AHRG: Augmented Hyper-Reality Glove video gives you the idea how thing works:

The Augmented Hyper-Reality Glove can identify upper-cuts and karate chops using flex and tilt sensors and play the accompanying sound effect using an Arduino-powered Adafruit wave shield.

Understanding and mitigating tin whiskers article says that tin whiskers are almost invisible to the human eye and are 10 to 100 times thinner than a human hair. They can bridge fairly large distances between electrical device leads, and in so doing, can short out the conductors. They can grow fairly rapidly; incubation can range from days to years.

Toyota has had problems with uncontrolled acceleration. Earlier report have said that the acceleration problems that led to the recall of nearly eight million Toyota cars and trucks in 2009 and 2010 were mechanical. Yet some believe that the issue goes beyond the floor mats and some new material on that has just surfaced. Toyota accelerations revisited—hanging by a (tin) whisker article tells that a NASA paper delivered at the International Tin Whisker Symposium last year reported on tin whisker growth in Toyota accelerator pedal position sensors that could lead to unintended acceleration. The whiskers were found in a “failed” sensor from a 2003 Camry and at least two other similar units that did not malfunction. The NASA paper gives further insight by detailing tin whisker physical behavior as well as outlining guidelines and methods of detecting whiskers.

Understanding and mitigating tin whiskers paper tells that tin whiskers are real, and they pose a serious problem for electronics of all types. Connectors, passive and active components, switches, and relays now must all be lead-free, and the switch to alternative solders in order to achieve RoHS compliance has created some challenges for the semiconductor industry, especially tin whiskers. Pure, tin-plated electronics have become ubiquitous over just the past five years. When used as a finish material for electronic components, pure tin can spontaneously grow conductive whiskers.

When a whisker grows between two conductors, the whisker usually fuses (disappears), creating a momentary short circuit. In some cases the whisker forms a conductive path, creating false signals at an incorrect location. In very rare cases, rather than disappearing like a fuse link, the whisker can instead form a conductive plasma.

Because the electronics industry does not really know what causes tin whiskers, cannot predict their appearance other than to say whiskers are likely to form on pure tin. Also higher the altitude, the more rapid the whisker formation.

Here are some suggestions for reducing the risk of tin whiskers:
1. Do not use pure tin. Studies have shown that alloying tin with a second metal reduces the propensity for whisker growth. (minimum of 3% lead by weight is acceptable)
2. Do not rely on the order paperwork. Use x-ray fluorescence (XRF) to verify finish on all critical parts.
3. Refinish a pure tin-finished part with a hot-solder dip. Stripping and replating is a recommended approach and is a service offered by some of the original part manufacturers.
4. Use some type of encapsulation or conformal coating. Uralane 5750 conformal can provide some benefit by reducing the growth rate, but tin whiskers can grow through conformal coating.

The shift away from lead solder presents risks for high-reliability applications, particularly in the form of tin whiskers on tin-containing finishes. When a tin-bearing finish is used, conformal coatings have been somewhat effective in fighting this problem. Because of the potentially dangerous and unpredictable risks of pure tin, it is not presently used in medical devices.

NASA has lost satellites due tin whisker. NASA Tin Whisker (and Other Metal Whisker) Homepage has more details on that. Tin Whiskers in Electronics Components white paper from Tyco Electronics is also good reading with lots of pictures.

Usually most of the IT problems visible to society are the same ones that system and service providers perceive to be the most problematic. Compensation alone will not satisfy users when the incident creates unpredictability and uncertainty for them. After service degradation, users are eager to use the service again if they receive relevant information. Information and knowledge thus play a significant role in incidents. Users will continue to IT after the failure, using a service, most likely, when they get the problem situation in a sufficient factual information.

This is stated in a recent Finnish study, doctoral thesis Information technology incidents in the present information society : Viewpoints of service providers, users, and the mass media, which examined the users’ thinking and intentions of the services provided at the time of their IT-related problems after the failures.

Clear information can bring significant competitive advantages over other service providers.

The WIMM One has a worthy ambition: shifting information from your smartphone screen to your wrist. The aim is to allow you to get on with life rather than pulling your phone from your pocket every thirty seconds. WIMM is a smart watch harnesses Android, a high-tech display and sensors.

The current developer kit version is targeted at developers. Commercial versions for end-consumers are expected in the coming months. For more details read WIMM One Developer Kit Review. Looks interesting based on the video and interview article.

