FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we look at a new category of devices for connecting to all those pesky peripherals and ever-morphing displays. QuickLogic is shipping what the company calls “CSSPs” or Customer-Specific Standard Parts. Our latest feature has the details.
Also new this week, we hear from Todd Brian of Mentor Graphics about building safe and secure embedded systems. With the proliferation of processing into just about everything we stick in our pockets these days, security is becoming a paramount concern. This new contributed article fills in the gaps.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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EVENTS and ANNOUNCEMENTS
Mentor Graphics provides advanced verification technologies and methodologies based on industry standards. Mentor will highlight its portfolio of industry-leading functional verification solutions, including intelligent testbench automation and HW/SW integration at  DVCon 2008 in San Jose on Feb. 19 & 20, booth 901.
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What’s a CSSP?
QuickLogic Reshapes Mobile Options
If you’re designing portable or battery-powered devices for medium- to high-volume production, you’ve already run into the problem. You need to control a hard disk, re-format the output of a video driver for a special LCD display, connect to some emerging and possibly obtuse I/O standard - or maybe do all three. There is no standard part that cuts the mustard. You may take an off-the-shelf ASSP and try to fix it with a programmable device like a CPLD, but the CPLD may not have enough capability, and you’re still faced with two chips worth of footprint, power, and inconvenience.
Furthermore, you’re delivering your product into a number of geographies and with a number of different feature sets. Each one (of course) requires slightly different hardware, so you really need not just one solution, but ten, or twenty – or you need a single device with lots of standards built in.
What you want is your own standard product, like an ASIC, only without the huge NRE, the long design cycles, the project risk, the design team expertise required and… Well, you get the picture. An ASIC is probably out. An FPGA might do the job, but they typically have power and cost profiles that won’t work within your BOM and battery budgets. Basically you’re stuck.
QuickLogic apparently heard your cry, and they’re here with what they call a “CSSP” or customer-specific standard part. You can pick out the things you need from a library of QuickLogic-supplied blocks (which include both hardware and software components). [more]
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The Need for Safe and Secure Software... It’s About Time!
by Todd Brian, Mentor Graphics Corporation
Not too long ago, secure software was the sole domain of the military and a few select governmental and financial agencies. Safe software was the sole domain of industries such as aerospace, medicine, and transportation. Software was either safe or secure, but in most cases, there was never a need to have both safe and securesoftware. But the times they are a changing. As digital devices become more ubiquitous and the convergence of multiple applications on a single device continues, safe and secure software now has a place in automotive, aerospace, and in industrial applications to name a few.
Growing complexity and multiple features have expanded to the point where today, keeping electronic data secure is critical to the safe operation of electronic devices. [more]
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