Synopsys is a finalist for EDN’s Innovator of the Year.

I’d like to ask all the readers of this blog to please go to the EDN website and vote for Synopsys.  Our engineers have worked hard to create a combined solution of USB 3.0 SuperPHY and USB 3.0 Controllers of the highest performance, highest quality and lowest area.  This lets our customer concentrate on the features that really add value like minimizing power consumption, maximizing system performance, or fantastic industrial design.

Please go to the link below and vote for Synopsys.

http://www.edn.com/info/CA6718223.html?industryid=49169

I suppose if you are a competitor you could go vote for someone else.

But that would be just plain mean.

Also, Here’s a picture of a few people from from our first Demo in November 2008.

The engineers don’t look so happy because they’ve been up late, working weekends and when the picture was taken, the demo wasn’t working.  It turned out that one of the circuit boards we bought (a $10 part) wasn’t working. So after 6 hours of debugging at 1 am, they figured that out, and the demo worked.

I’m on holiday, but I came across this article at TechCrunch that asks “Why does the iPhone still have the best touch screen in the world?”  The author links to informal data showing that the iPhone still has the best screen compared to the iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid, and Google Nexus One.

The TechCrunch author concludes that no one sees this touch screen technology as important since the iPhone has been around since 2007.  I think this goes even further back, the technology must be at least 1 year older, maybe 2006 or 2005.  This means in the last 4 years no one has either been able to duplicate the hardware and software used to make a great glass capacitive touch screen.

I also think that Apple’s competitors underestimate the user experience with this level of responsiveness.  When I’m flicking through my podcasts on my touch screen of my Apple iTouch, this is a much different experience than using my Garmin GPS (which has a resistive touch screen). I get pretty frustrated with this.  This is an extreme example, and I haven’t tried any of the new phones, but it gives me a feeling of what the frustration would be like of having a less responsive screen.

I’m simply saying this.  Apple iPhone users enjoy the responsiveness touch screens. Whatever deficiencies critics may point out in the iPhone, I suspect that competitors will have a really hard time converting iPhone users to non-iPhones even if the newer phones can multi-task or offer Adobe Flash.  That iPhone screen is an innovative, competitive advantage .

We demonstrated our USB 3.0 PHY and USB 3.0 Device controller at DesignCon in Santa Clara this week.  We also demonstrated our DDR PHY and controller as well.

We will have a more extensive video of the USB 3.0 PHY/Core demo shortly.  Here’s a short Video log from the show floor.

USB 3.0 and DDR at DesignCon Feb 2010

Dennis Crispo, Vice President of Marketing for DisplayLink demonstrates the DisplayLink USB 3.0 prototype using Synopsys USB 3.0 Digital Device Controller IP and HDMI Digital Tx Controller IP.

With the 10x speed improvement over USB 2.0, the 5Gbps SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connection enabled Displaylink to demonstrate the ability to stream in real time, high definition, uncompressed 1080p video from a USB 3.0 hard drive and PC through our USB 3.0 IP on the HAPS platform and displayed via HDMI on a Samsung 1080p LCD TV.  Check it out http://www.synopsys.com/dw/ipdir.php?ds=dwc_usb_3

To try to be more clear,

A USB 3.0 Hard Drive provides the video to a PC with a USB 3.0 Host.

The PC is running a media player that plays the video.

The video is sent out through the USB 3.0 Host port to the FPGA board.  The FPGA board has the Synopsys USB 3.0 Device controller.  The Controller decodes the packets, sends them over to our HDMI Tx Controller, and out over an HDMI cable to the Monitor.

Even though Gervais Fong is our SuperPHY guy, we are using the TI USB 3.0 PHY (our friends in interoperability).

Thanks to Gervais, Dennis, and DisplayLink for this video.

Here’s a short History of USB and a few USB 3.0 just shot this video in 2 takes, and used the first one because it’s less horrible than then second one.

The pictures I mention are actually in the previous Blog entry, that are below (somewhere).

I really hope this works.