Hy the way another interesting hacker watch product is EZ430-Chronos from Texas Instruments. I have seen this Chronos product in real life on hand of one TI field application engineer.

The rivalry between ARM and Intel in this arena is predictably intense because try as it will, Intel has not been able to bring the power consumption of its Atom CPUs down to the level of ARM-based designs (Atom typically in 1-4 watt range and a single ARM Cortex-A9 core in the 250 mW range). ARM’s East unimpressed with Medfield, design wins article tells that Warren East, CEO of processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England), is unimpressed by the announcements made by chip giant Intel about the low-power Medfield system-chip and its design wins. On the other hand Android will run better on our chips, says Intel. Look out what happens in this competition.

Windows-on-ARM Spells End of Wintel article tells that Brokerage house Nomura Equity Research forecasts that the emerging partnership between Microsoft and ARM will likely end the Windows-Intel duopoly. The long-term consequences for the world’s largest chip maker will likely be an exit from the tablet market as ARM makes inroads in notebook computers. As ARM is surely going to keep pointing out to everyone, they don’t have to beat Intel’s raw performance to make a big splash in this market, because for these kinds of devices, speed isn’t everything, and their promised power consumption advantage will surely be a major selling point.

Windows 8 Release Expected in 2012 article says that Windows 8 will be with us in 2012, according to Microsoft roadmaps. Microsoft still hinting at October Windows 8 release date. It will be seen what are the ramifications of Windows 8, which is supposed to run on either the x86 or ARM architectures. Windows on ARM will not be terribly successful says analyst but it is left to be seen is he right. ARM-based chip vendors that Microsoft is working with (TI, Nvidia, Qualcomm) are now focused on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) because this is where the biggest perceived advantages of ARM-based chips lie, and do not seem to be actively working on PC designs.

Engineering Windows 8 for mobile networks is going on. Windows 8 Mobile Broadband Enhancements Detailed article tells that using mobile broadband in Windows 8 will no longer require specific drivers and third-party software. This is thanks to the new Mobile Broadband Interface Model (MBIM) standard, which hardware makers are reportedly already beginning to adopt, and a generic driver in Windows 8 that can interface with any chip supporting that standard. Windows will automatically detect which carrier it’s associated with and download any available mobile broadband app from the Windows store. MBIM 1.0 is a USB-based protocol for host and device connectivity for desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. The specification supports multiple generations of GSM and CDMA-based 3G and 4G packet data services including the recent LTE technology.

Consumerization of IT is a hot trend that continues at year 2012. Uh-oh, PC: Half of computing device sales are mobile. Mobile App Usage Further Dominates Web, Spurred by Facebook article tells that the era of mobile computing, catalyzed by Apple and Google, is driving among the largest shifts in consumer behavior over the last forty years. Impressively, its rate of adoption is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet Boom of the 1990s. By the end of 2012, Flurry estimates that the cumulative number of iOS and Android devices activated will surge past 1 billion, making the rate of iOS and Android smart device adoption more than four times faster than that of personal computers (over 800 million PCs were sold between 1981 and 2000). Smartphones and tablets come with broadband connectivity out-of-the-box. Bring-your-own-device becoming accepted business practice.

Mobile UIs: It’s developers vs. users article tells that increased emphasis on distinctive smartphone UIs means even more headaches for cross-platform mobile developers. Whose UI will be a winner? Native apps trump the mobile Web.The increased emphasis on specialized mobile user interface guidelines casts new light on the debate over Web apps versus native development, too.

The Cloud is Not Just for Techies Anymore tells that cloud computing achieves mainstream status. So we demand more from it. That’s because our needs and expectations for a mainstream technology and an experimental technology differ. Once we depend on a technology to run our businesses, we demand minute-by-minute reliability and performance.

Cloud security is no oxymoron article is estimated that in 2013 over $148 billion will be spent on cloud computing. Companies large and small are using the cloud to conduct business and store critical information. The cloud is now mainstream. The paradigm of cloud computing requires cloud consumers to extend their trust boundaries outside their current network and infrastructure to encompass a cloud provider. There are three primary areas of cloud security that relate to almost any cloud implementation: authentication, encryption, and network access control. If you are dealing with those issues and software design, read Rugged Software Manifesto and Rugged Software Development presentation.

