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Modelling: not just for big boys?
(Dick Selwood)
Years ago, when I worked in PR, I used to visit a telecoms company every few weeks, with a colleague. (PR agency people always seem to travel to clients in pairs – I have never understood why.) The visits were usually to be briefed on a new product or a new release, and the briefings were conducted by engineers. On the way, we used to make small bets on how long it would be before the briefing engineer got up and started using the white-board: it was rarely more than five minutes into the meeting. Now, when on the receiving end of the PowerPoint presentations I used to help develop, if the presenter is, or was once, an engineer, there are frequently times when a notebook comes out and diagrams are sketched to make a point more clearly.
Engineers seem to think better when they do diagrams – for them a picture may be worth at least a thousand words. And yet modelling, model driven development, UML, SysML -- all the different names that are bandied around for defining a system through pictures rather than a screed of words, has not made significant headway outside areas like defence and aerospace. In fact, within defence, Unified Modeling Language (UML) is mandatory for projects in the US and UK.
There are tools from a range of sources. At the top end of the pile for embedded is Telelogic. Telelogic, having swallowed up a number of players in the modelling field such as iLogix to create a broad range of tools, has itself been bought by IBM. IBM had previously bought Rational Software, a leader in using UML for developing enterprise IT applications. Telelogic’s tool range is large, but the two most important products for embedded applications are the Doors requirements specification tool, which we are not going to look at, and Rhapsody, a suite of UML/SysML based modules for modelling and related activities. (SysML – System Modeling Language – is an extended sub-set of UML, tuned for describing systems rather than software.) [more]
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Flash Flood
We Never Thought...
(Kevin Morris)
Flash was great for storing small amounts of data. It was even pretty cool when we could pop a small card into our early digital cameras and save our low-res images with reasonable speed and security. It was expensive, but we were willing to pay the big premium because it could uniquely solve the non-volatile storage problem for certain classes of mobile devices. Flash seemed like a novelty, though, and those of us that knew all the evil quirks and kluges under the hood held a healthy respect for the potential of the technology to bite us. We knew that flash could "wear out," that flash wasn't truly random access, and that flash was very temperamental to bring up on a new process node - usually lagging far behind standard CMOS processes. Special techniques had to be applied to even get flash to appear to behave well, and we expected the curtain to fall aside on that magic at literally any moment. REAL non-volatile storage was done with hard disk drive (HDD) technology - always had been, always would be.
Uh, until now.
A few years ago, the analyst line on flash was that it was great for the niche it occupied, but that it wasn't headed for more mainstream storage applications. When NAND flash started to grab market share, we became even more skeptical. From an architecture point of view, it seemed like a step backward - even though performance and cost could potentially be much better. Progress marched ahead, however, and the rhetorical question became: "Will flash someday challenge hard drives for some specialized applications like laptops?" [more]
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Disruptive Technology?
(Dick Selwood)
“Engineers don’t have time to have fun anymore. We plan to put some of that fun back into their working lives.” Richard Terrill, VP of Marketing at XMOS, sums up one aspect of the philosophy of the company. We talked about XMOS about a year ago and will do so again, because if the people there have got it right, small companies with big ideas will once again be able to create innovative products without incurring corresponding big costs. The driving force behind XMOS is aimed at overturning the current way in which systems are created by providing the flexibility of a FPGA with the low cost of high volume silicon, without the associated NRE, using an approach the company has called Software Defined Silicon (SDS).
Certainly the group of students undergoing internships at XMOS this summer are having fun. One of them has already designed and built a robot and is into the design of a second, entirely different robot, after only six weeks with the company. “We gave them a dev kit and up to £50 ($100) that they can spend on materials, then we let them see what they can do,” Terrill told me.
[more]
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Energy: It’s Not Your Average Power
by Markus Levy and Bob Decker, EEMBC
Energy. You read about it in the newspapers, hear about it from political pundits, and pay for it every month in gas, electric, and fuel bills. Airlines and automakers blame their financial woes on energy costs, and developing nations try to become energy-independent. There’s a lot of energy spent on, well, energy.
The same is true of electronic design. The energy consumption of a chip, system, or assembly is a big deal to many engineers. Handheld systems need to balance performance and features against current drain and battery life. At the opposite extreme, the designers of high-performance systems grapple with energy consumption because they need to reduce heat, minimize space, or meet Energy Star specifications. Yet, for all this concern, there’s no standard way to quantify the actual energy consumption of embedded devices. [more]
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Does Harry Use Tools?
