June 15, 2011 Dylan McGrath
Apple agrees to license Nokia patents Apple Inc., will pay a one-time lump sum and ongoing royalties of undisclosed amounts in a patent licensing agreement with Nokia Inc., that settles all patent litigation between the two companies, Nokia said Tuesday (June 14).
Broadcom Corp. has for several years been ahead of the curve in bringing to market combo chips that support multiple wireless communications technologies. In February, the company rolled out a combo SoC, BCM4330, which integrates 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and FM radio technologies on a single silicon die. Late last month at the Computex computer show in Taiwan, Broadcom rolled out another combo chip, BCM43142, for PCs, notebooks and netbooks.
“What we think that we do uniquely well is combine all of these wireless technologies on a single chip and, in doing that, control the RF interference issues and cross talk” that are inherent problems with multiple radios in such close proximity, said Michael Hurlston, senior vice president of Broadcom’s Home and Wireless Networking business unit, at a recent press briefing in San Francisco.
In the cockpit of Europe’s defence, Airbus and satellites conglomerate is a modest man guided by his socialist beliefs
For a Frenchman who presides over a world-famous aerospace brand and counts presidents, central bank chiefs and media tycoons among his peers there is not a sniff of Gallic hauteur about Louis Gallois.
A graduate of the elite École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in Paris, the 67-year-old gathered the stewardship of three major companies under his belt before taking on his biggest job: chief executive of the industrial conglomerate EADS, which has interests spanning defence, satellites and Airbus.
“I had fantastic opportunities and I was extremely lucky. That’s the only thing I can say. It was not because I was the best. In each case I had the chance to be the guy who was needed.”
Noting how 15 years ago he got the top job at SNCF, the French national rail operator, he adds wryly: “The chief executive of SNCF [Loïk Le Floch-Prigent] was in jail and they needed somebody. And nobody wanted it.”
Nor was there much design in his appointment to EADS either, when he was drafted in five years ago amid production delays with the A380 superjumbo airliner and an associated insider-dealing scandal. Gallois has the background that would allow him to be parachuted into most big jobs without concern. ENA has groomed titans of French politics, finance and industry including the former French president Jacques Chirac, Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, and Jean-Marie Messier, the Icarus-like former boss of Vivendi Universal.
Gallois wears the privilege lightly. He happily handshakes his way around the staff at EADS’s London office before the interview, not, you sense, out of noblesse oblige. After all, this is someone who contemplated retiring and opening an antique bookshop before EADS came calling. It is too simplistic to equate his good manners with his strongly held socialist beliefs, but Gallois drives this multinational beast with French principles. “You could say that I am a republican in the French sense of the word, which is not the American one. You know the motto of France: liberty, equality and brotherhood.” Even French rail unions – imagine the RMT with sharper elbows – were won over.
Working at the top of EADS should come naturally to someone schooled to walk the corridors of power. Its Airbus subsidiary provides aeroplanes for scores of well known airlines from British Airways to Emirates. EADS is also part of the Eurofighter consortium that is battling France’s Rafale for a £6.1bn deal to sell 126 military jets to the Indian government, while customers of its defence business, Cassidian, include the UK and US governments, and the Astrium space division runs the UK Ministry of Defence’s satellites. Last year revenues were €45.7bn (£40.4bn).
Shareholder diplomacy is important too, because EADS ownership must be balanced between the 22.5% stake of France’s Lagardère group and the French state; a grouping of Daimler and German banks with a further 22.5%, and the Spanish state with 5%. Britain sold its 20% stake in Airbus in 2006.
The only semblance of a chill comes when Gallois is asked if he enjoys the politics involved in running EADS. Christian Streiff quit as Airbus chief executive after 100 days in 2006, saying that balancing French and German interests was impossible, adding: “I hope my resignation will be a salutary shock.”
Gallois, flattening the question politely, is keen to keep politics out of it. Acknowledging that governments are important EADS customers, he says they do not interfere as shareholders. “I cannot say that the politics are interfering in the management of the company. I cannot say that. I know that I have to protect the balance inside the company: French, German, British and Spanish. I know that, but I am not receiving phone calls from any government on any topic.”