Enterprise IT’s power shift threatens server-huggers article tells that as more developers take on the task of building, deploying, and running applications on infrastructure outsourced to Amazon and others, traditional roles of system administration and IT operations will morph considerably or evaporate.

Explosion in “Big Data” Causing Data Center Crunch article tells that global business has been caught off-guard by the recent explosion in data volumes and is trying to cope with short-term fixes such as buying in data centre capacity. Oracle also found that the number of businesses looking to build new data centres within the next two years has risen. Data centre capacity and data volumes should be expected to go up – this drives data centre capacity building. Data centre capacity and data volumes should be expected to go up – this drives data centre capacity building. Most players active on “Big Data” field seems to plan to use Apache Hadoop framework for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. At least EMC, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Informatica, HP, Dell and Cloudera are using Hadoop.

Cloud storage has been very popular topic lately to handle large amount of data storage. The benefits have been told very much, but now we can also see risks of that to realize. Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model? article claims that Megaupload Type Shutdowns and Patriot Act are killing interest to Cloud Storage. Many innocent Megaupload users have had their data taken away from them. The MegaUpload seizure shows how personal files hosted on remote servers operated by a third party can easily be caught up in a government raid targeted at digital pirates. In the wake of Megaupload crackdown, fear forces similar sites to shutter sharing services?. If you use any of these cloud storage sites to store or distribute your own non-infringing files, you are wise to have backups elsewhere, because they may be next on the DOJ’s copyright hit list.

Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model? article tells that worries have been steadily growing among European IT leaders that the USA Patriot Act would give the U.S. government unfettered access to their data if stored on the cloud servers of American providers. Escaping the grasp of the Patriot Act may be more difficult than the marketing suggests. “You have to fence yourself off and make sure that neither you or your cloud service provider has any operations in the United States”, “otherwise you’re vulnerable to U.S. jurisdiction.” And the cloud computing model is built on the argument data can and should reside anywhere around the world, freely passing between borders.

Data centers to cut LAN cord? article mentions that 60GHz wireless links are tested in data centers to ease east-west traffic jams. According to a recent article in The New York Times, data center and networking techies are playing around with 60GHz wireless networking for short-haul links to give rack-to-rack communications some extra bandwidth for when the east-west traffic goes a bit wild. The University of Washington and Microsoft Research published a paper at the Association of Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM 2011 conference late last year about their tests of 60GHz wireless links in the data center. Their research used prototype links that bear some resemblance to the point-to-point, high bandwidth technology known as WiGig (Wireless Gigabit), which among other things is being proposed as a means to support wireless links between Blu-ray DVD players and TVs, replacing HDMI cables (Wilocity Demonstrates 60 GHz WiGig (Draft 802.11ad) Chipset at CES). 60 GHz band is suitable for indoor, high-bandwidth use in information technology.. There are still many places for physical wires. The wired connections used in a data center are highly reliable, so “why introduce variability in a mission-critical situation?”

If you think that tcpdump has been made obsolete by GUI tools like Wireshark, think again. Wireshark is a great application; it’s just not the right tool for the job in every situation.

tcpdump uses a “one-off-command” approach that lends itself to quick, on-the-spot answers. You can run it through an SSH session, doesn’t need X and is more likely to be there when you need it. And, because tcpdump uses standard command-line conventions (such as writing to STDOUT, which can be redirected), tcpdump can be used in all sorts of creative, interesting and extremely useful ways.

You can even use tcpdump and Wireshark together by capturing the network data with tcpdump for viewing with Wireshark. To ensure that you capture complete packets, use the following command:

tcpdump -i <interface> -s 65535 -w <some-file>

tcpdump fu article introduces some of the basics of packet capture and provide a breakdown of tcpdump syntax and usage. Manual page of tcpdump lists you all the command line options you can use.

If you are embedded Linux system developer, remember that you can easily fit the tcpdump program inside a small embedded Linux system without too much problem (which is not the case with Wireshark, because it is a huge program that needs GUI and has many dependencies).

Learn the most important new technologies and start designing next-generation equipment early if you are working on real technology company. The real technology companies asks are Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Google good technology companies or good applications-of-technology companies? Applications-of-technology could also be a good position to be. No matter where you are differentiate to dominate. No more lame “me too” products. CES is over; it’s time to start designing. Here are some material to fuel up your innovation.

