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ESC Revisited
Connecting Dots in the Chaos
Any trade show, particularly a larger technical one like the Embedded Systems Conference, challenges the attendee with a confusing, chaotic barrage of highly-processed, often conflicting information. Most messages are complex wolves in sheeps' clothing, aimed at stimulating sales while pretending to provide technical guidance and advice. This year, we trekked to the ESC show and turned on our editorial hyperspectral imaging systems, complete with real-time digital marketing message filters, to help you extract the technical trends from the chaos.
As promised, we want to bring you the best, most important messages from the show distilled down into punchy, trip-report-worthy text bites, suitable not only for framing, but also for cutting, pasting, and turning in to your boss as plagiarized proof positive that you were out there gathering the key information that will propel your company's embedded systems development for the next year and, just maybe, justifying that $200 bottle of wine carefully camouflaged on your trip report. Remember, if you can't spell, edit in a few typos - for realism - with your own typical mistakes. Our copy editor is really good. [more]
Parallelizing PCB
Mentor's Multi-node Router Goes Auto
Multi-madness is upon us these days. Multi-core, multi-thread, and multi-processor mania has made a mess of the previously well-ordered software tools and operating systems market, creating abundant opportunities for innovation. Single processor computing is at its heat limit, and the new way to get more cpu power focused on your problem is to pile on the processors and parallelize your application.
Much has been made in the technical press about various approaches for automatically parallelizing general-purpose computing. However, there are occasional outstanding opportunities to create domain-specific solutions that can elegantly and efficiently elevate the performance of mission-critical tasks. Mentor Graphics has found such an opportunity in printed circuit board (PCB) routing with their newly-announced "XtremeAR" tool. They have crafted a system that can accelerate the arduous task of PCB auto-routing using up to 15 networked nodes, turning multi-day turnaround times into overnight iterations.
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