cypress and LSI Logic!).
I had my head buried in doing video interviews all week and they were all over the map, but here's my personal bias:
I think we're entering a new convergence era. Not computing/communications/consumer but computing/communications/cognition. In other words the final integration of analog world with the digital. (To date, the capturing of the analog world seems to me to have been very spotty or stuck in a walled garden of sorts; now we're starting to take that data and plug it into the well-established computing and communications infrastructure to make good use of it).
Time will tell, of course. Thanks again for writing.
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nicolas.mokhoff
5/16/2011 6:50 AM EDT
The embedded system design industry is too diverse to latch on one theme. With designs in consumer, communications, automotive, industrial, medical and military markets, the only theme is that the world is an embedded place; every system whether it is a microwave oven or a safety module in a car has some kind of embedded control. I'm preaching to the choir here, but ESC to me is the industry's greatest shopping mall, not just a 5&10 cent store.
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