Counting the Cost of 2008
(Dick Selwood)
Keeping Power Under Control
A Brief Look at PMbus
(Bryon Moyer)
Disziplin Muß Sein*
A Look at Recent Software Development Process Tool Announcements
(Bryon Moyer)
Is Free Too Good to be True?
(Dick Selwood)
Toys for Engineers in Automotive
(Dick Selwood)
Hooking Up
Choices of Interconnect in Embedded, New
and Old
(Bryon Moyer)
Rooting Out Software Heresy
(Dick Selwood)
Making More of a Contribution
Increasing Embedded’s Influence on Linux
(Bryon Moyer)
Towards a More Human Machine
And This Has Nothing to do With Machine Intelligence
(Bryon Moyer)
Toshiba Grows a Prefrontal Cortex
(Jim Turley)
[archives]
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CHALK TALK  Embedded Networking With MicroBlaze and Spartan-3A FPGAs. Join Amelia Dalton as she works her way to "Hello World" on an FPGA-based embedded system with Xilinx Spartan-3A and MicroBlaze. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK  Quick Start Embedded Software Development with MicroBlaze and Spartan-3A FPGAs. Join Amelia Dalton as she works her way to "Hello World" on an FPGA-based embedded system with Xilinx Spartan-3A and MicroBlaze. (Xilinx)
 Managing the Unmanageable.
Poor quality of results and long runtimes have unfortunately become all too familiar to FPGA designers trying to achieve design closure. Because designs have increased in size and complexity, and devices have grown in capacity and features, FPGA implementation can at times seem daunting. Attend a series of Precision Synthesis webcasts to learn how innovations in FPGA synthesis are helping users manage these seemingly unmanageable challenges. (Mentor Graphics)
CHALK TALK  Better Video With Less Power - QuickLogic Introduces VEE. Facing challenges with mobile display image quality and battery life? Join Amelia Dalton for a look at QuickLogic’s new devices with the Visual Enhancement Engine (VEE). Amelia chats with Brian Faith of QuickLogic about new technology that can dramatically improve image quality on mobile displays while extending battery life. (QuickLogic)
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CHALK TALK  DSP System Design on FPGAs Using the ISE® Design Suite 10.1. Confused about combining processors with DSP accelerators in FPGA-based DSP systems? In this Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton talks with Tom Hill of Xilinx about how to sort it all out. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK  Designing FPGA-based Systems With Xilinx Design ISE Suite 10.1. Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Mark Goosman from Xilinx about how to use system-level design tools to manage the complex task of system-on-chip design with today's complex FPGAs. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK  Multi Gigabit Serial I/O with Virtex-5 FXT. Confused about SerDes? Join Amelia Dalton as she chats with experts from Xilinx and Linear Technology about the latest in multi-gigabit serial transceivers and clean, simple power supplies. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK  Lowering System Cost Made Easy With Extended Spartan-3A Family. Still trying to reduce total system cost? Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Mark Moran of Xilinx about lowering total system cost using low-cost FPGAs. (Xilinx)
CHALK TALK  Designing with the Embedded Power PC 440 in Xilinx's Virtex®-5. Amelia Dalton talks with experts from Xilinx and Micron about taking advantage of the power and features of the embedded PowerPC® 440 processor and Micron's DRAM. (Xilinx)
[previous webcasts]
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Counting the Cost of 2008
(Dick Selwood)
It’s been a funny old year, has 2008. Traditionally this is the time to pull your chair close to the fire, grab a glass of mulled wine and tell ghost stories. We won’t do that this year: no yarn we could spin would chill your bones half as effectively as the news about sub-prime mortgages, Ponzi schemes/scams, financial meltdowns, factory closures and Reductions in Force.
(Interestingly, a quick Google search show that the use of the term, Reduction in Force, seems to be mainly in press releases from North America. I suppose it is easier on the corporate Human Resources’ tongues than to use words like “lay-off” or “fire.”)
Years ago, I learned that accountancy and financial people see the world in a very different way from the rest of us, certainly different from the way that most engineers see it. Now there are all sorts of reasons for this: one is the constant pressure on companies, particularly in the US, to ensure that the quarterly earnings figures look good. Another is that there are areas where arithmetic does not explain simply what is happening. Yet another is the continual battle between regulators and the regulated: a government devises a set of rules for taxes - the taxed find a way around them before the ink is dry. Accounting regulatory bodies devise rules to ensure that a company’s figures are reported in a way that is as honest as possible - the auditors and the audited are immediately on the hunt for ways of presenting them in the best possible light. [more]
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Keeping Power Under Control
A Brief Look at PMbus (Bryon Moyer)
Nothing should be simpler than turning the power on and off. It’s just a switch. Switch it on; switch it off. Easy peasey. Right?
