FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we look at the migration of virtualization technology from the server world into our tiny little system-on-chip and embedded device domain. While virtualization has been around for decades and has a strong presence in server society, it’s just now coming into vogue in embedded circles. Don’t be the last one on the block to don your hypervisor! Check out our latest feature for details.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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EVENTS and ANNOUNCEMENTS
Consumers expect to share and engage multimedia content on devices as diverse as mobile phones and HDTV's. Mentor Graphics introduces a solution to make this job easier. The Inflexion Platform Multimedia Feature Pack enables rapid incorporation of advanced audio/video functionality into any consumer device.
 In this session we take an in-depth look at this new solution.
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Introducing Precision RTL Plus
Precision RTL Plus is the latest addition to the Precision Synthesis family of products which builds on Precision RTL by delivering a vendor-independent solution for breakthrough productivity. Precision RTL Plus provides three industry-first capabilities for every designer, regardless of level of expertise, to reach timing closure faster, minimize the impact of late cycle design changes and make efficient use of FPGA architectural blocks.
 Learn more about Precision RTL Plus!
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Did you miss the ARM Developers' Conference?
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Free Job Postings on Journaljobs.com
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 October 31, 2007. Go online, post a job, pay nothing, and watch for those qualified resumes to come knocking on your inbox.
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From Servers to Smartphones
Virtualization Invades Embedded
The rack of heavy-iron blade servers whirrs away, dishing up data and mashing myriad algorithms for hundreds of users throughout the corporate campus. Most of them have no awareness whatsoever of the physical location of the computing resources doing their dirty work. Day by day and week by week the blades and racks are removed, replaced, upgraded, and re-tasked. One capacity increase is accomplished by stacking in additional blades, the next by replacing an outdated rack with a new, smaller one with fewer blades and vastly more processing power.
Those of us who have become accustomed to the abstraction of centralized computing resources barely give a conscious thought to the role of virtualization. With roots going back to the mainframe monsters of the 1960s, virtualization is a well-entrenched technology separating the physical computer doing the work from the virtual machine we access for our computing needs. We accept that our data is safe on a machine somewhere, and we go along with our business, visualizing a single repository for our data or a single processor doing our bidding. We are vaguely, if at all, aware that virtualization software – perhaps something from VMware – is masking the mechanics behind moving all that responsibility around among various pieces of physical equipment.
Whip your advanced smartphone out of your pocket, however, and the idea of server virtualization seems far away. The tiny ARMs and microscopic memory resources on the system-on-chip that patches us through to Aunt Julie while pausing our Sudoku or Scrabble game and serving up a rich message snapshot from Sophie on her Hawaii vacation don’t bear much resemblance to the power-sucking, fan-cooled, heat-sink-havin’, Giga-flopping server stacks in the computing lab. [more]
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