John Koon
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Aviation, AI, autonomous driving, robotics, automation, medical innovations, wireless technology including 5G and low-power WAN, edge, IoT, NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, cybersecurity.
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John Koon, professional writer, publisher, and editor.
My focus is embedded / emerging tech.
Articles by John Koon
Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
Article By : John Koon While demand for proximity detection continues to grow across IoT, automotive, and logistics applications, current solutions remain hindered by insecurity and imprecision. Bluetooth Channel Sounding represents the next leap, delivering higher accuracy, enhanced security, and scalable deployment.
Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
Nov. 17, 2025 – By John Koon, embedded.com While demand for proximity detection continues to grow across IoT, automotive, and logistics applications, current solutions remain hindered by insecurity and imprecision. Bluetooth Channel Sounding represents the next leap, delivering higher accuracy, enhanced security, and scalable deployment.
Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation
Bluetooth Channel Sounding: The Next Leap in Bluetooth Innovation While demand for proximity detection continues to grow across IoT, automotive, and logistics applications, current solutions remain hindered by insecurity and imprecision. Bluetooth Channel Sounding represents the next leap, delivering higher accuracy, enhanced security, and scalable deployment.
Revolutionizing Manufacturing with the Internet of Things
Revolutionizing Manufacturing with the Internet of Things The internet of things is defined as a network of connected devices with built-in intelligence that primarily communicate wirelessly with each other to generate and collect data for operation optimization and efficiency maximization. By analyzing this data, further improvements can be made to enhance functionality and performance.
Sensor Fusion in Humanoids - How Humanlike Robots Energize Automation
Sensor Fusion in Humanoids – How Humanlike Robots Energize Automation Automation has employed robotics for years across various industries, including automotive manufacturing, warehouse logistics, material handling, patient care, surgical assistance in healthcare, agriculture, restaurants, military, and banking. A new breed of robots called humanoids is now emerging to take automation to the next level.
How 5G impacts future IoT development - John Koon
How 5G impacts future IoT development By John W. Koon Introduction There is an interesting history about the Internet of Things (IoT)! National Semiconductors' (now defunct) early attempt to introduce IoT technology at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Newport Beach in 2001 was indeed ahead of its time. The concept of IoT didn’t gain significant traction until much later, as the necessary infrastructure and widespread adoption of connected devices took years to develop.
Using AI/ML To Combat Cyberattacks
Machine learning is being used by hackers to find weaknesses in chips and systems, but it also is starting to be used to prevent breaches by pinpointing hardware and software design flaws. To make this work, machine learning (ML) must be trained to identify vulnerabilities, both in hardware and software. With proper training, ML can detect cyber threats and prevent them from accessing critical data.
Increased Automotive Data Use Raises Privacy, Security Concerns
The amount of data being collected, processed, and stored in vehicles is exploding, and so is the value of that data. That raises questions that are still not fully answered about how that data will be used, by whom, and how it will be secured.
Why Chiplets Are So Critical In Automotive
Chiplets are gaining renewed attention in the automotive market, where increasing electrification and intense competition are forcing companies to accelerate their design and production schedules. Electrification has lit a fire under some of the biggest and best-known carmakers, which are struggling to remain competitive in the face of very short market windows and constantly changing requirements.
Role For ICs Expands In Humanoid Robots
Semiconductors play a crucial role in the development and functionality of humanoid robots. Humanoid robots are advanced machines designed to resemble and perform tasks similar to humans. The integration of semiconductors in humanoid robots contributes to their sensory perception, processing capabilities, and overall functionality. Robots are used in everything from security and defense, to industrial and manufacturing operations, entertainment, warehousing, retail, and health care.
Auto Network Speeds Rise As Carmakers Prep For Autonomy
In-vehicle networks are starting to migrate from domain architectures to zonal architectures, an approach that will simplify and speed up communication in a vehicle using fewer protocols, less wiring, and ultimately lower cost. Zonal architectures will partition vehicles into zones that are more manageable and flexible, but getting there will take time. There is so much legacy technology in vehicles today that carmakers must support an alphabet-soup collection of protocols.
Autonomous Vehicles: Not Ready Yet
The swirl of activity around L4 and L5 vehicles has yet to result in a successful demonstration of an autonomous vehicle that can navigate the streets of a city or highway without incident, and there is a growing body of real-world data showing that much work still needs to be done. Robo-taxi trials in big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and soon San Diego, are proving that autonomous vehicles are a monumental work in progress.
