ANNOUNCEMENTS

CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

6.0 is a Go
Windows CE 6 Hits Production
Optimizing Architectures for Performance and Area using Virtual System Prototypes
by Russell L. Roan, VaST Systems
Embedded Britain?
by Dick Selwood
Adrift...
Dataquest Dumps Design Automation
Fall Fury
Embedded Announcements Galore
Power Parallelism
Ambric Accelerates Algorithms

6.0 is a Go
Windows CE 6 Hits Production

The beta period is over.  The feedback has been assimilated, and Microsoft has given the green light for the latest, upgraded version of their long-lived embedded operating system to roll into production.  While little Windows’s big brother usually ends up getting all the serious attention, there are a number of things about the new generation of the cute little embedded version that warrant further discussion.  If you’re familiar with Windows CE from the past, it would pay to take a look at this new incarnation.

Windows CE may have previously seemed a bit behind the times, as hardware capabilities have sometimes outstripped the aging embedded OS in terms of capacity and modern-day features.  With 6.0, however, CE has jumped ahead again with massive upgrades in memory capability, number of processes, and a host of other important improvements.  CE 6.0 sports a completely redesigned kernel that is now also 100% "shared source" – Microsoft’s answer to the growing popularity of open-source embedded options such as Linux. [more]

Optimizing Architectures for Performance and Area using Virtual System Prototypes
by Russell L. Roan, Technical Marketing Manager, VaST Systems

Setting out to create a new (or revised) design of an embedded system-on-chip (SoC) has always been a difficult task for system architects. Traditionally, there have been few tools available for the architect to make good decisions and even fewer methods to extract data that will provide feedback at architecture definition time on whether decisions are optimal.

With new virtual system prototyping technology, the ability to make correct design decisions has been greatly enhanced so that system engineers may be able to evaluate their decisions under the actual operating conditions of the final system and to evaluate these decisions based on measurable goals such as run time performance and cost. [more]