‘Tis the Season to be linked up

With the Holiday Season underway and many considering giving electronic entertainment systems and personal mobile devices as presents, Electronic Products' Multimedia/Entertainment issue brings up a very important question: Can your multimedia devices talk to other multimedia devices?

And consider this too: just what IS a multimedia device? With screens embedded in everything from refrigerators and washing machines to gas pumps and airport kiosks, it looks as if everything is turning into a multimedia device. So the expectation of most consumers is that all these things will be able to communicate as needed: Your smart phone will be able to communicate with your TV to send movies to a bigger screen, your refrigerator will be able to send a shopping list to your smartphone, your camera will send videos to your smartphone for uploading, your gas pump will entertain you while you're pumping gas and tell you when it needs you to upload a payment, and so forth and so on.

The ability of mobile electronic devices to reliably communicate complex information wirelessly to all sorts of things, over the Internet of Things, or IoT, will be key to the next generation of machines, be they for consumer electronics, aerospace and transportation system, industrial equipment, medical systems, or any of myriad areas of applications. Hence, it's critical that design engineers understand what is needed to make this work. In their article, “The challenges of the Internet of Things” on page 26 of this issue, Joseph Yiu and Andrew Frame of ARM look at what requirements a microprocessors must fulfill — in terms of power, integration, memory, addressing, security, connectivity, performance, scalability, and software — to unlock the full potential of the IoT.

Another important new technology that is bringing multimedia into the future is I² C. New? I² C? Yes, I² C is the backbone of many entertainment and computing systems and it is being used in ways that many people have never seen before. For more on this, be sure to look at “The venerable I² C bus” by John Hull of NXP Semiconductors on page 32. And if you want to get a detailed look inside an advanced multimedia smartphone, take a look at “What's Inside” on page 36 for a teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Even though Black Friday 2013 is now history, you may still be looking for gifts to please some of those picky individuals who have to have the latest, greatest new things. So the editors of Electronic Products have put together a list of some of the gear they have seen and tried out during the past year, and can recommend based on their experience. To browse our gift list, go to http://bit.ly/17IDU6X. And have a very Happy Holiday from all of us at Electronic Products !