Imaging will be persuasive.
Bad news for the shy and the paranoid, but out of the 290+ attendees at the San Jose event, almost a third of them indicated that they would be designing an application that would use image sensors in the near future. Applications that we discussed with customers ranged from mini-submarines to vision systems on factory assembly lines. Most engineers that we spoke to were surprised to hear that we had purchased Aptina (even those who used Aptina products) and most quickly realized that with the combination of Truesense, Aptina and the old Image Sensor division of Cypress, ON Semiconductor is quickly becoming a major player in this field.

Haptics are hot.
It is always exciting to be in San Jose around the time of an Apple “event” and one of the announcements of interest was the Apple watch. Suddenly, designers were curious to know more about using touch as a remote feedback method from a portable device. Kudos to the TI team for having a mock watch with a Bluetooth receiver, which coupled with a Bluetooth phone could be programmed to give the wearer different tactile sensations depending on the phone setting (although the mother-in-law setting that delivers a stunning jolt was in poor taste I thought). I think we held our own at the ON Semiconductor booth with our combined touch+haptic demo boards (see the earlier blog titled Touch and Proximity Sensing in Wet Conditions by my colleague Steve Sheard for more details).

IoT can be anything you want it to be.
Marketers are like teenagers, always wanting to have the latest hot new product or to engage in the latest fad. When you consider the number of applications that could conceivably come under the umbrella of The Internet of Things (IoT), it shouldn’t surprise us to see the number of components at the show proudly labeled as key to the IoT. It appears that everything from MOSFETS to Intelligent Power Modules plays a part in this brave new world. Since I readily abandoned all shame many years ago when I took my first marketing job, I took the opportunity to explain to anyone careless enough to stop moving for a moment in front of our stand, that although we don’t provide the Digital Core of many of these applications (leave that to ARM, Intel, Xilinx et al.) with 44,000 products in the portfolio we could provide just about every surrounding function. If we consider for a moment a wearable product transmitting to the cloud (from fancy watch to a personal camera to a fitness band) On Semiconductor can provide ultra low power Flash and SRAM, stunning image sensors, battery management components, protection devices, and our latest fuel gauges, the LC7920x family, which do away with the annoyance of your device showing a battery level which goes from 30 minutes left to dead in 60 seconds flat…. (see our video on the topic HERE).
I now get a few days break from the road, time to do the laundry, and perhaps share with you some of the personal lessons from Week 1.
*This is Part II to Eamonn's blog Travel is Not for the Faint of Heart, read it here.