EE Times’ 20 hot technologies for 2012 article is a list of 20 technologies EE Times editors think can bring big changes, and that EE Times will be tracking during 2012. Hot technologies: Looking ahead to 2012 article: EDN magazine editors reflect on some of the hot trends and technologies in 2011 – and look ahead to 2012.

Top 12 Hot Design Technologies for 2012 article mentions MEMS, Wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things starts with lightbulbs, new flexibility via organic materials for electronics, Near Field Communication (NFC) is becoming available in many mobile phones, Printed electronics, power scavenging methods for low power electronics, Graphene, conversion of solar energy, Ethernet displaces proprietary field buses, 40/100 Gbit/s Ethernet Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays and Smart Grid technologies (power management and architecture system components). We are nearing the point where some microelectronics systems can be made sufficiently low power – requiring microamps rather than milliamps – that scavenging methods can produce enough power to enable them to be autonomous.

Home electronics is expected to become a new status symbol (Kodinelektroniikasta uusi statussymboli) article tells that consumer electronics demand will increase further in 2012 according to market research by Deloitte. Latest digital technology will also become a status symbol in homes. In particular, tablets, and smartphones Deloitte expects record sales.

Mobile phones with advanced features start to replace traditional separate devices for different functions. This is happening for small digital cameras and video cameras. 2012 At the end of 2012 there is the more navigation capable mobile phones than the stand-alone GPS navigators according to Berg Insight. Berg Insight calculates that the sales of separate GPS navigators started to decline already in 2011. Nav equipment manufacturers have responded to the situation by bringing the software to mobile devices.

How apps for your appliances represent the next opportunity article tells that Samsung Electronics not only pushed its smart TVs at CES, but a whole line of smart appliances, including washers and refrigerators. If Samsung Electronics is right, developers may flock to smart appliances as the next opportunity. That included music apps such as Pandora on the refrigerator and an app on the washer that can ping you when a load is done.

IPv6 is becoming more important. One of the driving forces behind the move from IPv4 to IPv6 has been low-cost embedded devices, which are going online at an accelerating pace. Support for this technology will be crucial for the success of many forthcoming connected embedded devices. IPv6 on a microcontroller article gives some tips how to implement IPv6 on small microcontroller.

The science fiction future of medical implants is here article tells that semiconductor solutions contained in hand-held consumer product innovations are now finding their way into medical implantables: wireless data and power transmission as well as analog, microcontrollers and transducer capabilities.

App Servers and Lua Scripting Speed Rich Web Applications for Small Devices article tells that with ever more smart devices connecting to the web, even small embedded devices must be able to serve up rich graphical presentations of the data to satisfy user expectations. This creates a new challenge for designers of small embedded systems as a new task. With time and space at a premium, a scripting approach can be invaluable. LAMP (Linux, Apache, mysql, PHP) setups work well in full-up web server implementations (at least around 65 Mbyte of memory), but for small embedded system we need something that uses less resources. Smartphones have set the bar ridiculously high when it comes to how sophisticated the application interface should be.

We’re on the cusp of an era that offers better-than-ever display technologies for an excitingly immersive viewer experience. Just as we’ve seen the emergence of 3DTV for consumers and higher than HDTV resolutions are to be tested in 2012 London Olympics. Xilinx Making Immersive 3D and 4K2K Displays Possible with 7 Series FPGA System Integration press release tells that Xilinx just introduced new 28nm Kintex™-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based targeted reference designs and a new development baseboard for accelerating the development of next-generation, 3D and 4K2K display technologies at 2012 International CES. The network infrastructure will need an overhaul in 2012 due to the increasing amounts of high-definition video and other traffic.

ARM processor becomes more and more popular during year 2012. Power and Integration—ARM Making More Inroads into More Designs. It’s about power—low power; almost no power. A huge and burgeoning market is opening for devices that are handheld and mobile. The most obvious among these are smartphones and tablets, but there is also an increasing number of industrial and military devices that fall into this category. ARM’s East unimpressed with Medfield, design wins article tells that Warren East, CEO of processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England), is unimpressed by the announcements made by chip giant Intel about the low-power Medfield system-chip and its design wins. Android will run better on our chips, says Intel. Look out what happens in this competition.

