Round-up 2010: Best of electronics, telecom and technology

Year 2010 has been a good year for the global electronics industry, rather, the technology industry, coming right after a couple of years of recession. Well, it is time to look back on 2010 and see the good, bad and ugly sides, if any, of electronics, telecom and technology.

Presenting my list of top posts for 2010 from these three segments.

ELECTRONICS

Electronics for energy efficient powertrain

Photonics rocks in India @ APW 2010, Cochin!

Plastic Logic’s QUE proReader looks to mean business!

Growing Indian power electronics market provides host of opportunities

Philips focuses on how interoperability, content sharing drive CE devices!

Apple never ceases to amaze!

Is this a war of tablets, or Apple OS vs. Google Android?

India needs to become major hardware player!

Roundup of day 2 @ Electronica India 2010

Strategic roadmap for electronics enabling energy efficient usage: Venkat Rajaraman, Su-Kam

NI stresses on innovation, launches LabVIEW 2010!

What’s Farnell (element14) up to? And, semicon equipment bubble burst? Whoa!!

Bluetooth set as short range wireless standard for smart energy!

View 3D TV, without glasses, today!

Indian medical electronics equipment industry to grow at 17 percent CAGR over next five years: ISA

Top 10 electronics industry trends for 2011

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

LTE will see larger deployments, higher volumes than WiMAX!

LTE should benefit from WiMAX beachhead!

Context-aware traffic mediation software could help telcos manage data tsunami: Openwave

Mobile WiMAX deployment and migration/upgrade strategies

Upgrade to WiMAX 2 uncertain as TD-LTE gains in momentum!

Tejas celebrates 10 years with new products for 3G/BWA backhaul

Focus on gyroscopes for mobile phone apps: Yole

Bluetooth low energy should contribute to WSN via remote monitoring

INSIDE Contactless unveils SecuRead NFC solution for mobile handset market

How are femtocells enhancing CDMA networks?

Top 10 telecom industry trends for 2011

TECHNOLOGY

Symantec’s Internet threat security report on India has few surprises!

Epic — first ever web browser for India, from India!

Norton cybercrime report: Time to take back your Internet from cybercriminals!

NComputing bets big on desktop virtualization

Brocade launches VDX switches for virtualized, cloud-optimized data centers

It isn’t an easy job tracking so many different segments! 🙂 I will try and do better than this next year!

Best wishes for a very, very happy and prosperous 2011! 🙂

NI stresses on innovation, launches LabVIEW 2010!

National Instruments hosted the the annual India LabVIEW Conference 2010 in Bangalore today, where it launched LabVIEW 2010 – the  latest version of its graphical programming environment for design, test, measurement and control applications.

Jayaram Pillai, MD, NI-India Russia and Arabia.

Jayaram Pillai, managing director, NI-India Russia and Arabia, delivered the India LabVIEW Conference 2010 keynote by discussing how LabVIEW in India has evolved from a product to a powerful ecosystem.

“Innovation is key,” said Pillai: “I earlier cribbed about innovations not happening in India. Now, I have been seeing a lot of innovations over the last five years. Today, people are very involved. They understand situations better, and therefore, innovations are possible. Growth has to come with everybody involved. Innovations are required to solve problems. We need more innovations!”

Pillai presented an example of the solar powered milk refrigeration system as an example of innovation. This is a very simple solution addressing  a massive problem, especially in rural areas of India. Vehicles with solar powered milk refrigeration systems visit villages and rural areas to collect the milk and chill it for distribution and use later. LabVIEW was the silent hero behind the scenes.

He added that designers need better and simple tools, which have to be very flexible. Tools such as LabVIEW provide immense flexibility to scientists, engineers and designers. The LabVIEW vision is: bringing software programming to the masses. For over 24 years, NI has consistently delivered performance and features based on existing technologies via LabVIEW. Another interesting highlight is that LabVIEW has always been multi-core enabled.

LabVIEW ecosystem in India
Speaking about the India LabVIEW Sphere, which is one platform providing infinite solutions across industries and applications, Pillai said that from taking simple temperature measurements to controlling the world’s largest particle accelerator, engineers and scientists use the LabVIEW platform to meet a wide range of application challenges across various industries. He added that many features of LabVIEW 2010 are based on actual feedback received from users.

LabVIEW has a robust ecosystem in India. Currently, there are over 5,000 industry applications being served via LabVIEW, though this number could be higher. Over 400 engineering colleges are teaching LabVIEW in their curriculum and there are over 25,000 LabVIEW trained engineers in the country.

LabVIEW also boasts of over 4,000 active users online and more than 200 attendees during its weekly web user groups. This number rises as and when NI’s customers present. “The sphere is all about things that help and sustain the NI and LabVIEW ecosystem.” added Pillai.