Well, not so fast. There ain’t just one power supply on a board anymore. These days you’ve gotta have in place a veritable cornucopia of power levels to satisfy all the finicky chips that are spreading like a bad mold across your boards. And the different power lines have different capacitances and different drivers, so that simply shutting the power down can conjure up images of leaves floating to the ground: a bunch of individual lines, all drifting down in their own sweet time, with little predictability as to which will reach the ground first. And turning the power on can be the equivalent of the dude with the blower; leaves fly up in the air willy nilly. [more]
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Disziplin Muß Sein*
A Look at Recent Software Development Process Tool Announcements
(Bryon Moyer)
Software development processes can vary dramatically. If you program only occasionally as a hobby, like me, then you dream up what you want to do and immediately start coding. Working units then randomly materialize and just as quickly disappear like quantum fluctuations. Moving into the more professional arena, if there is a process, it can vary from something light, agile, and extreme, where code is generated quickly and converges towards requirements using Brownian successive approximation, all the way to heavyweight rational processes with which you risk spending your entire career just reading the manual (understanding it would take even longer; lifting the entire document is out of the question). [more]
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Is Free Too Good to be True?
(Dick Selwood)
A few weeks ago I wrote about model-based development in Modelling: not just for big boys? At the end of the article I said “So is modelling just for big boys? Well, I hate to say it, but unless companies change their views on an appropriate level of expenditure for tools, yes it is, today. However, I have heard that one company is planning an announcement that could change this scenario quite markedly. And if the rumour is true, there may soon be a tool that will be very cost-effective for the single user.”
[more]
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Toys for Engineers in Automotive
(Dick Selwood)
There is an old story about two shoe sales people sent to a desert island. The first looks around and sends a message back to head office, “No one here wears shoes. Coming home on next ship.” The second sent a message to his head office, “No one here wears shoes. Send several hundred pairs on next ship.” The mood at the Paris International Automotive Electronics Congress (IAEC), earlier this month, was more like that of salesman two. The tribulations of the mainstream auto market, particularly the US, was recognised, but the view was that the tier one suppliers (those who supply the car manufacturers directly) and their specialist subcontractors were likely to continue, at least for the time being, to invest in R and D. The reasons are many.
[more]
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Hooking Up
Choices of Interconnect in Embedded, New and Old
(Bryon Moyer)
The number of options for getting from point A to point B keeps growing. It’s one of those areas where the concept of “standard” is somewhat loose, since there are so many of them you might wonder if the word even applies. Connectivity in larger embedded systems historically took advantage of backplane standards that allowed different cards to communicate with each other; smaller form factor devices often didn’t need the kind of data transfer rates that would warrant a complex protocol.
[more]
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Rooting Out Software Heresy
(Dick Selwood)
For those of you who don’t regularly visit the comments at http://www.journalforums.com/ (and you should), my piece two weeks ago on “Taming C?” generated a number of comments. These got me thinking. The outcome of these thoughts seemed sufficiently relevant to all regular readers of ETJ that it was worth writing a full-length article rather than just posting replies.
[more]
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Making More of a Contribution
Increasing Embedded’s Influence on Linux
(Bryon Moyer)
Peer review is a well-established essential component of the scientific process. For good science, anyway. The system provides a way for new ideas to be vetted and tested rather than being foisted immediately on a public that is all too willing to accept at face value the pronouncements of anyone calling him- or herself a scientist. [more]
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Towards a More Human Machine
And This Has Nothing to do With Machine Intelligence
(Bryon Moyer)
The human body and the set of biological processes we collectively refer to as “life” bear little resemblance to any real machine. We attempt to synthesize the complexity of the natural world but in fact have done so only on the fringes, in marginal, limited contexts. Undaunted, we anthropomorphize with respect to our creations, crowing about their ability to listen, see, hibernate, snooze, sleep, wake up. [more]
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Toshiba Grows a Prefrontal Cortex
(Jim Turley)
To no one’s great surprise, there’s yet another new ARM chip available in the market. This time the perpetrator is Toshiba, and its lyrically named TMPM330FDFG is a new low-cost microcontroller based on the Cortex-M3 processor design.
The new chip marks Toshiba’s first step into the world of ARM Cortex-M3 processors. The company has certainly produced its share of microprocessors and microcontrollers before – probably numbering in the billions by now – but never one based on ARM’s newish low-end architecture. It’s a move designed to broaden Toshiba’s product portfolio and attract a new kind of customer.
[more]
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[previous feature articles]
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