(Dick Selwood)
In England there is a phrase used to describe a significant sub-class of embedded engineers - “Fred in a shed.” It is the guy who works for himself and carries out contract work for a range of different people. I prefer to think of him as a sub-set of “Harry the Hairy Hacker.” You must all know him - even when he is in part of a multi-national company and not in a shed. He has war stories of how he single-handedly saved a project by coding in machine code for 48 hours without a break, and then, with a piece of baling twine and a strip of duct tape, managed to keep the prototype hardware working long enough for a full debug. When he goes to sleep he counts sheep in hexadecimal, and he loves jokes about upgrading girlfriend 8.0 to wife 1.0.
Harry the Hairy Hacker is both the strength of a project and also its potential weakness. Simplifying somewhat, but after careful research I know this is not simplifying to the point of caricature, Harry hacks good code quickly, these days mainly in C or C++, throws it at the compiler and, when the compiler stops throwing back errors, hands it over. There is working code ready for implementation, normally fairly quickly. So what is the problem? [more]
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Let’s Abolish All Patents
by R.H. Brooklands
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the (patent) lawyers.” – William Shakespeare: Henry the Sixth, Part 2, Act IV, Scene II (sort of)
Where would our industry be without patents? Indeed, what kind of world would we live in if there were no patents or patent rights?
It would be a better place, that’s what.
It’s an idea worth exploring, if for no other reason than to inject some much-needed sanity into the current climate of patent trolling, erratic judicial rulings, laughably trivial “innovations,” ridiculous business plans, the chilling climate of IP litigation, and arbitrary definitions of what constitutes intellectual property.
[more]
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Citius, Altius, Fortius
XAP5 Goes for Gold (Jim Turley)
Better, stronger, faster. Isn’t that what every new microprocessor is supposed to deliver? Hope springs eternal in the breast of many a processor-marketing drone. Their new chip isn’t just better than the previous one, it’s better than everyone else’s, too.
And you know, sometimes that promise actually comes true. A case in point is the XAP5 processor from Cambridge Consultants, a company of consultants located in – wait for it – Cambridge, England. Actually, they’re located in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well, a choice of venue that’s both convenient and confusing. Either way, this bicoastal team of engineers has cooked up a fifth generation of their XAP processor, a 16-bit CPU designed to minimize both power consumption and code space. [more]
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HFame Academy for Engineers?
(Dick Selwood)
We have all seen Fame Academy, Pop Idol /American Idol, The Apprentice and the like. Should we be pushing for a TV reality show on selecting embedded engineers, particularly software people? Given the anecdotal evidence, the producers of such a program would have difficulty finding enough people to put together a panel big enough for a final round, let alone a first round.
The problem exists in all areas of electronics, from EDA through manufacturing to system developers, and in most geographical markets. It regularly crops up in conversations and seems to be part of a general trend away from Science/Engineering/Technology in Western countries.
[more]
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Why Hamsters Cannot Save the Planet
(Dick Selwood)
While low power was officially the theme of only a panel session at Globalpress Electronics Summit, it was also frequently the theme, sometimes explicit and frequently implicit, of much of what was discussed.
The most striking performance was by John East of FPGA company, Actel. He spoke mainly from the perspective of the USA, which is probably appropriate, as the US, with around 5% of the world's population, daily consumes 20.7 million barrels of oil, or 25% of world consumption. “This 20-million-barrel-a-day habit costs $1.4 billion a day,” East said, but that was when oil was at $70 a barrel; today it is twice that, so to feed their habit costs the population of the USA around $9 a day for every man, woman and child. Feeding the habit requires the US to import oil and has adverse effects “on the environment, the economy, and the political landscape.” [more]
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Death, Taxes and Intel
Atom Attacks Embedded (Jim Turley)
Three things are certain in the engineer’s life: death, taxes, and Intel dominance.
One of those is not actually true. Although “Intel” is the name that comes to mind when the topic turns to microprocessors, the company’s famous chips account for barely 2% of all the microprocessor and microcontroller chips sold each year. (That’s counting units, not dollar value. The revenue picture is quite different.) The other 98% of the world’s microprocessors all come from somewhere else. [more]
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[previous feature articles]
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