Bill McClean: Don’t broad-brush the semiconductor market article tells that year 2011 started off great, full of optimism and high growth expectations for the semiconductor industry. But that mellowed as the year progressed (total semiconductor market at 2% growth for this year, although smartphone increase very much). Going into 2012, there’s not a lot of optimism. Any thoughts on 2013? A: We’re thinking it’s going to be a little slower than 2012. So, we’re looking to a slower market—not a disaster.

Chip sales flat in 2011, will grow (a wee bit) in 2012 article tells that the prognosticators at Gartner have ranked the chip makers of the world by 2011 revenue and are calling the market for 2012, with a reasonably upbeat forecast for next year’s chip sales, but (paradoxically) a dreadful forecast for companies that make the gear to bake the chips. Disk shortages are expected to slow down PC sales for several quarters. Smartphones, tablets, and flash will represent more than three-quarters of the revenue growth between now and 2015.

There are also some more optimistic predictions for chip sales. Malcolm Penn, founder and chief analyst with semiconductor market analysis firm Future Horizons Ltd, is more bullish than most other market analysts. Bullish Penn sees chip market growth of 8% in 2012 article tells that Malcolm Penn has predicted that the global chip market will rise on an annual basis by 8% to $323.2 billion in 2012. Penn said that after a flat first quarter he expected the chip market to bounce back in the second half of the year. He considers that 8% growth is a “safe bet,” and indicated that annual growth “could easily be 20%.” For 2013 Future Horizons forecasts 20% annual growth.

EDN magazine writes in PC boards: Materials and processing are now a hot technology article that exotic substrates and fabrication methods are now commonplace. A dozen layers, thick copper, fine lines, and buried vias are just the processing side of the modern high-tech PCB. There are many processing options that have made PCBs truly a hot technology. Also the substrates themselves are now high tech. Traditional FR-2 (phenolic resin bonded paper) or FR-4 (glass-reinforced epoxy laminate) are not the only widely supported choices anymore. You could always specify Teflon or polyamide substrates for high-speed circuits. In addition to the old high tech like flex circuits, there are a host of improvements that make a whole new set of high-tech PCB designs that are truly a hot technology.

EDA industry predictions for 2012 mentions that 28-nm design starts will increase by 50% in 2012 and more people will be dabbling with 20 nm. The increased design sizes and complexity will create all kinds of pressure in the verification and test fields.

The rise in fake parts is also contributing to engineers’ fears that their products will be corrupted. Counterfeit electronic components were big issue in 2011, and the problem does not go away this year.

EDA industry predictions for 2012 mentions a trend, and one that has been going on for some time, is a continued migration of functionality from hardware to software. Dr Markus Willems of Synopsys attributed this to “the needs to support multiple standards simultaneously (wireless, multimedia), use the same hardware platform for product derivatives (automotive), quickly adjust to evolving standards (wireless), and react to changing market demands (all applications).” Increased rate of adoption of new technologies such as tablets, ultra-books, and their inherent demand for low-power solutions will help the EDA industry improve their importance. Electronic system-level design tools (ESL) continues to be an important thrust for the EDA industry. Increased adoption of the TLM 2.0 (Transaction-level modeling) standard is a popular theme. Several EDA companies have been busy writing books recently and self-publishing them.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools are taking product design to the next level (especially in automotive, aerospace, and defense). PLM was launched more than a decade ago with the lofty vision of creating an enterprise-wide, central repository for all product-related data, from the earliest customer requirements feedback through quality and failure data collected in the field by maintenance and support personnel. Product lifecycle management, sometimes “product life cycle management”, represents an all-encompassing vision for managing all data relating to the design, production, support and ultimate disposal of manufactured goods. What 2012 holds for Product Lifecycle Management? article tells about current PLM trends.

The prototype comes of age article tells that a radical change is about to happen in the typical development of an electronic system. The hardware-development flow will no longer be the center around which everything else revolves. The rising size and complexity of systems and the limitations of using a single-purpose model—the hardware-design model—have fueled the growth of new prototyping technologies. Among the changes now taking place in this area is the migration to higher levels of abstraction for hardware design. The ability to derive several implementations from a single high-level description is also desirable. Many hardware blocks now come with sophisticated software stacks, and they also must be integrated into the software flow.

