When it comes to video services, the children of Ma Bell have taken their hard knocks. A flood of ventures by telephone companies designed to compete against entrenched cable TV operators received much fanfare in the early 1990s, only to fizzle out as failures before the new millennium passed. But don't count them out just yet. As cable operators increasingly target their data and voice customers, the telephone companies are crawling back from defeat, reinvigorated by a perfect storm of network convergence, broadband technology and the good ol' IP infrastructure. Coming soon to a screen near you: IPTV. "It's one of the hot topics in telecommunications," said Steve West, director of product marketing for fixed solutions at Alcatel, a network infrastructure provider. "We've been actively pushing the space since 1999 or 2000. It is absolutely ready for market. "While traditional cable systems devote a slice of bandwidth for each channel and then cablecast them all out at once, IPTV uses a "switched video" architecture in which only the channel being watched at that moment is sent over the network, freeing up capacity for other features and more interactivity.
For years, security intellectual property (IP) existed in the semiconductor world as something of an afterthought; bolted on at the tail end of chip design cycles and treated as a compliance checkbox. That era is decisively over. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, the Security IP sector is entering a sharply accelerated growth phase, driven by a shift in how OEMs think about trust, compliance, and embedded protection. The message from the market is unambiguous: integrated, certification-ready security is no longer optional infrastructure; it is a competitive imperative. The explosion of connected devices across industrial, automotive, consumer, and data center environments has expanded attack surfaces. Security IP Market Development Meanwhile, regulatory frameworks worldwide are tightening, demanding demonstrable security assurance rather than self-attested claims. And looming on the horizon is the quantum computing threat, which is already forcing forward-thinking c...