networkZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG

If Melanie Rieback has her way, we could soon have a way to control who reads the numerous RFID tags in our lives - without having to resort to wearing an aluminum foil suit. That's because Ms Rieback's current work as a graduate student at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam focuses on developing a handheld device that will act as a wireless firewall that can provide selective access or full blocking of devices attempting to read RFID tags that are on your person or immediate surroundings. Since RFID manufacturers as well as the numerous businesses and government agencies that use these devices don't seem to take our personal privacy and security seriously, it's great to see that we may have a means of taking care of the matter ourselves.

Dubbed the RFID Guardian, the device was inspired by Ms Rieback's research which showed that most current commercial RFID devices (including those with 4...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Greetings from San José, CA, the home of Korean-Thai-Tex-Mex fusion cuisine, the million-dollar starter home, and the Embedded Systems Conference. The 2007 ESC West reflected the maturity of the industry and did not contain any blockbuster technical breakthroughs, but there were a few interesting trends that made the show worth braving the high hotel room rates and the usual Silicon Valley traffic.

While digital signal processors (DSPs) have been finding applications in embedded systems for a long time, 2007 probably marks the point where they are almost as common as the RISC cores and PICs that traditionally do the majority of computing in the embedded space. Dual-core chips that combine a RISC and DSP were in evidence everywhere across the show floor in applications ranging from multimedia cell phones to set-top boxes. Another sign that the embedded signal processing (ESP) market is maturing is the greatl...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Pressing the Print button at the TechShop has a whole different meaning than most other places in the world. Rather than commit a few milligrams of ink or toner to a paper document's surface, choosing Print on one of the TechShop's lovingly-recycled machines might move the contents of your CAD file to a table-top laser cutter whose beam can render your design in neatly-etched pieces of plastics, woods, paper or cardboard, fabric, leather, and even chocolate. Other labs within the tidy industrial building located on the outskirts of Palo Alto, CA have hardcopy capabilities that include a 3-D printer which produces solid plastic models directly from CAD drawings and a plasma jet cutter that can slice the parts for your next race car, bio-fuel converter, or battle-bot out of ½-inch plate steel.

But as...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Covering CES, the world's largest assemblage of consumer toys, single-handed is not for the faint-hearted. With 2700 exhibitors spread over four cavernous halls (the size of 30 football fields), two hotels, and the front lawn of the convention center itself, I and the rest the 143,000 CES attendees engaged in a five-day death march across the neon-encrusted canyons of Las Vegas. The event seems to exist in another dimension, separated from what we consider ordinary reality by a veil of pure marketing hype that's so dense it could be cut into chunks and used to fertilize the barren Las Vegas desert. Since the CES size and sheer weirdness assured that there was not even the slightest hope of covering a measurable fraction of the show, I'll just post a few of the more interesting...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Standing here with my toes hanging over the edge of a new year, I've started to ponder what 2007 will hold for computing and networking. From my foggy viewpoint it appears that much of the industry should progress in a predictable manner, adding increments of processing power, storage and multimedia capabilities to the venerable PC architecture -- all bundled together under the rigid strictures of Microsoft's new Vista OS. On the other hand, a slightly different reading of the tea leaves hints at the early signs of what may be deep faults in the strategy that has allowed the folks in Redmond to hold sway over our digital lives for the past couple of decades.

If it happens, I don't think it will be because Windows falls victim to a digital coup that enables Linux or any other OS to displace Microsoft from the desktop. What may happen, however, is that a number of technical trends are slowly moving the traditional PC further from the center of our digital lives. In his recent ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

It's not unusual in this industry to see manufacturers making overly-optimistic claims about their products, and using subtle, often pointless, distinctions in their feature sets to declare their chip, box, or board an industry first. While we don't encourage such practices at EN-Genius Network, it is our policy to publish the manufacturer's press release in its entirety as part of our product reviews and then pick apart any questionable claims they make in our commentary. In fact, taking regular jabs at those inflated claims has become one of our favorite sports. Of course, this also means that we expect to be held accountable for the statements we make.

This was exactly what happened in the case of my December 4, 2006 review of AMCC's new framer/pointer processors in networkZONE, where I'd cited Agere as an e...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

"They looked for dung but found gold, which is just opposite of the experience of most of us." Describing Wilson and Penzias' Bell Labs discovery of the Big Bang radiation.

Claude Shannon would ride his unicycle through the halls of Bell Labs, but when he stopped he invented communications theory. Applying that theory suggested megabit speeds over copper were possible, and DSL is the practical application. Crucial early work came directly and indirectly from the Bell Labs and Telcordia. Today, 160 million homes have DSL connections. Dozens of the engineers whose work has been reported by DSL Prime were deeply influenced by their time at the Labs.

Another great moment came when Wilson and Penzias couldn't get rid of some noise in their radio telescope, even after shoveling off the bat guano. No matter which way they pointed, that three degrees above absolute zero noise wouldn't go away. Eventually, they found an explanat...  -- Click Here to Read More >>