CES is held in January each year. It is the largest conference in Las Vegas, which might make it the largest conference in the US. Last year 170,000 people attended and this year attendance is forecast to be greater than that. It occupies the whole of the Las Vegas Convention Center, four or five nearby hotels that have their own exhibition space, and tents and trucks in the parking lot. The size of the booths vary from companies like Samsung and Sony, whose booths stretch into the distance, overflowing with people, to little companies from China with tiny booths and...well, not overflowing with people, shall we say. Samsung's booth was further surrounded by 40ft tall walls from floor to just underneath all the stuff that hangs from the ceiling in conference centers. There seem to be two ways to approach CES. One is just to wander around and try and spot new and interesting individual products. But I think it is best absorbed as a stream of consciousness. Just by looking around, you see whole areas of the show dedicated to particular market segments. Some are there every year, like audio (how do all those headphone manufacturers stay in business?) but the new markets that have suddenly blossomed are the most interesting. So what is new this year? Autonomous Vehicles There is a whole hall devoted to automotive with all the big car companies, as you would expect. One thing I hadn't realized was that NVIDIA is heavily involved in autonomous vehicles. They had a huge booth. The Mercedes booth was also showing some of their technology in a "pedestrian-avoidance solution." If yoy have seen Google's cars around the Bay Area, then you know how big Lidar is. But it is getting smaller and less obstrusive and, I assume, cheaper. Here is the Lidar from a car in the Ford booth, along with a shot of the monitor showing what it is "seeing", with the car at the center and all of us attendees around it. If you waved your hand, you could even see which person was you. Drones You can't move here without running into a drone. Not literally, they fly them in cages so that the drone can't escape onto the show floor, and somebody can't accidentally cut across the booth and run into one. There are lots of drones with steerable cameras so you can take pictures from interesting angles. Brian Krzanich demonstrated a drone that would follow you by seeing where you were visually (as opposed to, for example, following the bluetooth in your phone) but there were others with similar capability. So you can go walking, cycling, snowboarding, sailing, or whatever, and forget about the drone and it will follow you and record video or photographs. One surprise, to me anyway, was that one of the booths showing drones (and other robotic stuff) was Qualcomm. Of course, Qualcomm are famous for their Snapdragon chipsets for mobile phones, and for being the pioneers of CDMA. But I hadn't realized that this was another potential area of growth where they are getting involved. 4K and 8K Video It is clear that 4K is the new 2K, and 8K is the new 4K. All the usual suspects had beautiful TVs, some as large as 98", with incredible contrast. Most were 4K video (4096 pixels horizontally), but the largest were 8K. Both LG and Samsung had setups using dozens of TVs coordinated together to produce what was more like a fireworks show than an exhibition of televisions. I'm not sure how well 4K video will work with Internet streaming. Netflix, HBO, and Amazon supposedly already consume some huge percentage of the bandwidth of the US Internet every evening. There may be some compression effects that mean it is not quite this bad, but 4K video requires about four times the bandwidth of 2K (because it is double the height and double the width). More and more people have "cut the cord" and no longer have cable, meaning that their video is delivered over IP rather than being frequency modulated into a particular band on the cable. I guess we will just need more bandwidth. Plus 8K is 16 times the bandwidth of 2K. The other trend is that TVs are like a sheet of glass, just a few millimeters thick. Some of them are even transparent, so when the TV is off you can see what is behind it. So you can mount it on the front of a set of shelves displaying pottery or sculpture. You can really tell the scale of the pictures below. On the left is a wall of screens. The middle shows just how thin the "sheet of glass" TVs are. And on the right is a 98" 8K TV. Virtual and Augmented Reality Virtual reality is the immersive experience where you put on a headset that delivers a complete field of view. The most famous company is Oculus (which Facebook bought). Their headset is $599, which is very high and requires a high-end computer to drive it. Around their booth was a line of people waiting to try it. I wasn't prepared to stand in line for an hour to get to try the Oculus headset but I did talk to one person on her way off the booth and she said it was close to magic. It is completely convincing at dropping you into a new world. However, there were plenty of other suppliers. Augmented reality is adding a data view to your visual field, typically by giving you a pair of glasses that can display data by reflecting it off the glass, a sort of head-up display for life. The companies with products in the space seem to be targeting medical, allowing patient data to be displayed unobtrusively. There are also industrial applications. Unlike virtual reality, which for now seems to be targeted at gamers and consumer use, the augmented reality products are targeted at commercial use. This probably means they will take off faster if users consider that the functionality is worth the cost. Cadence We were at CES too. For Cadence, it is an opportunity to show off various aspects of the IP portfolio that are most applicable to the consumer electronics market. (Almost nobody at CES is a user of semiconductor design tools, and nobody goes to CES to look at new developments in EDA, that is what DAC is for.) We were showing a number of audio solutions, some with partners, and some recognition (faces, street signs) using Tensilica processors. Plus the IP for USB Type-C kit that allows SoC designers to add USB capability, including power delivery and driving displays. The way of the future is going to be that your display delivers power to your laptop or smartphone, and the same cable is used to drive the display and access other USB devices. The USB Type-C test board was in the booth to show it is all real.![]()
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