Nonetheless, it is impossible to talk about EADS and not touch on political issues, since it is a huge firm exposed to defence spending cuts in the western world, sensitive to fluctuations in the euro and, as a multinational, reliant on business-friendly environments in a range of countries. On this point, Gallois has no complaints regarding Britain, where EADS is a major employer, including the Broughton Airbus site in Flintshire, north Wales; the Filton Airbus site in Bristol and 23 other sites around Britain.
When the company’s 17,000-strong UK staff are mentioned, interrupts. They are at the top end of industry, he says: “High-technology people, skilled workers, engineers. We are spending more than a lot of British companies on research and development.”
The seemingly interminable saga over reductions in Britain’s £37bn defence budget is not a problem for EADS either, Gallois adds, because the coalition government has laid out its spending plans until 2015 already. “What we appreciate in the UK is we know exactly where you are.” He adds: “We receive the support we need for research on the UK in defence. The UK is not at a disadvantage compared with France, Germany and Spain. It is a good base to do business.”
Of greater concern to Gallois is the euro. EADS trades in euros but it sells planes in dollars so the stresses and strains of the eurozone, and its currency fluctuations, play havoc with planning. Gallois is confident that the eurozone will not break up and a solution will be found for Greece.
“Greece is small,” he says. “It means we have the capacity to find a positive outcome to this crisis and I think we need it to strengthen the euro. You know we are not for a too-strong euro [to aid exports] but we need a sustainable common currency.” In the long-term, he adds, the world needs a more stable currency market: Airbus aircraft jets are bought in dollars while most of EADS’s 122,000 staff are paid in euros. A weak dollar and a strong euro is an excruciating combination for EADS.
Airbus exemplifies EADS’s global footprint. It employs 52,500 people in the US, China, Japan, the Middle East and its Toulouse base, and its jets fly all over the world. The success of Airbus – it had sales of nearly €30bn last year – is one of the reasons why Gallois is determined to push into emerging markets, which he describes as calls the third pillar in the group’s growth strategy. “We want to balance commercial aircraft manufacturing, which represents 65% of our activities, with other activities to reduce the risk we are taking with aircraft.”
The interview took place before last week’s interim report into the Air France Airbus crash in the Atlantic two years ago but Gallois declined to make a detailed comment about the disaster, which killed all 228 passengers and crew. “We have to know what happened,” he says, reserving judgment until the final report later this year.
The report by France’s BEA air crash investigation agency indicated that the A330 pilot, confused by conflicting speed signals in the cockpit, mistakenly slowed the plane down into a stall that could not be arrested. Airbus had a scare last year when a Qantas-owned A380, the world’s largest and most modern passenger plane, suffered an engine blow-out over Indonesia. Luckily, the ruptured engine disc blew three holes in the wing and not the fuselage. Rolls-Royce, Britain’s own industrial powerhouse, has spent £56m so far on rectifying the problem.
Gallois says the A380 came out of it well: “We are always alarmed when we have an incident and this one was significant. We had three shocks and the aeroplane was certified to receive one shock not three. We demonstrated the resilience of the aeroplane.”
Gallois steps down next year with the German chief of Airbus, Thomas Enders, his most likely replacement. There has been less tumult under his leadership, reflecting his modest, mandarin style. In a last attempt to get politics into the conversation, Gallois’s bonus is raised. In 2008 he gave an estimated €1m to charity, with a further €1m expected to be given away this year.
“I think when you are gaining a lot of money it is creating some duties in front of society. It is my opinion – it is absolutely personal, it is not a criticism of other people. I feel more comfortable. It is a way for me to stay free.”
Born 26 January 1944
Education Economics at École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC); École Nationale d’Administration (ENA)
Career 1972-89: Posts in ministries of economy and finance, research and industry, and defence; 1989: chairman and chief executive of engine-maker Snecma; 1992: chief executive, Aérospatiale [predecessor of EADS]; 1996: chief executive, SNCF; 2006: co-chief executive, EADS; 2007: chief executive, EADS
Family Married with two children
Interests Rugby, antique books, cycling, baroque Bavarian churches
<from http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/03/interview-eads-chief-louis-gallois?CMP=twt_fd>
Richard Wilson
Wednesday 01 June 2011 11:57
Maxim Integrated Products has acquired a Scottish analogue mixed-signal chip design firm.
