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Bigger, Faster, More Connected
Embedded Technology Looms at ESC
Embedded Systems have tracked the progress in desktop and enterprise computing, only faster. Development practices and standards have been much slower to mature, however, and this week’s Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose will surely show an industry struggling to keep pace with the rapid rate of change in technology demands. Embedded computing systems have gone from bit-stingy, machine coded, custom crafted, one-off jobs to standards-based, memory-rich, multi-processing, IP-re-using, connected wonders – in an improbably short period of time.
As systems have changed, so have the engineers and teams that design them. Rapidly disappearing is the tall-thin engineer that does a top-to-bottom soup-to-nuts embedded system design. Replacing him is the domain-focused specialist array – a team of experts, each of whom understands and creates a specific portion of the overall package – often distributed over a number of companies loosely collaborating as part of a platform “ecosystem.”
As the teams and technology change, so do the suppliers have to adapt. Already in the weeks and days leading up to ESC, a rush of announcements has surrounded the arrival of the event like a shock wave traveling with a fast-moving plane. This year, we will see the battle for ownership of the ecosystem as processor vendors and OS vendors each vie for control of the developer’s cockpit. We will also see a continued infusion of non-embedded methodologies and technologies into the embedded space, including multi-core, multi-processor architectures, wider words, virtualization layers, more memory management, more feature-laden operating systems and middleware, higher-level programming techniques, and better-than-enterprise-class development and debugging facilities. [more]
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