Keynote Lecture

Challenges in Consumer Electronics for 21st Century Steve Leibson Tensilica, Inc. Date: June 25, 2007 Time: 10:55 - 11:55 AM Location: Lance Burton Theater

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The era of perpetual and nomadic connection to information and entertainment sources is upon us. Wireless and wired connections rain audio, video, and data into every conceivable type of consumer device, ranging from mobile telephone handsets to PDAs to cameras, camcorders, media players, and video games. Omnipresent video screens appear in your home, in airports, in bars, and even at individual tables in restaurants and gasoline pumps. The future belongs to a broad spectrum of connected devices delivering myriad combinations of sound, image, video, and data over a wide range of channels with varied bandwidths. The major challenges in delivering these new consumer products involve the development of smart, adaptable, low-power systems that can deliver high-quality user experiences while compensating for the imperfections of peripheral components such as inexpensive lenses, less-than-ideal display technologies, and tiny sound drivers.

Increasingly advanced consumer electronics systems demand more creativity than ever from systems designers, yet system architectures remain mired in the old design styles dating back to the early days of the microprocessor. Moore's Law has laid a transistor bounty at the feet of every system architect but the systems being designed today continue to suffer from self-inflicted bottlenecks. The industry suffers from a true lack of creativity in fully exploiting those billions of transistors and there is a vast opportunity to develop new system architectures and system-design methodologies that can fully exploit the bounty of Moore's Law. This keynote will briefly review the history of system design in the microprocessor era and the state of the art in consumer electronics products and will peer down the paths leading to the future of systems design to illuminate the future development opportunities.

Biography

Steven Leibson is the Technology Evangelist for Tensilica, Inc. He formerly served as the Vice President of Content and Editor in Chief of the Microprocessor Report, Editor in Chief of EDN Magazine, and Founding Editor in Chief of Embedded Developers Journal magazine. He has conducted many seminars and tutorials on system design around the world, has written hundreds of articles that appeared in many of the world's industry trade magazines, has won many industry awards for his writing. He published the book "Designing SOCs with Configured Cores" in 2006, which discusses the concepts of IP-driven and processor-centric SOC design for the 21st century. This book advocates across-the-board advances in system design, leaving behind antiquated ASIC design styles that are now almost two decades old. In 1982, Leibson published a very different book about microprocessor-based system design titled "The Handbook of Microcomputer Interfacing," which introduced system designers to the then-new concepts of microprocessor interface protocols and standards. That book was published in English, French, and Dutch and was used as a college-level textbook for many years. Since then, Leibson has developed and presented many microprocessor seminars and organized and ran the Microprocessor and Embedded Processor Forums while at the Microprocessor Report. He received his degree from Case Western Reserve University and then worked in industry as a design engineer and engineering manager for leading-edge system-design companies including as Hewlett-Packard and Cadnetix before becoming a journalist. Leibson is an IEEE Senior Member.