FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we look at the latest release of Altium Designer, one of the hottest things happening in desktop design automation. Altium continues to change the rules of the game, this time with things like 3D visualization of printed circuit board designs, compilation of software into hardware accelerators, and system-level design with a point-and-click platform creation tool. Does this sound like a broad topic? We thought so too. If you’re designing board-based embedded systems, you’ll want to read about it in our newest feature article.
Also new this week is a contributed article from Marty Bakal of Telelogic and Ariel Bautista of Tilcon Software. Marty and Ariel explain a new approach to GUI design for embedded systems, and look at the impact of GUIs in embedded design.
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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Altium Goes 3D
Board Design Can Be Fun
He holds the joystick with a light, experienced grip – his eyes fixed on the screen. His hands are steady as his viewpoint skims through a rotating object resembling a cityscape with strange buildings and vast networks of roads interconnecting them. He then dives below the surface, moving through the layers of the virtual world, flying past cylinders that look like giant elevator shafts bridging the levels. He slows as he comes to the area he’s interested in.
There, he spots a problem. A buried via is dangerously near a mounting hole, creating the possibility of a short when mounting hardware is inserted and normal manufacturing variations skew toward their limit. Switching to a 2D view, he corrects the problem. While this may look and feel like the next version of some Xbox 360 game, Altium, Ltd. says they are sticking to the more traditional PC platforms for now. [more]
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Modeling for High Quality GUIs: Cracking the GUI Host-to-Target Challenge
by Marty Bakal, Telelogic
and Ariel Bautista, Tilcon Software Ltd.
Introduction
An easy-to-use, intuitive GUI drives the sale of many popular products like in-dashboard navigation, infotainment systems and telecommunications products. The rich graphics found on popular GUI applications shows how important good software is, but more importantly reveals a critical weakness when developing a high quality GUI: meeting the host-to-target challenge.
Traditionally, building a high quality GUI is a laborious task where mistakes can be easily made because developers have to work on the host and the target to create the GUI and put it on the RTOS. [more]
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