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Wireless gigabit alliance (WiGig) has a new(updated) website. For a first up, there is a link How WiGig Works which nicely explain what WiGig is all about, in a clear layman’s terms. If you ever wondered whether we saw the finale of the wireless rate surge, just re-think. We are still a lot far from drafting even a proposal, but there is surely plenty of light seen in the wireless horizon. As an example, HDTV would require about 3Gbps rate. WiGig is addressing applications such as this which demand rates beyond 3 giga bits per second. The brief tutorial is a compelling read.
The much expected Wolfram alpha has gone for a soft launch since last night. It had some start up glitches, as Wolfram briefed during the live demo, but nothing major fortunately, prevented me from getting a first feel of it. Erick Schonfeld has a nice blog with a detailed first hand feel description of this new computing web search engine. He also did a one to one comparison with Google for a few specific search queries.
My first impression is in much the same line as what I expected after reading Wolfram’s pre-launch blog. This is not a Google competitor for sure, but instead an incredibly complementing brother. Wolfram alpha is more of a scientific and quantitative information search engine. For instance, if you want to know the Taylor series expansion of exponential function 
wolfram1
This is the sort of query it likes the most and not something like “proof of Sanov’s theorem”. Google will incredibly list a set of documents which has the proof one is looking for, since it simply search down the web and display a listof matching queries, ordered based on pagerank, which is loosely speaking in the order of relevance.
Not all queries are bound to get a result with wolfram alpha, atleast for now. That is expected since it is not yet in launch mode, but on soft launch. In the coming days they are likely to have it running full fledged with all kind od queries supported.
So, the wolfram alpha is definitely going to be useful for very many cases and it surely is going to rock in scientific searches. I initially thought the Google squared which is going to come from Google shortly is addressing the very same segment of search area, but it is clearly different.
I tried “tallest mountain Switzerland” . It gave a very nice cute quantified table. I love this kind of result. It is also state things with less ambiguity. For instance the height is mentioned in meter, but there is a list of unit conversions listed along, which help people to map them into the units of their convenience.
I tried a query “Who is Claude Shannon”. This is what it displayed. Of course, the result you get is a very brief information about him. Same query in Google will lead you to the more detailed Wikipedia entry of Shannon or may be the Mathworld entry of Shannon among the list of hits . Wolfram alpha gives information more like in capsule form. If you need to know more, you should ask more. Clearly, what search engine to use is thus subject to the query type. I strongly see Google and Wolfram alpha are complementary. Wolfram alpha gives more or less one reply to a single question. Of course you can renew the query and then get answer to that. In some sense, this is like people asking questions to one another in real physical scenario. Imagine you ask a friend, knowledgeable pal that is: Who is Shannon? He would perhaps start answering in those lines as Wolfram Alpha do. On repeated question he will give more details. On the other hand, Googling is like broadcasting your query to a large pool of friends, each one of them sends what they know or heard about Claude Shannon. It is you,who decides whichamong the many answer(s)/explanation(s) suit your need!
We can afford some amount of spelling errors while entering the query in wolfram alpha. Since it is natural language based, that is a decent feature to have. I deliberately typed the query “distnace from Bangalore to geneva ” instead of “distance from Bangalore to geneva “. It understood the intended query and displayed the result in a nice quantified table. Eve the geographical trace between the two places is shown. Incredible!
When I tried “weather in Lausanne”, this is as good as it gets. Spot on with all possible things you want to know in one screen! It had a list of mountains and their heights mentioned!
In a nutshell, Wolfram alpha give you the best cooked food, given a user recipient as input. Google will give you a list of foods available and then you pick the one tasting suit . It really then is a question of preference, time, and satisfaction of the end user on what to choose from. As far as I am concerned, it is subjective. I see both of these are invaluable and both will co-exist. Scientists,economists, finance folks, mathematicians, historians are all bound to benefit from this new computing engine. I am waiting for a full release!
