Architecture & Design

The embedded market sees great potential in improving utility supplies but it presents complex challenges, says Alistair Morfey.

System Modeling Language (SysML) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile that allows the creation of standard descriptions of a system. However, this profile is too generic to address embedded and real-time system design. The Modeling and Analysis for Real-Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) UML profile attempts to fill this gap by providing elements from [...]

The increasing use of electronics systems in today’s cars, trucks and other vehicles inevitably presents a new set of security challenges. Primarily for safety reasons but also for commercial ones, the components used in automotive systems must be extremely resistant to malicious attacks. There are essentially two domains for in-vehicle security: ‘inter-vehicle’ and ‘intra-vehicle’ or, [...]

For the first time in four decades, a new book goes inside the Defense Department’s cutting-edge research agency DARPA.

Imagination Technologies creates and licenses semiconductor intellectual property (IP) processor cores for graphics, video, multi-threaded embedded processing/DSP and multi-standard communications applications. These products are complemented by software tools and drivers as well as developer and middleware ecosystems. The company recently embarked on the development of an advanced system-on-chip for one of its customers that could [...]

To the world at large, Junot Diaz is well on the way to becoming a literary superstar. His novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has already earned critical superlatives and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. And deservedly so. It is a fabulous, accessible book, expressed in language that—when you buy a copy […]

New separation kernels and embedded hypervisors can help ease the pain of migrating legacy systems to new hardware platforms, including multicore processing systems. Bringing multiple OSs and applications on to the same hardware also opens up new possibilities for combining systems that offer real-time performance within a familiar GUI environment. The LynxSecure separation kernel and […]

The Texas A&M team describes an FPGA embedded system design project intended to assess the technology’s suitability for use in real-time, high-performance applications. The test application is a speech encryption system intended for use in military and high-security environments. The team used a Xilinx Virtex II Pro platform FPGA for the project, and was also […]

The dependability of high-volume embedded systems, such as consumer electronics devices, is threatened by a combination of rapidly increasing complexity, decreasing time-to-market, and strong cost constraints. This environment poses challenging research questions that are being investigated in the Trader Project, following an industryas- laboratory approach. This paper describes the vision behind the project and reviews […]

Sharing industry-driven best practices in parallel programming is the only way to unlock the benefits of efficient use of multicore silicon platforms and dramatically increase their rate of adoption. It is now widely agreed that the largest single brake on the adoption rate for multicore platforms is the ability of software developers to program them. […]