I have a couple projects going on, both for my full time job and for my personal interests. So I spent a lot of my 2nd day at ESC Silicon Valley 2011 wandering around the show floor talking to vendors about their products. There's lots of cool stuff (and no, I don't mean the swag).
One thing that has been encouraging throughout ESC is that there are a lot of engineers there. No, not the attendees, of course they're engineers. I mean a lot of the people manning the booths for companies are engineers. FAEs, product designers, product definers and just plain ol' engineers seem to be at every turn. And when you're showing up and trying to find out about new products, it's important that you can talk to someone that doesn't just know the product specs and key features (as a marketer or PR person might know), but also the application you're discussing and what parts might best fit; I'm most impressed when a vendor won't just try and shoehorn their part into my application and instead mentions another nice product that could fit the bill, even from different companies.
So what kind of things and trends have I seen? Your mileage may vary on how "new" these concepts are to you, but here's my take on it:
Consolidation
- FPGAs are integrating more modules and trying to be more of a SOC architecture. This is not new. However, both Xilinx and Altera are pushing hard processors that are embedded within their programmable fabric. Then they wrap more modules and IP blocks around that hard processor to try and get the maximum performance.
- Chip makers seem to be going smaller, lower power. Again, no suprises, right? However, it seems that these smaller footprint, lower power devices have become the focus of these companies, at least when presenting to the ESC people.
- The peripheral set keeps increasing, even on the lower end chips. Larger chip manufacturers find that adding IP (that they have already paid for/developed) doesn't have much incremental cost, so we see more and more peripherals.
Modules
- Form factor continues to shrink, driven by the mobile market. This refers to the mechanical portion of USB, PCI and non-standard modules.
- It seems that there is more focus on modularizing and partitioning designs, but this could be perception bias. If you go to a conference where vendors are trying to sell their modular technology (to other companies that would integrate it), of course you'll see modules!
Software
- I'm not a big software person, but it seems there are many code analysis tools that have popped up recently. The drive seems to be continuing to enable fewer engineers to create more products with less resources. If you can buy a $50k license that helps you create code faster, maybe you don't need to hire another developer....right? (Chris says: wrong)
All told, I really enjoy hearing about the new products coming out. I don't have much invested because I'm not looking for anything too specific. But it's still great to walk the show, see the demos and--most importantly--talk to the engineers.
How do you handle trade shows? Are you a swag grabber? I data sheet sampler? A product ogler? Or a silent ship, passing by stand but not stopping? Let us know in the comments.