Edinburgh-based Calvatec is attractive to Maxim because of its intellectual proporerty (IP) for analogue system-on-a-chip (SoCs). Calvatec employs 15 people.
Calvatec’s technology is targeted at end-markets such as mobile phones, laptops & GPS systems.
This is the latest in a number of acquisitions by the US-based chip supplier over the last few years as it reorganised its product development around end markets.
Written by Mike James Thursday, 26 May 2011 16:05
Modern computational linguistics can crack the encryption on VOIP calls well enough to reconstruct what is being said. Even though they are encrypted, the frames that make up a Skype call contain clues about what phonemes are being spoken.
Cracking a code is usually a complex matter of mathematics and nothing much else other than mathematics. However, if the encrypted data contain any statistical relationship to the original data then there can be shortcut ways to decryption that make the whole thing much less secure. This is well known and yet you might be surprised to discover that Skype, and many other forms of VOIP telephone systems, are vulnerable to this sort of attack.
The reason is that the best form of compression for voice data makes use of the structure of speech – the Linear Predictive Filter. The basic idea is that the data is compressed by using an input code word that represents the sound made in the throat by the vocal chords. Then a set of parameters are set in a filter which represents the shape of the mouth and resonant cavities. The parameters are set so that the output matches the sound as well as it can – this is an example of analysis by synthesis, i.e. you analyze a signal by setting up a system that creates it accurately.
Skype uses Code Excited Linear Prediction in which the data in a frame consists of a code word, the gain coefficient and a set of linear prediction coefficients. The next step in processing the data is that the frame is compressed using a variable bit rate scheme and this produces a frame that has a size that does depend on the type of phoneme that has been encoded. The encryption step that follows doesn’t change the size of the frame and so the encrypted data that is transmitted has a correlation between frame size and phoneme uttered.
In theory working out what is said from a loose correlation between frame size and phoneme should be very difficult. However a computer scientists and linguists at the University of North Carolina have used the grammar of phonemes to restrict the possibilities for pairs and larger groups of phonemes in the data stream. This allows them to match the patterns of data frame sizes with most likely patterns of phonemes. These phoneme patterns are then mapped to most likely words, a technique they call “Phonotactic Reconstruction”. PhonemeMethod
In practice it turned out to be surprisingly effective – although probably not good enough to eavesdrop on any conversation at any time. Some times the method works much better than expected and some times it can’t crack the data stream. The researchers state that with improved computational linguistics they could achieve a much better success rate.
What ever the future holds it is clear that the method of compression leaves too much information in the clear after encryption. A solution might be to break the data up into fixed sized frames but this would make it more difficult to reconstruct the data if there was packet loss.
<more at http://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/2487-cracking-a-skype-call-using-phonemes.html>
<from http://750words.com/>
I’ve long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist’s Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day. Unlike many of the other exercises in that book, I found that this one actually worked and was really really useful.
I’ve used the exercise as a great way to think out loud without having to worry about half-formed ideas, random tangents, private stuff, and all the other things in our heads that we often filter out before ever voicing them or writing about them. It’s a daily brain dump. Over time, I’ve found that it’s also very helpful as a tool to get thoughts going that have become stuck, or to help get to the bottom of a rotten mood.
750 Words is the online, future-ified, fun-ified translation of this exercise. Here’s how it works:
<more at http://750words.com/>
February 26, 2007
The title of this post says it all, and it tends to apply to most people in most walks of life:
The list goes on and on. To elaborate, a good example of the last point is projects where people to database to database batch-integration because databases is what they know, even though some sort of messaging solution may be more appropriate in most cases.
Whats the point of this? Well, most people will tend to try to solve problems, even unfamiliar ones with familiar tools even if they are completely wrong and counter-intuitive, you do not solve a problem with more process if the problem is bureaucracy, or over-regulation with more legislation. It’s a problem that exists everywhere, at every level.
