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CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

MIPS for your Media Room
MIPS/Dolby Team to Accelerate Audio Deployment
Forgotten Battles
Holes in the Engineering Fossil Record
Wind River Zooms In
Increased Focus on Consumer and Networking
Model-Based Design Shortens Development Time of Motor Control Applications
by Arun Mulpur, Ph.D. and Zijad Galijasevic, Ph.D., The MathWorks, Inc.
Students Throw Down the Gauntlet
Time to Speed Up Your Embedded Development
Electronic Elitism
DAC Divulges Design Tool Dilemmas
DAC Previsited
Dawn of the Design Tool Decade

MIPS for your Media Room
MIPS/Dolby Team to Accelerate Audio Deployment

Are you trying to dash to market with a set-top box or video recorder/player that has one or two new things to offer? Keeping up with the latest evolving standards and getting your design certified can be among the most time-consuming tasks in readying a media-enabled system-on-chip (SoC) for the market. The constant improvements in technology in every area of home entertainment from high-performance displays and sound systems through advanced content-delivery mechanisms has kept embedded system designers in a frenzy just keeping up with the competition in this rapidly changing landscape.

With HDTV now making the transition from exotic to ordinary, consumers naturally expect the audio portion of their experience to keep pace with the vast improvement in video quality. While stereo, lower-fidelity sound might have been perfectly acceptable with standard definition television and movie programming, the consumer's standard for acceptable audio performance is elevated considerably by the act of plunking down a few thousand for the latest-generation plasma or DLP monitors with HDTV tuners and DVRs. Chances are, they've got a similarly expensive sound system with way more than two channels eagerly awaiting top-quality content that will make their guests dive for cover when that low-flying helicopter passes overhead. [more]

Forgotten Battles
Holes in the Engineering Fossil Record

I pushed the button to turn off the night vision scope, but the eerie greenish image of the Utah desert landscape persisted. The characteristic cloud of sparkling noise continued to dance in my viewfinder making it look like the desert had been invaded by an army of crazed fireflies. Otherwise, the scene was devoid of any movement from the nocturnal desert life I had been seeking.

Somewhere, possibly thousands of miles away and maybe dead by now, there is an engineer for whom the design of this particular scope was a major project - someone who fought with colleagues over issues like the choice of materials in the image sensor, the scheme for light amplification, and the design of the power supply. Perhaps the project was some cold-war-era Soviet skunkworks design. Unlike me, this engineer understands (or understood) almost instinctively why this device continues to operate for several minutes after it is powered down. His story, however, is probably long forgotten. [more]