I am eagerly waiting for this new search and compute engine promised by Stephen Wolfram. They call it wolfram|alpha (If google always went with the beta release, Wolfram is going even early).This, if it work in the promised lines is going to rock the Internet evolution. From the outset, this is not just a search engine. It is kind of an intelligent searcher who can loosely understand the human requirements.
For long, it was perceived that a search engine driven by natural language processing is the way forward. But it is pretty hard to build such a system since natural language processing is no mean business. Wolfram’s idea is to create an abstraction and then algorithm of these realizable models. Once we can do a mapping of the requirements to algorithm that is computable, at least in principle we can build such a system. But that is a whole lot of heavy statements already. How easy it is to build all these methods and models into an algorithmic framework? He is using the New Kind of Science (NKS) armoury to realize that. We have to wait to get the full rainbow, but when he promises we can confidently expect something big.
Now once the algorithmic mapping (and implementation) is done, then the question of natural interacting between humans and the system comes. Natural language is the way, but according to him we don’t have to worry about doing that as such. Once the knowledge of the individual is made into a computational framework, then that is enough. I am not an expert in this natural language processing and NKS framework, but for sure this is pretty exciting,both from an algorithmic point of view as well as a practical MontBlanc. As Wolfram himself pointed out Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task. Indeed it is still being considered a difficult problem, both in academia and industry. So there is excitement aplenty in the offing. I am eagerly waiting for this to hit soon.
Considering that, the big wig search engine houses including Google are still struggling to make that dream natural language engines (the many pseudo ones in the market are not quite approved). I remember www.ask.com started their business in those lines, but never seemed to have crossed that elusive mark of acceptance, atleast not to an extend to capture a world wide wow! If Wolfram has a new way to get this through, that will be a big breakthrough. I cant wait to see that. Wolfram promises that it is going to be very soon. He says it is in May 2009. My guess is that they will release it on May 14,2009.
It was today. I’ve just come back to office, after the dinner party hosted as part of the I&C anniversary celebrations at EPFL. Andrew Viterbi was the guest of honour and largely because of his fame, there was considerable crowd attending the function. Martin Vetterli made a nice colourful, flashy presentation illustrating the history of I&C in EPFL as well as scientific progress in Switzerland. He mentioned the names including Jim Massey, Ungerboek who are undoubtedly pioneers of modern communication theory and practice. He began saying that “…Ungerboek is our friend, and now not quite..I will come to that in a minute…”. And of course he didnt come back and fill the circumstance in which the friendship derailed. But I reckon it was a casual remark, perhaps to indicate that Ungerboek, now with Broadcom is a bitter rival to Qualcomm. Since Qualcomm recently established a scientific partnership with EPFL and Viterbi being a Qualcom founder and associate, he perhaps just jotted that remark. It was a nice, usual interesting presentation by Martin.
He also mentioned a nice story about the current EPFL president Patrick Aebischer. Interestingly Patrick Aebischer after an MD (Medical science) degree was fond of computer science and decided to venture into taking a MS degree in CS . He then decided to test his luck at EPFL and approached the admission committee with a formal application. CS was affiliated to the Math department in those days. EPFL politely rejected his application and in due course that ended Patrick’s quest for an EPFL CS degree. He then moved to the US, as a successful surgeon and took a career path of entirely different trace. Years later, as one would say, due to the uncertain turn of things in the great cycle of life, he became the EPFL president and now ruling not only the CS department, but the whole school.
Viterbi talked about the Digital Communication history. He started giving a perspective of this field starting from the days of Maxwell, Rao, Cramer, Wiener and Nyquist. Then he discussed the impact of Shannon’s work. He said the three driving force which made this digital mobile revolution are
1) Shannon’s framework (1948)
2) Satellite (Sparked by the Sputnik success in 1957)
3) Moores’s law, which is more of a socio economic law, which dramatically kept driving the industry so successfully.