‘KISS’ Among Engineers’ Top 2012 Concerns article tells that Rich Merritt agrees that we’ve forgotten the KISS principle especially in automation sector. “We’ve made everything so complicated, complex, and convoluted that we’ve entered the age of ‘transoptimal engineering,’ ” he says. “That is, things are so advanced and have so many features, they don’t work anymore.” Business development manager Herat Shah sees the pressures for complexity and price converging in an unhealthy manner. “The biggest issue for the automation and control supplier is to design and engineer something that’s the cheapest and the best,” he says. “Practically, this is not possible.” In addition to this there are security concerns: Stuxnet targeted controllers, and made engineers realize that factories aren’t immune to security threats.

How do you manage the Internet of you? article claims that electronics has gotten to the point (in the consumer space) where the only innovations are the mundane, the enhancements, the extensions. A computing device today (whether a tablet, a phone or a PC) can do what telephony, typewriters, pen and ink, film (motion and still), cameras, television, radio (basically all major mediums) did a generation ago. And yet… And yet we still innovate. We still build. We still buy. The devices in one sense feed the worst part of a personality: compulsiveness. They suppress pause and reflection. Think about it.

There has been many different car charging connectors in use on electronic vehicles. Electric Car Charging Standards Split article tells that many car manufacturers have agreed on a single EV charging port connector standard that has been in development by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) for several years. European car companies have been divided on standards for both AC and DC charging. The new single connector will support fast DC charging as well as be backward compatible with the J1772 AC charger that is standard on many plug-in electric vehicles today. I think that use of that standard will rise in 2012, and common charging standard will speed up the EV deployment.

Automotive electronics: What’s hot in 2012 article tells that in automotive electronics, 2012 looks to be a year of consolidation as technologies introduced previously become more widespread across model lines. In particular, voice recognition, with different features and interfaces, is seen as a way of distinguishing one brand from another, while electrified power trains in the form of hybrids and pure electric drives will be available in more models. In keep costs down driven auto industry the more mature the technology that goes into a car, the less risk of failure and costly warranty claims.

Cars and smartphones start to communicate using MirrorLink technology to allow new features. MirrorLink™ has been developed with the objective to provide a technology, offering seamless (extremely simple from the consumer perspective) connectivity between a smart phone and the in-vehicle infotainment system. It uses IP technologies in order to be independent of the physical transport mechanism and supports many car connectivity solutions (Bluetooth, WLAN, USB etc.). Whereas MirrorLink™ does allow any legacy application on the mobile device to show-up on the car display, it specifically enables easy development of mobile device based automotive applications.

Ethernet for Vehicles is gaining momentum in in the car. Ethernet for Vehicles Advances article tells that Ethernet technology in the car (a concept that was once unthinkable for the automotive industry) has been gaining momentum lately. Special interest group, known as the OPEN (One-Pair-Ether-Net) SIG, is aimed at driving broad-scale adoption of Ethernet in vehicles, largely to serve the expected boom of camera-based applications in cars. Many vehicles now have backup cameras, and many others are going to add cameras for such applications as lanekeeping, adaptive cruise control, and collision avoidance.

There is going to be an increasing number of Driver Information applications that involve displaying complex images and graphics. Xilinx Paves the Way for a New Generation of Automotive Driver Assistance and Infotainment Systems at CES 2012. World’s first Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based Ethernet Audio/Video Bridging (EAVB) network implementation optimized for carrying high-speed data traffic within the automobile was shown at CES 2012. The IEEE 802.1 EAVB standard is already gaining the attention of a number of leading automotive manufacturers even though the specifications are still being finalized. OMG! Amazing home displays and automotive Ethernet AVB stuff from Xilinx article gives some more details what is expected in near future.

New electronics features are making challenges for developers. Automotive Electronics: Do We Really Need All This Stuff? article tells that everyone in the auto industry knows that the number of electronic control units (ECUs) in vehicles is nearing the point of unmanageability. Low-end vehicles now incorporate between 35 and 40 ECUs, while luxury cars may have 80 or more. “We’re right up against the limit right now. We need to find unique ways to integrate features and functions, and give our customers what they want without overloading our controllers.” The number of automotive features and functions keeps rising.

Would Cellphone Ban Secure Car Safety? article tells that the proliferation of in-car entertainment technologies (internet routers, smartphone links, MP3 connections, capacitive touch screens, etc.) are great for selling cars. Auto executives understand what consumers want: Many people don’t want a car with no extra features. Those new extra features have also sparked a serious debate about driver distraction dangers. “According to NHTSA [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents.” “You’re dealing with human nature here. People want what they want. And sometimes they want more than they should have.”