Embedded Technology Journal Update

a techfocus media publication :: April 17, 2007 :: volume VII, no. 02

FROM THE EDITOR

Jim Turley is back this week with a feature on stackable USB. If you enjoyed building Lego towers as a kid, and you also happen to have limited PCB space while requiring a number of USB connections, you might want to consider designing these guys into your system. If you’re designing a system but you’re not really sure what you want to do with it yet, just drop a few of these in and you can plug in pretty much any peripheral on the planet – handy for when marketing comes running in at the last minute with “A camera, we’ve got to add a camera!”

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Kevin Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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Investigate Algorithmic Testbench Generation from Mentor Graphics today.

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JournalJobs.com – the job board for FPGA Journal and Embedded Technology Journal is now re-launching with a host of new features and capabilities. In celebration of JournalJobs.com grand re-opening, we’re offering free job postings through April 30, 2007. Go online, post a job, pay nothing, and watch for those qualified resumes to come knocking on your inbox.
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CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

USB Goes Vertical
by Jim Turley, Embedded Technology Journal
Smaller is Bigger
ESC 2007 Tracks Technology
Bigger, Faster, More Connected
Embedded Technology Looms at ESC
ArcticLink
Connectivity Without the Watts
ARM Optimizes for FPGA
ARM/Actel Announce Cortex-M1
Mixing Fossil Fuel and Electrons
by Jim Turley, Embedded Technology Journal
Managing the Middle Manager
An Engineer's Guide

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

Using Processors in FPGAs? The industry's only soft IP ARM7 core for Flash FPGAs sponsored by Actel

Low Power FPGA design with Actel IGLOO, the 5µW FPGA for cool portables sponsored by Actel

ARM7, Analog,Flash and FPGA in a Single Chip Actel's ARM in Fusion sponsored by Actel

Introducing Actel Fusion – the world’s first Flash-based FPGA, with Memory and Analog front end sponsored by Actel

Introducing Spartan-3AN FPGAs – Non-Volatile Secure Platform for Highest System Integration sponsored by Xilinx

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

USB Goes Vertical
by Jim Turley, Embedded Technology Journal

USB is moving up in the world. Specifically, it’s going vertical.

There are plenty of board-level standards out there and even more companies that support them. PCI Express, VMEbus, PC/104, S-bus (remember that one?), ATCA… the list goes on. Board-level standards are as ubiquitous as they are useful, and the healthy board-level market enables a whole layer of system-level integrators and developers. Not everyone wants or needs to develop all their hardware from scratch, so buying boards is a quick way to produce a custom system without ever reaching for the soldering iron.

So in a crowded market like this, you’d think there would be no room for yet another board-level standard, right? Au, contraire, mes amis – we have not heard the last word in this play. There’s still plenty of innovatin’ to be done.

Enter Micro/Sys, a maker of PC/104 boards. For the uninitiated, PC/104 is basically the x86 processor bus (aka, the ISA bus of older PCs) mated to small-form-factor boards. The boards are about the size of your hand and are stackable, one atop the other. Matching top and bottom connectors on each board allow the bus signals to pass through each board in the stack, combing them all electrically as well as physically. [more]