Open-source toolchains give companies ultimate control over their development environments, but how many can really afford the resources to debug and develop their own tools? Would they be better off with a commercially supported open-source approach?

Texas Instruments’ MSP430 microcontroller platform has been one of the industry’s leading ultra-low-power architectures for more than a decade. Each generation has been focused on setting new records. The latest, Wolverine, cuts power and energy consumption by more than half.

There’s already some love out there for ARM’s v8 64bit architecture as the processor giant builds out its ecosystem.

The QorIQ AMP (Advanced Multi-Processing) family was unveiled by Freescale Semiconductor in June and is an aggressive play for the control plane market. As such it is both innovative in its own right and also shows what kind of performance communications designers must deliver to meet the overall system demands of today’s customers. At its [...]

Data protection has long been a major issue for embedded systems, but it is becoming even more challenging with increasing adoption of multicore technology.

Linux®-based systems have been dominant in enterprise networking for more than a decade. They have been the basis of consumer electronics devices dating back to the original TiVo DVR in 1999, and wireless handsets beginning with the NEC phones for DoCoMo in 2003. However, many vertical markets are only now seeing new devices built on [...]

This paper looks at the embedded software technology that enables the development of mobile devices and portable equipment. The medical instrumentation sector is used as an example. A brief review of healthcare trends is followed by the identification of the key characteristics of such devices and how connectivity (wired and wireless) is influencing the designs [...]

While silicon vendors are taking the lead in bringing the multicore revolution to embedded markets, software developers of embedded operating systems, middleware, and applications are struggling to keep pace. A major hurdle is transiting to the multicore environment, which requires a paradigm shift in design strategies for legacy systems. This white paper addresses one such [...]

This white paper opens with a quick introduction of the Android OS. It continues with a description of the Android architecture highlighting major design features. Finally, we’ll discuss challenges and key considerations to keep in mind when porting the Android OS. Android is a trademark of Google Inc. Use of this trademark is subject to [...]

Before the widespread adoption of multicore systems, designers had been accustomed to the operating system managing resource allocation. It has been quite a challenge for engineers who now find themselves faced with the prospect of having to take direct control of these management tasks themselves. In response, the Multicore Association has established the Multicore Resource [...]