Welcome to MiricsPULSE

Hello, and welcome to the inaugural Mirics blog – MiricsPULSE – penned by me, Simon Atkinson, Mirics CEO. On this blog, I will share my thoughts on developments in the electronics industry that interest me, and I hope you will also find these musings interesting.

To kick off MiricsPULSE, let me talk about the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which I recently attended in Las Vegas. The major focus of the show this year was really 3D TV. I have to confess that I am still somewhat cynical about 3D TV in the home environment. The major problem that I see is that in most families, watching TV is as much a social experience as a pure entertainment experience and the need to wear glasses to gain the 3D experience (or even to make the picture watchable), would tend to inhibit social interaction. As a consequence, I cannot really see 3D TV becoming mainstream technology in the home until it is no longer necessary to wear the dreadful ‘Geek Glasses’. As for the individual, living alone, well, I am one of these people that loses my keys, glasses, and TV remote controls with depressing regularity, so having to have one more thing on-hand before I could actually watch TV is definitely a negative. In terms of the technology required to make the 3D viewing experience real without needing to wear polarizing glasses, Samsung seems to be most advanced with making such technology real. The demos that I saw did look quite impressive, but only when viewed from a particular viewing angle.

Beyond the hype over 3D TV, what really has become apparent was the firm establishment in mainstream consumer electronics devices of IP-based connectivity. I saw flat panel TVs, set-top boxes, games consoles and even home energy controllers incorporating IP connectivity – IP truly has become the de-facto connectivity protocol. What seemed to be missing in my view were solutions to the broader challenge of ‘converged content delivery’. By this, I mean that there are a variety of ways in which multimedia content is delivered to the consumer and these methods (be they IP based, cable, satellite or terrestrial broadcast) exist in discretely separate forms. The ‘network of everything’ for content delivery- leveraging the complementary technologies of IP, cellular and broadcast – will open up new multi-media applications and possibilities for today’s devices that were not even dreamt of only a couple of years ago.

Talking of new possibilities, several analysts (most recently ABI, http://tiny.cc/Lq9Fl) have been predicting the rise and rise of ARM – rather than Intel x86 – processor-based ultra-mobile computing and mobile internet platforms. These devices are variously and indiscriminately called netbooks, smartbooks, MIDs and tablets. I find this debate rather tiring – consumers do not care what piece of silicon is powering their favourite device, all they care about is ‘Does it meet my needs?’ Intel has been the dominant power in the PC arena since the 1980′s, and it will not standstill and watch a competitor take a large slice of the commercial pie without a fight. Likewise, whilst over 4 billion ARM-powered processors have been deployed to-date in various applications from handsets to washing machines, ARM cannot rest on its laurels and needs to attack new market segments to grow revenue and bolster margins. Whether Intel or ARM – via its proxies such as Nvidia, Samsung and Qualcomm – eventually comes out on top, or both find an amicable coexistence is not clear. However, ultimately the fierce competition will benefit the consumer, and for that, we should all cheer.