The talk as such wasn’t too attention gathering, but he made a rather comprehensive presentation discussing the impact of digital communication evolution spurred since Shannon’s days (and even early) knitting a dramatic success story of digital wireless world with millions of cell phones and similar devices, which showcased literally the realization of theoretical promise Shannon made in 1948. He himself has his name etched in part of that success story, at least in the form of Viterbi algorithm, which is (one of the instance of it) an algorithm used to detect sequences when perturbed by a medium.
Quite a lot of fun activities were organized by the committee. It was quite fun. Since many programs (especially the fun part) were in french, the appeal was considerably deaf to non-french speakers. But then the rationale given was that, the alumni in good percentage are french! I found it funfilled , mainly to see these successful people like Viterbi sharing their views in real. After all we can learn from history. Not many people can claim to have done so well in everything he touched. In the case of Viterbi, he is an academician, researcher, successful entrepreneur and now a venture capitalist, all scaled to the possible limits. Incredible role model, whichever way we look.
…and it is Oracle! Quite a surprise! Thats the least I felt, when the news broke out stating that Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems. The once great and proud maker of some of the best servers and computing power houses is now leading to the hands of a software giant, largely focused on database solutions. There is no natural connection to the obvious eye But who knows? Oracle may be eying something big! I cant see a justification of spending 7.4Billion $ to get hold of Java and MySQL alone. These are the big software solutions from Sun, apart from Solaris. Anyway both these are open source software too. Afterall Sun is known for its champion make of servers right? Is it that Oracle feared an imminent acquisition by some other competitor, which might have distracted their lead? For a good amount of time the speculation was on whether IBM would still buy Sun. Then it was the Cisco, and the HP taking rounds as potential buyers. None of these materialized, but Oracle, the one choice with maximum entropy!
Would it be that, Oracle saw something big with Solaris? Are they eying on a solid operating system market? In any case, a decision to buy a company for 7.4Billion cant be for fun. Surely there got to be a plan, at least in theory!As someone opined in some article recently about possible consolidation of SAP and a possible buy over by one of he bigger fishes like IBM or HP. Now, that would take some shape too. Nothing can be ruled out at the moment. This is the sort of indication floating around.
It was almost unthinkable that a single company would rule the EDA world. At least this is what I strongly perceived, a few years ago. Now, put the present dishes on the table and I see that, Synopsys is giving nightmares to all other EDA shops. While working with Synopsys, we always saw Cadence as the rival company to get floored on. All of that, was in the wish list and not many of us thought we could do that, ever so easily. Cadence was the obvious leader of EDA for many years and Synopsys strongly stood at the second position. Then there were the Mentors and the Magmas, at a fair distance down. Magma was the emerging company with a strong future predicted by many pundits within and outside the EDA world. It was imminent that Magma one day would give a stronger competition to both the big brothers Synopsys and Cadence. They may still be a force to reckon, but sadly they tried to act over smart and it all triggered a downfall. I am not sure whether their, rather peculiar sue attempt on Synopsys was wholly responsible for their slide. Definitely that may have had a role.
Now it appears that, the discounts offered by the EDA big fellows are giving more aches to smaller players. It is well known that the EDA tools are phenomenally expensive and the marketing always revolved around giving deals for bulk purchase of tools. What is more colourful is that the buyers offer to make the deal public in exchange of more discounts. The concept of primary EDA vendor was not that prevalent a few years ago. However, the trend these days is to grab that extra mileage by roping with leading semiconductor houses. It is a big win for both the buyer and seller. Synopsys for sure is going to enjoy this. First they are among the very few making profit even in these difficult economy. They are perhaps the only one from EDA. Considering that the EDA market itself is only about 4 or 5Billion dollar market, the impact of a near 1.5billion dollar Synopsys doing too well is going to give more headache to other little fellows, in the coming days.
