Embedded Technology Journal Update

a techfocus media publication :: November 14, 2006 :: volume V, no. 07

FROM THE EDITOR

This week, forums, conferences and symposia are in full swing around the globe. First, from the SDR forum, we bring you a major SDR development kit announcement from a bevy of companies. There is more fun packed in this SDR kit than in your old Radio Shack 50-in-1, and it makes an even cooler walkie-talkie. Our first new feature has the details.

Thanks for reading! If there's anything we can do to make our publications more useful to you, please let us know at: comments@embeddedtechjournal.com. If you'd rather sound off in public, please post your comments or questions in our new Journal Forums.

Kevin Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal

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CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Team SDR
Extreme Collaboration
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

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

Embedded Design with LatticeMico32 Open, Free 32-bit Soft Processor sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor

Speed Adoption of Intel® Multi-Core Processors with VirtualLogix Real-Time Virtualization™ Technology sponsored by VirtualLogix

Harnessing ModelSim Designer to Improve your FPGA Design Productivity sponsored by Mentor Graphics

Optimizing Verilog Coding for More Efficient FPGA Synthesis sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor

Designing 2Gbps Parallel I/O with the LatticeSC FPGA sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor

Lattice's new 90nm LatticeSC family--general introduction sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor

Team SDR
Extreme Collaboration

Old wisdom says that too many cooks spoil the broth. New wisdom says that accomplishing anything really big in high-tech requires a great deal of collaboration. This week, new wisdom trumped old at the SDR forum as an unlikely coalition consisting of Texas Instruments, Xilinx, Green Hills, Objective Interface, CRC, and even The MathWorks all had roles in producing a new platform for development of software defined radio (SDR) applications.

Software defined radio is developing into a benchmark challenge for the creators of technology. The idea is simple enough – take the information coming in from an antenna and digitize it as early as possible. Then, the entire behavior of the radio can be handled and modified in the digital domain with the flexibility of software. Then (as the theory goes), hardware could be made very generic, and new radio standards could be quickly deployed and changed in the field without replacing hardware. One radio could do the work of many with greatly reduced cost, improved operational flexibility and much greater security.

That’s all in theory, of course. The reality is that huge technical barriers remain in the path of most design teams’ efforts to execute on that lofty vision. Each piece of the SDR puzzle is a formidable problem, pushing the limits of technology and engineering resourcefulness. The SDR challenge also spans a great number of disciplines, making a single-company, single-team solution almost infeasible. [more]