Consumer Electronics Show 2007
Embedded Reporting from the Front Lines

The Consumer Electronics show is so large that it’s small.  Amidst the acres of exhibits and over 140,000 attendees, the topics and interests are so diverse that the event becomes a buffet of sorts, serving up a greater variety of technology than you can find anywhere in the world, but specializing in nothing.  Few of the companies exhibiting here consider CES their “big show” of the year.  That status is reserved for the more specialized shows that go into exhaustive detail on any of the sub-subjects sampled at CES.

From an embedded design perspective, you’ll hear far more from companies like ARM, MIPS, and Intel at processor-specific forums and conferences.  You’ll learn much more about Linux at any one of the specialized events in that universe.  You’ll get more memory, storage, and connectivity details at a wide variety of venues.  Where CES does excel, however, is in putting the entire embedded design world into context.  The products showcased here, with their trillions of MIPS of embedded processing power and billions of lines of device software, put into perspective the net result of all that embedded technology when it finally finds its way downstream into the hands of the general public.

The thing most in evidence at CES is the idea of connecting people.  We want to see each other perfectly reproduced in the glowing color of giant plasma displays, super-sharp computer monitors, portable phones, PDAs and music devices, and digital cameras and imaging equipment.  We want to hear each other accurately enunciated through Bluetooth headsets, rumbling home theater systems, elegant audiophile earpieces, and exotic high-end audio speakers.  We want to communicate with each other with ubiquitous connectivity that can pass our messages instantly wherever and whenever we are with voice, data, and video resources at our disposal.  We must be lonely and afraid.

From the days when a device with an embedded computer was novel and we assumed that digital electronics would primarily be of value in balancing our checkbooks, we have transformed the world into a place where it seems to make sense to develop a winter jacket with a few million transistors on board just to handle daily coat-computing tasks.  Absurd fiction?  Hardly.  The weatherproof controls on the sleeve operate the portable media device nestled safely in an inside pouch.  Headphone connections are well-placed so the active snowboarder doesn’t snag anything as she spins 360s on the half-pipe while privately rockin-out to “I Predict a Riot” by Keizer Chiefs, then taps the “next track” button on her sleeve so she can catch some air to “Rooftops” by the Prophets before she cruises on down the slope.

If we extrapolate the current technology trends, we find that transistors, processing power, and memory become ubiquitous commodities that are almost infinitely inexpensive.  That means that our embedded consumer offerings will have to differentiate themselves by features, content, and aesthetic design.  In many markets (such as portable media players and mobile phones), this trend is already firmly established.  Apple’s dominance in the portable media player market, for example, is more a function of physical aesthetics and content than anything deeply technical.  Behind the scenes, they boot their micro-HDD one sector at a time, just like the rest of us.

As embedded designers, we have a profound effect on these trends which, in turn, have a profound effect on the world we live in.  Consider the case of a content-generating friend of ours, singer Storm Large [WEBSITE].  Storm’s single “Ladylike” made number five on the Billboard charts late last year with no recording label, no radio play, and no album.  Even a few years ago, this would have been an impossible feat.  Portable media players, internet distribution, and iTunes-like interfaces are transforming the music industry, dramatically expanding the number of artists to whom the general public has access.  Media players are filled with an increasingly large and diverse collection of tracks, and consumers are still coming to grips with how to manage and maintain all that music.

CES Exhibitor MusicIP has one angle on managing that content and adding differentiation to your embedded media player.  Their proprietary mix-making technology is available as hardware IP for embedded developers.  MusicIP scans digital audio tracks and profiles them – enabling listeners to identify a song, artist, album or mood that strikes their fancy, and then generating a complementary playlist from the listener’s own library.  In this age of music devices with multi-gigabit storage capacities, this more intuitive access to matching music may be the kind of differentiating feature that lets a media device rise above the deluge of disks, decoders, and D-As flooding the portable music market.

Intel’s booth featured embedded computing in another novel application: Expresso Fitness’s Spark S2 web-enabled, virtual-reality-enhanced fitness bike.  The exercise bike simulates road courses in a first-person-rider, video-game-like experience, where the pedal effort is modulated by the virtual terrain, and the rider is pitted against virtual competitors or even real riders at other locations via the WAN connection.  The bikes, spawning what the company calls the “exertainment” market, are currently targeted at health clubs and fitness centers.

Microsoft was at the show, primarily touting their new, non-embedded Vista operating system.  For those of us developing connected embedded devices, however, Vista will likely be at the other end of the line for many of our satellite-server-like applications.  You’ll want to brush up on the implications of Vista before you start docking your device’s USB connector with a Vista-running desktop machine.

Although Intel and AMD dominated the “big processor company booth” scene – it is likely that far more machines on the show floor were powered by ARM and MIPS processors than either of the two big desktop brands.  MIPS claims that 95% of cable modems, 70% of DVD recorders, 76% of set-top boxes, and 72% of VoIP applications use their processor IP.  ARM, on the other hand, is dominant in the gargantuan cell phone and portable media player markets.  The number of ARM processors whirring away on the CES show floor at one time – just in the mobile phones carried by the 140,000 show attendees – probably exceeded the Pentium tally in the booths.

A few hard-core embedded companies had a booth presence at the mega-show.  Mentor Graphics Embedded Division (formerly known as Accelerated Technology) had a staffed booth in the “emerging technology” section.  Probably less than .01% of the show’s attendees knew what to make of the Freescale development platform Mentor had on display. However, if that .01% included the guy two booth rows over who is chief designer for that next multi-million unit must-have media device, Mentor’s booth efforts will have paid off nicely.

All in all, our CES experience was a fun and enlightening one.  Taking a peek down the river, where much of the technology we spawn in the embedded computing space grows to maturity and public distribution, we can see the impact of embedded computing on the average citizen – the one who’s never heard of embedded processors, AMBA busses, DDR2, SDIO, or 802.16.  They just get up every morning, switch on the DVR-recorded news on their 1080p plasma display, drop their cell phone and media player into their digital parka, clip on their Bluetooth headset, and head out to meet a customer in their hybrid SUV guided by integrated GPS navigation.  Are we arrogant to think we’re changing the world?

For more CES coverage, see our companion article in FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal [CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE].  There, you’ll read about programmable logic penetration into the consumer electronics market, Laura Domela’s CES photo/art project, and the best record player you can buy for over $300,000.00. 

Kevin Morris, Embedded Technology Journal

January 16, 2007

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