Cadence is literally having a plate of their own problems and now with the whole semiconductor market trying to minimize their R&D spending, it is double advantage for Synopsys; That too with newer friends adding to their primary EDA friends list. Magma is becoming more or less a prospective buying target than a rival. A few years ago, Synopsys had worries about a growing Magma. Now I wouldnt rule out a potential buy over by Synopsys itself, may be Cadence or Mentor Graphics!
Some people say that Synopsys is going to be the next Microsoft in EDA. Aart perhaps rightly said they want to be the Apple of EDA. I would prefer Aarts view here. Not just because Synopsys was my breadwinner for a while and not because I attended the same grad school as De geus, nor because of the well known fact that yours truly is an ardent fan of Aart de Geus. But because Synopsys is well managed by a great management team with great work ethics. When the ratable (subscription) revenue/ licensing model was announced there were lot of eyebrows, but it was a long term vision and Synopsys is really reaping the fruits now.
Having said all these, like many of you, I am too worried by this single monopoly trend in EDA. We need smaller players in every market and we need more innovation. From Synopsys standpoint having less competition would yield relaxed days ahead, but for the market we need better products and superior innovation. We need Cadence to revive and at the same time companies to emerge to take position for the next Magma. At this stage, I am worried about Magma. Is Magma to follow the Avant! route to get merged with Synopsys?
Aart has aptly mentioned that “I understand that the entire world is under economic pressure,” he said. “When that happens, some will do better than others”. One thing for sure. Among all the EDA executives, Synopsys folks must be getting better sleep these days.
While the talk and boom about multimode multiband phone in CMOS is turning greener, there should be a natural question around it. How about doing all these in software? Rather add a level of programmability such that a great deal of issues from a hardwired implementation are shifted to more flexible firmware. Without contention, pros and cons with the idea of programmability still prevail. Clearly, one definite advantage I see with programmable design is the significant cost reduction and reuse. Additionally a migration or upgrade, which is imminent from a future gadget design point of view, can get done with relative ease with a programmable multimode chip. Building a suitable processor architecture to suit the modulations schemes (say an OFDM based scheme can have an inbuilt FFT engine or a WCDMA can have a correlator engine). Aren’t anyone working seriously in these directions? I am sure there are many, atleast startup ventures. Vaanu and Icera indeed are two things coming to my mind. How about the big boys? There were lot of furies about software programmable baseband chips being developed. Not quite sure what is the latest in that front. Isn’t it the next big thing in the offing? I am sure the EDA big houses have thought ahead for building tools for a heavily software oriented design, at least for years ahead. Or is it that, I am jumping the gun a little too far? However, I see some top level bottlenecks in making this programmable multimode chips realizable at an easier pace than a textbook concept. One of them is difficulty in getting away the analog front end. As a matter of fact, now I feel that, analog is going to stay.
So where are we heading to? Clearly, an all CMOS multiband multimode single chip (baseband and analog) with a near perfect RF and a software architecture would be the ultimate holy grail of cellular chip design. How many bands and how many modes to be incorporated becomes less important, if the programmability aspect is assured. Challenges within a single chip concept are themselves many. Clearly the RF portion is expected to take up lesser share of the overall chip size. An all digital front end is aimed in that direction. While a direct digitization of radio signal of high frequency eliminates analog life process significantly, there are several practical bottlenecks with this Utopian design model. We are not quite there to say good bye to analog entirely. Analog signal processing is still critical and inevitable, even for a programmable multimode dream. I will give you some numerical facts to substantiate my claim:
Suppose we decide to build programmable all digital zero if receiver for a 2GHz system (around the UMTS band). Then, Shannon Nyqusit sampling would demand at-least 4 G samples/second. Even with a processor which clocks 4Ghz and say 8 operations per cycle, our full steam purchase is going to be a maximum 32000000 operations per second. This theoretical figure is based on the assumption that processor memory is fully utilized. At the sampling rate of 4G samples/second, we only are going to get 
Today, there appeared an interestng (and perhaps general) question posted on the Linkedin Analog RFmixed signal group. The question was this “Regarding multi-mode multiband RF transmitters for handsets (CMOS), what do you think are the hot issues (besides PA)?” I have given a short overview of the challenges that I could see when a multi mode phone is to be designed on CMOS: The phone has to support a wide range of frequency bands as well as multiple standards/technologies/modulation/air interface. Here is what I wrote. I am not sure whether the discussion is accessible to public. Hence I repost here.