For SDVs, Software Is The Biggest Challenge
Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) involve far more than just OTA applications enabling software upgrades over the air. Software that will manage hundreds of ECUs and other functions within the vehicle is expected to grow beyond hundreds of millions of lines of code, possibly making SDV software development the number one challenge in automotive design.
How Much AI Is Really Needed?
Tensor Core GPUs have created a generative AI model gold rush. Whether it’s helping students with math homework, planning a vacation, or learning to prepare a six-course meal, generative AI is ready with answers. But that’s only one aspect of AI, and not every application requires it. AI — now an all-inclusive term, referring to the process of using algorithms to learn, predict, and make decisions — mimics human intelligence.
Gearing Up For Level 4 Vehicles
More autonomous features are being added into high-end vehicles, but getting to full autonomy will likely take years more effort, a slew of new technologies — some of which are not in use today, and some of which involve infrastructure outside the vehicle — along with sufficient volume to bring the cost of these combined capabilities down to an affordable price point. In the meantime, many of the features that will be included in autonomous vehicles are likely to be rolled out individually.
Quantum Plus AI Widens Cyberattack Threat Concerns
Quantum computing promises revolutionary changes to the computing paradigm that the semiconductor industry has operated under for decades, but it also raises the prospect of widespread cybersecurity threats. Quantum computing cyberattacks will occur millions of times faster than any assault conventional computing can muster.
Designing Vehicles Virtually
The shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), electric vehicles (EVs), and ultimately autonomous vehicles (AVs) is proving the value and exposing the weaknesses in simulating individual components and complete vehicles. The ability to model this intensely complex maze of real-world interactions and possible scenarios is improving, and it’s happening faster than comparable road-testing of vehicles over millions of miles.
Multiple Hurdles In The Race To 6G
The rollout of 6G will opens the door to significant changes and possibilities, but whether this technology lives up to the hype will require massive collaborative efforts, huge investments in infrastructure, and solving some problems for which there are no precedents. Multiple companies are already working on 6G technology, aiming for a maximum download speed of one terabit per second (Tb/s) with latency less than 0.1 ms — a 100-fold increase over 5G.
AI Transformer Models Enable Machine Vision Object Detection
The object detection in machine vision applications that autonomous driving, smart manufacturing, and surveillance applications require depends on AI modeling. Over the years, many AI models have been introduced, including YOLO, Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, RetinaNet, and others, detect image or video signals, interpret the objects, and make the appropriate predictions. In recent years, AI transformer models have emerged as better object detection solutions.
Solving The Last-Mile Delivery Problem
Retailers are deploying robots to cut costs and improve efficiency, opening new opportunities for chipmakers as well as a host of new challenges. Key to this strategy are autonomous roadside delivery robots (ARDRs). Retailers have been facing razor-thin profit margins for years and have turned their sights to increasing operational efficiency to stay competitive.
Curbing Automotive Cybersecurity Attacks
The relentless cyberattacks on the automotive sector are not limited to vehicles and have an impact on the entire automotive supply chain, so the pressure is on the automotive ecosystem to understand the necessary standards and regulations for vehicles and components. While the process of attaining compliance adds additional effort, in the long run, the increase in cybersecurity will save the automotive industry development costs by fending off cyberattacks.
How Many Sensors For Autonomous Driving?
With the cost of sensors ranging from $15 to $1,000, carmakers are beginning to question how many sensors are needed for vehicles to be fully autonomous at least part of the time. Those sensors are used to collect data about the surrounding environment, and they include image, lidar, radar, ultrasonic, and thermal sensors. One type of sensor is not sufficient, because each has its limitations.
Developing An Unbreakable Cybersecurity System
Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency and sophistication, and the impact of those attacks is increasing almost exponentially as the amount and value of data continues to grow. Cybersecurity Ventures projected the annual cost of cybercrime will grow from $8 trillion in 2023 to $210.5 trillion by 2025, with no end in sight. On the target list are a slew of industrial and commercial segments, including health care, infrastructure, banking, and education, as well as government agencies.
Machine Vision Plus AI/ML Adds Vast New Opportunities
Traditional technology companies and startups are racing to combine machine vision with AI/ML, enabling it to “see” far more than just pixel data from sensors, and opening up new opportunities across a wide swath of applications. In recent years, startups have been able to raise billions of dollars as new MV ideas come to light in markets ranging from transportation and manufacturing to health care and retail.
