Kicking the CAN with Microchip MIPS
(Jim Turley)
Intel, AMD, Patents, and Punishment
(Jim Turley)
x86 in Embedded Systems
(Jim Turley)
Going For Golden
Tracing Requirements with LDRA’s TBreq
(Bryon Moyer)
Who is Responsible for Safety?
(Dick Selwood)
Don't Touch Me There
(Jim Turley)
More ARMs Than a Hindu Goddess
(Jim Turley)
Build Crappy Products
(Jim Turley)
Security Is As Security Does
(Jim Turley)
[archives]
|
CHALK TALK  Dual-Processor FPGA Designs Made Easier. Thinking of using multiple processors on FPGA-based systems? Join Amelia Dalton as she demystifies dual-processor development with Rey Archide of Xilinx. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK  Simplifying Processor-Based Designs in FPGAs. Using processors in FPGAs? It doesn't have to be complicated. Join Amelia Dalton as she chats with Steve Wenande of Xilinx about Simplifying Processor-Based Designs in FPGAs. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK
 Power Estimation in a High-Level DSP Design Flow. Want your DSP design to consume less power? Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Tim Vanevenhoven of Xilinx about new methods for estimating and reducing power consumption in FPGA-based DSP designs. (Xilinx)
[previous webcasts]
|
CHALK TALK  Improving Software Development Productivity With Virtual Platforms. Are your SoC and embedded design projects increasingly dominated by software development schedules? Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys about ways to improve software development productivity using virtual platforms. (Synopsys)
CHALK TALK  From Desktop to Target: What You Need From A Development Suite. Is embedded software development and debug a challenge for your team? Join Amelia Dalton as she chats with Jit Sivalogan of Mentor Graphics about setting up a productive environment for embedded development. (Mentor Graphics)
CHALK TALK  Simplified Verification of DSP Algorithms in Hardware. Moving algorithms from MATLAB to FPGAs? Join Amelia Dalton as she explores options for verifying DSP designs implemented in FPGAs with Tim Vanevenhoven from Xilinx. (Xilinx)
|
|
Kicking the CAN with Microchip MIPS
(Jim Turley)
Microchip users, it’s time for your big-boy pants.
The company has launched a new 32-bit chip that tops its range of ubiquitous microcontrollers. It’s got grown-up features that could entice the company’s legions of 8-bit and 16-bit users to move up into the 32-bit world and experience life in the semi-big leagues.
“Thirty-two bits for 5 bucks” could be the headline here, as the new chips combine a 32-bit MIPS M4K core – a processor for real men—with an average price of $5. As usual for Microchip, the device is crammed to overflowing with peripherals and interfaces for most conceivable applications. In this case, the key gee-whiz features are CAN (controller-area network), 10/100 Ethernet, and USB.
There are really multiple chips in the new range, and they come in three flavors: the MX5, MX6, and MX7. The MX5 has CAN, the MX6 has Ethernet, and the MX7 has both. They all have quite a bit of I/O in addition, including USB, 512K of flash, 128K of SRAM, five I2C ports, six UARTs, four SPI interfaces, a bunch of timers, two analog comparators, and more. I like that the USB interfaces can do host mode, device mode, and on-the-go (OTG) mode. OTG is particularly useful because you can do peer-to-peer USB connections instead of going through a PC or USB hub. It turns USB into a convenient high-speed connection between any two devices. [more]
|
Intel, AMD, Patents, and Punishment
(Jim Turley)
What would you do with $1.25 billion?
You could buy a large yacht – and a Caribbean island to moor it on. You could keep a lifetime supply of Ferraris for you and all of your newly found friends. You could acquire several small companies. You could settle into a dozen houses along the fairways at Pebble Beach, hitting balls through the windows all day.
Or if you’re Intel, you write a big check to AMD. And if you’re AMD, you fritter it away in about 12 months.
By now you’ve heard about Intel’s big legal settlement with AMD, ending a longstanding lawsuit that’s been both bitter and strangely entertaining. The two companies have been fighting each other for years, both in the market and in the courtrooms. For now, at least, it looks as if they’ve buried the hatchet. [more]
|
x86 in Embedded Systems
(Jim Turley)
“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.” Thus spake Albert Einstein, a man who knew a thing or two about big spaces and long stretches of time. Given a few more years, he might have made the same observation about Intel’s x86 processor family and its infinite attraction to programmers.