LabVIEW 8.5 delivers power of multicore processors

National Instruments (NI) recently released the latest version of LabVIEW — LabVIEW 8.5, which delivers the power of multi-core processors to engineers and scientists.

According to Jayaram Pillai, MD, India, Russia & Arabia, NI, new processors with multicore are coming out. Processing power is now split into two separate cores. With multicore, you are doing parallel processing. LabVIEW is a very dataflow programming tool. It is not sequential — it is decided by the data itself. And inherently, it has always been parallel processing. NI has taken the advantage from LabVIEW 5 — due to dual-core processing. It used multi-threaded architecture.

Assign different tasks on different cores
With processor technology shifting to multi-core, there is a need to run efficiently on the processor. For LabVIEW, you can assign different tasks on different cores — which are independent. They don’t have to run at the same speed. Those are the challenges multi-core seeks to address.

The technology NI has, the single application that you can build in LabVIEW, it aids in taking advantage of multicore. Part of a program can be assigned to one core. Another part is, if you don’t want to club, it can run on the another core. All of this happens on one program.

So how is the new version better? As you want to accomplish more things, you have to go to higher levels of extractions (or abstractions). The graphical program is a very high level of abstraction. You can accomplish more with the graphical programming.

Another area where LabVIEW is finding itself is in the design space. Building systems today is very complex. NI builds into three stages — design-prototype-deploy.

As an example, the Railways want to detect trains that have bad wheels. They collect data from railway lines — lot of signal processing and maths were done. NI knows how to detect defective wheels. It put sensors to that signal, go to the field and do some trials. Once you know the algorithms and the BIOS required, you can go into designing. You take the prototype and make that into a product. Each stage, in the past, used different tools.

Since it is all the way — from design to deployment — it can all be done with LabVIEW. This capability — that it can start at design and prototype, etc., brings greater value to engineers. NI call this process as graphical system design.

Community LabVIEW
Commenting on NI’s activities in India, Jayaram Pillai said LabVIEW 8.5 is a major release. “Over the last 10 years we’ve been in India, we have changed its hardware platdform. One thing that remains common is LabVIEW and what it does for scientists and engineers. We’ve been able to create a community around LabVIEW. There are users and programmers of LabVIEW. There are certified developers, companies that have been built around LabVIEW. There are applications built around LabVIEW,” he added.

Looking at graphical programming, over the last 10 yrs — the biggest challenge for Pillai has been to address customers needs for engineers who can program LabVIEW. There’s enough excitement in the market about LabVIEW. There are 1,100 jobs at least for LabVIEW.

There are people writing toolkits that can work with LabVIEW, which includes IP, developers, companies, customers, products, systems built around LabView. This has been happening within India.

Pillai said that similar to any technology adoption, there’s a take-off stage. “It is called the S Curve, and we are at the bottom of the curve. The potential is huge. Our big challenge is to be able to create more engineers in the market. I feel that over 1,000 engineers are required,” he added.

From an academic standpoint — India has about 400,000+ engineers passing out each year. Only 25 percent are hireable, with reasonable training, by companies. The IITs, state governments, etc. take care of it. That means, there are business opportunities for companies to start finishing schools for training these people for the industry.

Lots of companies are getting into these finishing schools. These students will learn about the tools that they would later need to use.

Pillai stressed that it was important how the country looks at academicians. He said: “We haven’t got into this stage as much. The IT industry has done very well and created a huge appetite for engineers. The majority of engineers passing out are hired by the IT companies.”

He added: “LabVIEW is getting accepted by people in various projects. We’ve created a LabVIEW community — the whole ecosystem.”

Outlook for 2008

According to Pillai, algorithm enineering is key during the design phase. LabVIEW 8.5 has a new tool for design stage of the graphical system design.

With LabVIEW, users can increase performance through graphical programming for multi-core processors and FPGAs. Pillai said: “At the design stage, you want to give the engineer multiple computing options. The engineer is concerned about deployment, but he would like to move from Windows to real-time. This should be done seamlessly. LabVIEW FPGA has been around for a long time.”

Programming in FPGA is not simple. NI’s offer to engineers is: look at the FPGA as a platform and program it freely without even needing to know what’s the VHDL code! LabVIEW can run on Windows, and move to RTOS and FPGA, and all of it is seamless.

As an example, Lego has a product called Mindstorm — a robot. That robot has sensors. It is targeted at 10-yr olds. On one side, a 10-yr old can program LabVIEW. All details are there in LabVIEW. On another side, it can be used in the largest, physics experiments. So LabVIEW is not complex to use.

LabView has been shipping formally since last month.