Designing Crash-Proof Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles keep crashing into things, even though ADAS technology promises to make driving safer because machines can think and react faster than human drivers. Humans rely on seeing and hearing to assess driving conditions. When drivers detect objects in front of the vehicle, the automatic reaction is to slam on the brakes or swerve to avoid them. Quite often drivers cannot react quickly enough.
Role Of IoT Software Expanding
IoT software is becoming much more sophisticated and complex as vendors seek to optimize it for specific applications, and far more essential for vendors looking to deliver devices on-time and on-budget across multiple market segments. That complexity varies widely across the IoT. For example, the sensor monitoring for a simple sprinkler system is far different than the preventive maintenance in a sophisticated smart factory.
Growing Challenges For Increasingly Connected Vehicles
Automobiles will become increasingly connected over the next decade, but that connectivity will come at a price in terms of dollars, security, and constantly changing technology. Connectivity involves all parts of a vehicle. It includes everything from autonomous driving to in-cabin monitoring and connected infotainment. And it encompasses external sensors, IoT, V2X, over-the-air communication, remote control, and more.
Options Widen For Optimizing IoT Designs
Creating a successful IoT design requires a deep understanding of the use cases, and a long list of tradeoffs among various components and technologies to provide the best solution at the right price point. Maximizing features and functions while minimizing costs is an ongoing balancing act, and the number of choices can be overwhelming.
Auto Cyberattacks Becoming More Widespread Original
As vehicles become smarter, more complex, and increasingly connected, they also become more prone to cyberattacks. The challenge now is to keep pace with hackers, who are continually devising new and innovative ways to attack both software and hardware in vehicles. Recent statistics bear this out.
Building Better Cars Faster
Carmakers are accelerating their chip and electronic design schedules to remain competitive in an increasingly fast-changing market, but they are encountering gaps in the tooling, the supply chain, and in the methodologies they use to create those cars.
Solving Problems With The IoT
The Internet of Things, a term once applied to almost any “smart” gadget connected to the Internet, is becoming more useful, more complex, and more of a security risk as the value of data continues to grow and more people depend on IoT technology. In the decades since the concept was first introduced, IoT devices have become so ubiquitous that applications cover practically every consumer, commercial, and industrial segment.
Competing V2V Technologies Emerge, Create Confusion
The battle over vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology has begun, as governments step back to see which of two main competing standards and lots of related technology are best suited for reducing accidents. V2V is an often-discussed wireless communication protocol that enables vehicles to communicate with each other, easing traffic congestion, avoiding accidents, and ultimately improving transportation safety.
Shifting Toward Software-Defined Vehicles
Apple reportedly is developing a software-defined vehicle. But so are Renault, Hyundai, General Motors, and just about everyone else. Some of the benefits of SDVs include increased comfort, convenience, safety, reliability, and remote software and firmware updates. Preventive and predictive maintenance, and remote diagnostics, can be done more conveniently over the air, while vehicle behavior will more closely resemble that of a computer. With these changes come many advantages.
Why Better Mapping Technology Is Critical To Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous cars find the way to their destination using a number of critical technologies, including some version of a global position system and a central brain to interpret that and other data. But many of those technologies are not reliable or accurate enough today, and may not be for years to come. There are numerous reports of vehicles missing their stop, or trucks being guided into alleys that are too narrow or underpasses that are too low.
Cybersecurity Risks Of Automotive OTA
Modern vehicles increasingly resemble supercomputers on wheels, with many electronic control units (ECUs) networked together as increasingly sophisticated software is installed and updated. Similar to smartphones, vehicle OEMs will contact vehicle owners remotely about operating system updates that add new features and/or fixes, as well as software bugs and vulnerabilities.
Improving Reliability In Automobiles
Carmakers are turning to predictive and preventive maintenance to improve the safety and reliability of increasingly electrified vehicles, setting the stage for more internal and external sensors, and more intelligence to interpret and react to the data generated by those sensors.
Memory-Based Cyberattacks Become More Complex, Difficult To Detect
Memories are becoming entry points for cyber attacks, raising concerns about system-level security because memories are nearly ubiquitous in electronics and breaches are difficult to detect. There is no end in sight with hackers taking aim at almost every consumer, industrial, and commercial segment, and a growing number of those devices connected to the internet and to each other.
