Case Studies

Case Study: Measuring Energy Consumption of Embedded Applications

Energy consumption is a chief concern for most embedded applications, especially for portable applications where battery life is paramount. In these applications, an accurate understanding of energy consumption is critical to processor selection and to system design. Unfortunately, many obstacles hinder comparisons of processors’ energy consumption. One key problem is that processor vendors usually report power consumption, not energy consumption. Calculating energy consumption—which is Read more...

Case Study: With Reduced Reporting, Product Announcements Must Really Pop

The economy is finally recovering—sort of—and a number of tech companies are planning long-delayed product launches. But over the last year, the technical trade press that covers these announcements has been decimated. There are a lot fewer tech reporters now, and those that remain are often struggling to cover unfamiliar tech areas. They’re overworked and understaffed, and they don’t have time to decipher unclear marketing messages. If you want your product announcement to get attention and Read more...

Case Study: Chip Vendors, Walk a Mile in Your Customers’ Shoes

Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated.  Chips are getting more complicated.  And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger.  As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits.  Design engineers rely on these kits to quickly evaluate chips and prototype key portions of their systems. Clearly chip manufacturers recognize that development kits are important, and there are hundreds available.  But the quality of Read more...

Case Study: Extreme Audio Software Optimization—in Double-Time

In the early days of DSPs (circa the mid ‘80s), audio compression and other audio algorithms really taxed the performance of the processors available at the time.  And high-level language compilers for DSPs were, for the most part, lame.  Therefore, real-time implementations of audio algorithms almost always required hand-optimized software.  Now, 20 years later, processor performance has improved dramatically, and compilers are much better.  So you might think the days of hand-tuning audio Read more...

Case Study: Benchmarking PowerPoint Processors

Processor designers know that a cycle-accurate simulator can be used to benchmark a processor that has not yet been fabricated. But many designers don’t realize that it’s also possible to benchmark an idea for a processor, a processor that may exist only in PowerPoint slides—and that there are good reasons for doing so. As BDTI’s president Jeff Bier wrote in a recent column, BDTI has seen a number of cases in which a processor vendor used BDTI’s benchmarks on its fully-designed processor, Read more...

Case Study: Patent Litigation Support

These days it’s not uncommon to see patent infringement claims settled for hundreds of millions of dollars. There was RIM’s settlement with NTP for $612 million, Intel’s with Intergraph for $600 million and with MicroUnity for $300 million, and the blockbuster, Qualcomm’s settlement with Broadcomm for $891 million. These huge sums stimulate the equivalent of high-tech ambulance-chasing: individuals and companies pursuing patent infringement claims against companies with deep pockets, seeking Read more...

Case Study: Perfecting Presentations for Greater Impact

The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective is to test it with a knowledgeable, critical, and responsive audience. A test audience can also help ensure that the content is correct, relevant, and appropriate for the intended audience. Just as important, a test audience can help presenters gauge the clarity, appeal, and impact of their pitch. After all, superb technical content serves no purpose if the audience loses interest a few minutes into the presentation. BDTI analysts can Read more...

Case Study: Is Your Development Kit Ready for Customers?

Time-to-market pressures mean that system designers, software developers and integrators require more than just hardware from their chip vendors. They demand reliable, easy-to-use software development tools, OS support, middleware and application software components, I/O support, and more—right out of the box. To win design-ins, a chip vendor must deliver much more than just processing performance on a board. Vendors are responding to this demand by packaging development boards, software Read more...

Case Study: Reliable Benchmark Results Lead to Good Design Decisions

To paraphrase business guru Peter Drucker, "If you can't measure it, you can't design it."  In the world of embedded processing, processor developers and users alike rely on benchmarks to measure and assess the capabilities of embedded processors on their target applications.  Benchmark results enable processor developers to understand where they stand in relation to their design targets and their competitors.  For processor users, high-quality benchmark results are a uniquely critical resource Read more...

Case Study: Improving Products and Product Announcements—Cost-Effectively

We all know that test marketing is the best way to see if a product meets buyers’ needs.  Household and consumer product manufacturers test their products with a select test market as a matter of course.  They use test marketing as a rehearsal for product introduction and to avoid disasters.  For technology developers and vendors, test marketing can be just as valuable, but finding the right test market can be tricky.  After all, the right test market is the target market—and when this is the Read more...