Integrating the RF transmitter and receiver circuits is a challenging thing since we have to support multiple bands (within a single mode. Say GSM/EDGE should support GSM900 to 1900 bands) as well as support for multiple phone modes. For instance a natural multi mode multi band phone supporting GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/LTE will have to consider a wide frequency ranges from 850MHz to over 2GHz. If we were to consider incorporating GPS and WLAN, add that extra consideration. Not just the transceiver circuitry, but also other components such as oscillators, filters, passive components, frequency synthesizers and power amplifiers. Another thing is that, for multi mode, the sensitivity requirements are much more stringent than a single mode, multi band design.
Since CMOS offers low cost, better performance and better scaling, to me that is the way forward. The natural choice of transceiver in CMOS would be the direct conversion/Zero IF, since it eliminates the costly SAW filters, and also reduce the number of on chip oscillators and mixers. Now, there would be several key design issues to be considered now with direct conversion architecture. Most notable ones are the well known ghost “DC offset” and the 1/f noise. Designers will have the task cut out to get a cleaner front end and as well as near ideal oscillators.
Now I see another problem with multi mode, depending on what level of flexibility we prefer on this integration. Do we need the phone to operate in multiple modes simultaneously? Say a voice call on GSM and at the same time a multimedia streaming on LTE. In such a case, the question of sharing components are completely ruled out. If not, say some components such as synthesizers and mixers (if in the same band for multiple modes) can be shared. Clearly, simultaneous mode operation will ask for increased silicon die size as well as cost. Challenges may be there for circuit isolation for different modes as well.
In all, depending on the level of sophistication (and of course all these things will have to be scaled economically too) the design,partitioning, architecture challenges are aplenty. Now the choice between a single chip (containing both analog baseband and digital baseband) versus two chips (analog and digital partitioned) will get a little more trickier with multiple modes. With multiple antennas (MIMO), add another dimension to this whole thing:-(.
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Phew! After the heck of debates and discussions (over years) on the standard evolution of the IEEE 802.11n for multiple antennas (MIMO), now it appears that we are all in for a single stream (single antenna) chip. It sounds more like an 11g upgrade, or perhaps a conservative lead from there on? If Atheros believe this is is the way to go I have my belief that Broadcom and Marvell have it in the delivery line too. Here is that interesting new story at EEtimes.
Stumbled upon the news on New York times: it is about a new search engine being developed by some former Google folks. First there is excitement when it comes to a startup idea when you know that they know how it is to be confronting their former employers in business. Anyway, the new engine is called cuil (pronounced just like ‘cool’). I am all for new ideas. Hopefully we are into better search engines. Since these folks are also from Google, you can expect a certain Google standard guaranteed. Google undoubtedly changed the search engine business, by simply scaling the internet to a level hitherto unimagined. Yet again, a Stanford connection to a new startup. Tom Costello and his wife Anna Patterson (former Google architect) surely will know this business better than us (correction, better than me to say the least).
If their motto of producing a more appropriate search engine, bettering Google, then we should feel happy and proud of this adventure. Surely Google cant relax either. In all it is a win win for the world. A preliminary look at the search engine game me a good feel. I am not sure whether the change in appearance (after being stuck and used to Google search for so long) gives me this impression. Anyway I look forward to see their progress.
I leave it to you to try out for a comparison. I did a Cuil on “compressed sensing” and found this where as a google of “compressed sensing” displayed this. Google displayed the search result as a list (rows) where as the Cuil results to a tabular form. Too early to say anything discrete, but I am going to try the new one as well. Google is by far the fastest (at the moment).
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