Complex Tradeoffs In Inferencing Chips
Designing AI/ML inferencing chips is emerging as a huge challenge due to the variety of applications and the highly specific power and performance needs for each of them. Put simply, one size does not fit all, and not all applications can afford a custom design. For example, in retail store tracking, it’s acceptable to have a 5% or 10% margin of error for customers passing by a certain aisle, while in medical diagnosis or automotive vision, accuracy needs to be significantly higher.
Auto Safety Tech Adds New IC Design Challenges
The role of AI/ML in automobiles is widening as chipmakers incorporate more intelligence into chips used in vehicles, setting the stage for much safer vehicles, fewer accidents, but much more complex electronic systems. While full autonomy is still on the distant horizon, the short-term focus involves making sure drivers are aware of what’s going on around them — pedestrians, objects, or other cars that might cause accidents — and ensuring they are paying attention.
How Memory Design Optimizes System Performance
Exponential increases in data and demand for improved performance to process that data has spawned a variety of new approaches to processor design and packaging, but it also is driving big changes on the memory side. While the underlying technology still looks very familiar, the real shift is in the way those memories are connected to processing elements and various components within a system.
Challenges Mount In New Autos
Electronics are becoming the primary differentiator for carmakers, adding an array of options that can alter everything from how a vehicle’s occupants interact with their surroundings to how the vehicle drives. But the infrastructure needed to support these features also raises a slew of technology and business questions for which there are no simple answers today. For example, how will new technology function over long lifetimes and under extreme conditions?
New Uses For AI In Chips
Artificial intelligence is being deployed across a number of new applications, from improving performance and reducing power in a wide range of end devices to spotting irregularities in data movement for security reasons. While most people are familiar with using machine learning and deep learning to distinguish between cats and dogs, emerging applications show how this capability can be used differently.
Design And Security Challenges for VR Original
Virtual reality is no longer just for gamers, and as this technology is deployed in everything from health care to industrial training, the requirements for processing more data faster over a high-speed connection are growing. Designing these devices continues to be a study in contradictions. They must be extremely low power, with a small enough batteries to make them comfortable to wear.
Telecare Challenges: Secure, Reliable, Lower Power
The adoption of telecare using a variety of connected digital devices is opening the door to much more rapid response to medical emergencies, as well as more consistent monitoring, but it also is adding new challenges involving connectivity, security, and power consumption. Telecare has been on the horizon for the better part of two decades, but it really began ramping with improvements in sensor technology and with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Using AI To Speed Up Edge Computing
AI is being designed into a growing number of chips and systems at the edge, where it is being used to speed up the processing of massive amounts of data, and to reduce power by partitioning and prioritization. That, in turn, allows systems to act upon that data more rapidly. Processing data at the edge rather than in the cloud provides a number of well-documented benefits.
Risks Rise As Robotic Surgery Goes Mainstream
As robotic-assisted surgery moves into the mainstream, so do concerns about security breaches, latency, and system performance. In the operating room, every second is critical, and technology failures or delays can be life-threatening. Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) has around for a couple decades, but it is becoming more prevalent and significantly more complex.
Chips Can Boost Malware Immunity Original
Security is becoming an increasingly important design element, fueled by increasingly sophisticated attacks, the growing use of technology in safety-critical applications, and the rising value of data nearly everywhere. Hackers can unlock automobiles, phones, and smart locks by exploiting system design soft spots. They even can hack some mobile phones through always-on circuits when they are turned off.
Standardizing Chiplet Interconnects
The chip industry is making progress on standardizing the infrastructure for chiplets, setting the stage for faster and more predictable integration of different functions and features from different vendors. The ability to choose from a menu of small, highly specialized chips, and to mix and match them for specific applications and use cases, has been on the horizon for more than a decade.
Improving PPA With AI
AI/ML/DL is starting to show up in EDA tools for a variety of steps in the semiconductor design flow, many of them aimed at improving performance, reducing power, and speeding time to market by catching errors that humans might overlook. It’s unlikely that complex SoCs, or heterogeneous integration in advanced packages, ever will be perfect at first silicon.
Building Security Into ICs From The Ground Up
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, but they also are starting to compromise platforms that until recently were considered unbreakable. Consider blockchains, for example, which were developed as secure, distributed ledger platforms. All of them must be updated with the same data for a transaction to proceed. But earlier this year a blockchain bridge platform called Wormhole — which connects different blockchains to make crypto currency transfer easier — was hacked.
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