If I may indulge in another quotation, it’s been said that there are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they hate the x86, and liars. Nobody really likes programming x86-family processors, at least nobody I’ve ever met who’d worked with any other chip family. [more]
|
Going For Golden
Tracing Requirements with LDRA’s TBreq
(Bryon Moyer)
Marketing guys have it rough. [That’s your cue to get out your hankies because you just know that sometime during this movie you’re going to be crying for the poor marketing guy. <snort>] They research and they request and they require and they cajole and they do and they do, and what do they see for their efforts? [Besides the one guy that actually does have his hanky out at this point… yeah… he’s hoping for a transfer into marketing…]
Let’s say you’re new to a company, or you’re proposing a new product. Engineering and manufacturing will demand a requirements document. And an environment analysis (remember SWOT?) And a competitive analysis. And a business/ROI analysis. And a marketing plan. And a sales plan. Make that a forecast. For five years, accurate to 10% or else you’ll get called on the carpet. [more]
|
Who is Responsible for Safety?
(Dick Selwood)
We have all heard the (apocryphal) story of the motor-home driver who sets the cruise control and then goes back to make coffee, since he/she was told that the cruise control looked after everything. The story has been around the internet for years and while wholly untrue (at least I hope it is) it still has, at its heart, one of the essential questions of safety – who is responsible? Presumably the cruise control did exactly what it was meant to do, control the speed of the vehicle, but this wasn’t what the driver expected it to do.
The cruise control is now electronic, as are many of the control and related functions in today’s cars, and the motor car is by far the most dangerous artefact in human hands. Even in the United States it is responsible for more deaths than any other single cause, including guns. And where gun deaths are mostly deliberate, either other people or suicide, the overwhelming majority of car deaths are “accidents.” [more] |
|
Don't Touch Me There
(Jim Turley)
“As our rivets rub together, flashing sparks into the night.” Anything for a Tubes reference. Actually, the headline is relevant to today’s embedded designers because touch-sensitive interfaces are becoming hugely popular, just as they have been for millions of years. But now they’re popular in electronic gadgets, too. (Just as they have been for…. oh, never mind.)
Cypress Semiconductor and Atmel are among the microcontroller companies making noise about their touch-enabled chips. These devices include interface logic for capacitive touch screens (sold separately), making it much easier for the average engineer to include this must-have feature. But there’s a lot more to touch than just having the right digital I/O. [more]
|
|
More ARMs Than a Hindu Goddess
(Jim Turley)
After shipping 15 billion chips you’d think the cocky computer cowboys from Cambridge would be finished, right? Not on your life, pardner. They’ve got more tricks up their collective sleeve than a saloon gambler with a seat against the wall. They just keep dealin’ and we keep ante’ing up.
The newest ace in the hole is the Cortex-A5, announced today. The –A5 fills the enormous (not really) gap between the Cortex-A8 and ARM’s older designs in the ARM9 and ARM11 family. (For some background on ARM’s processor nomenclature, see Embedded Technology Journal, August 25, 2009.) [more]
|
|
Build Crappy Products
(Jim Turley)
Engineering is all about design. Creating elegant solutions. Finding the best compromise between price, performance, power, reliability, time-to-market, and so on. It’s a high-wire act that requires balance, technical skill, and more than a little creativity.
Sales, on the other hand, is all about… well, selling. And marketing? The less said about marketing the better, right?
So why does the world reward bad products and ignore good ones? Why do so many idiot customers seem oblivious to the benefits of your design while shelling out good money for that other company’s inferior product? [more]
|
|
Security Is As Security Does
(Jim Turley)
Following on from last week’s article about security and cryptography, this week we have a new product from CPU Tech. As the name might suggest, CPU Tech designs CPU chips. The twist is, this company’s chips have a high level of security built into them. As you also might guess, one of their big customers is your government.
CPU Tech starts with the familiar PowerPC processor architecture, so if you’re in the market for PowerPC chips, CPU Tech is worth a look for that reason alone. But the real excitement comes when you enable the on-chip security features. The processor is tamper- and virus- and hacker-resistant, and it includes all sorts of other features I’m not allowed to talk about. [more]
|
|
Spinning Heads & Busting Spooks
(Jim Turley)
Q: When is a disk drive not a disk drive? A: When it becomes your next memory chip.
We’ve seen how flash memory chips are steadily replacing hard disk drives in MP3 players, laptop computers, and all sorts of embedded systems. Now, in a weird reversal of technology fortunes, disk-drive technology is moving into nonvolatile memory chips.
The perpetrator of this counter-intuitive strategy is Crocus, a French startup named after a Mediterranean flower bulb. Just as the crocus competes with the tulip in horticultural circles, Crocus competes with flash memories among technophiles. Its technology provides many of the same benefits as conventional flash, but it paradoxically does so using magnetic read-head technology spun off from hard disk drives. [more]
|
[previous feature articles]
|
