A month-plus back, I provided a preview of ARM’s upcoming Cortex-A15 (aka ‘Eagle’) core, whose first publicly announced licensee was Texas Instruments. The ‘A’ in its marketing moniker exposes its “highly integrated application processor, primarily for mobile devices” primary focus, as a successor today’s Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 devices. And in addition to its consumer electronics concentration, I suggested that ARM aspired to find homes for it in trendsetting server designs.

TI keeps pushing the low-power envelope with its MSP430 ultra-low-power microcontroller family. The newest member, the MSP430L092, operates from a supply voltage down to 0.9V – a single cell battery – meaning that it requires no external voltage- boost circuit to run all of its internal analog and digital functions.

Has a child ever inspired a solution for you when trying to grapple with a problem? I suggest substituting anything for the term child, such as a pet, a spouse, a cat reaching through some bars to catch a mouse, or even an apple falling from a tree.

AT&T’s recent national outage of their U-Verse voice service affected me for most of one day last month. Until recently, such outages never affected me because I was still using a traditional landline phone service. That all changed a few months ago when I decided that the risk and consequences of an outage might be offset by the additional services and lower cost of the VoIP service over the landline service. Since the outage, I have been thinking about whether I properly evaluated the risks, costs, and benefits, and whether I should keep or change my services.