The solution? There are no simple ones, because most of the time people make implicit assumptions without even being aware that they are assumptions and not facts. But you can get a long way by trying to question yourself more, and understanding what assumptions you are making. That, and expanding your actual toolbox to incorporate a wider variety of tools will be the most useful things to do. However this is not easy, as people like familiarity, and most people actually don’t like change or learning new things if they seem challenging.. This means that people who are inquisitive, curious and prepared to ask the stupid questions and perhaps look a bit stupid in the process are worth their weight in gold.
Electrical engineers who expressed skepticism that Hewlett Packard Co.’s memristors could switch as fast as DRAM and yet retain their memories millions of times longer than flash can now rest easy, according to their inventor, senior HP Fellow Stanley Williams.
Memristors are touted as the future “universal memory” device because they are as fast as DRAM, as small as flash, and as durable as read-only-memories, according to HP. As the fourth fundamental passive circuit element—after resistors, capacitors and inductors—memristors retain either a high- or low-resistance state by virtue of introducing or removing oxygen vacancies in oxide thin films.
Using their favorite formulation—titanium oxide—HP recently used high-energy synchrotron x-rays to correlate the device’s electrical characteristics with its atomic structure, chemistry, and temperature in three dimensions. The until now unforeseen conclusion was that a hot spot near the bottom electrode heats enough during switching to induce a crystallization of the oxide. After driving out vacancies (for a 1) or introducing them (for a 0) in one-to-two nanometers thick region, the film cools in an annealing-like like process which leaves the film in a fixed crystalline state that should remain that way indefinitely.
“In testing, we have switched these devices over 30 billion times and counting, with no degradaton in their ability to retain information,” said Williams.
HP is currently working with Hynix Semiconductor Inc., to create commercial memories based on memristive technology.
Dylan McGrath 5/11/2011 2:18 PM EDT SAN FRANCISCO
The U.S. International Trade Commission issued an exclusion order Tuesday (May 10), barring further importation into the U.S. of MEMS microphones sold by Knowles Electronics Inc. that were found to infringe patents held by Analog Devices Inc. The exclusion order is effective July 11. The exclusion order was issued after the ITC ruled that Knowles infringed an ADI patent covering the coating of wafer anti-stiction application in MEMS manufacturing. The patent at issue is U.S. patent No. 7,364,942. Knowles (Itasca, Ill.) said it no longer uses the processes at issue in the ITC case. The ITC’s order prohibits the unlicensed entry of MEMS devices or products that contain MEMS devices which infringe claims two through six of the patent No. 7,364,942 that are manufactured by or on behalf of Knowles or Mouser Electronics Inc. (Mansfield, Texas), according to the order. The ITC’s decision confirms an initial ruling by an ITC administrative law judge issued on Dec. 23, 2010, which found that Knowles infringed ADI’s patent. The ruling did reverse part of the administrative law judge’s December ruling pertaining to some other patents at issue. “We are very pleased that the ITC ruled in our favor,” said Mark Martin, vice president of ADI’s MEMS/Sensor Technology Group, in a statement. “While we are gratified that the ITC has granted our request and issued an exclusion order barring importation of Knowles microphones into the United States, our dispute with Knowles is not over,” said Margaret Seif, ADI vice president and general counsel. Seif said ADI expects to recover “significant financial damages for Knowles’ past sales of infringing MEMS microphones,” through a pending lawsuit against Knowles in Delaware. “In addition, we will do what we can to insure that Knowles does not import infringing products into the United States, either directly or indirectly,” Seif said. Knowles said the ITC’s ruling clears the way for the company to continue selling and importing its MEMS microphones. The company previously transitioned all of its production to a manufacturing process that ADI did not claim infringed its patents during the ITC ITC investigation. “The ITC has now expressly affirmed an earlier ruling that products manufactured under Knowles’s current process would not be subject to any exclusion order issued by the ITC,” Knowles said in a statement. The ITC’s decision makes clear that imports by Knowles’s customers who incorporate Knowles’ microphones into their products may continue without interruption, regardless of the process used to manufacture those microphones, Knowles said. In January, the ITC confirmed an earlier ruling by the administrative law judge in the case, which found that two of Knowles’ patents were invalid, and that ADI was not restricted from selling its own MEMS microphones.
<from http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4215918/ITC-bans-Knowles-MEMS-microphones-from-U-S–>
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